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Safari Ventures Success Story
Building your brand with email marketing to stay ahead of the pack
Safari Ventures Success Story
Constant Contact Customer Since: 2006
List size: 3,390
Open rate: 20.3%
Website: www.safariventures.com
What I love about Constant Contact: "I'm very cognizant about keeping our brand pristine, and with the help of Constant Contact we have email templates that portray our brand perfectly." -- Rose Garretson, Marketing & Communications Manager
Safari Ventures, based in Florida, provides guided tours of the most beautiful destinations in East and Southern Africa. Founder Niru Patel attributes his enduring passion for his native homeland of Tanzania as his inspiration for creating the company and dedicating his life to making luxury travel services more affordable.
Unlike typical travel and tourism companies that only book airfare or hotels, Safari Ventures is an expert in "destination management." This means it works directly with hand-picked African tour providers to offer custom tours and experiences that travel companies can resell or that customers all across North America can purchase directly. At the end of the day, they pride themselves on providing all their guests with the experience of a lifetime.
Challenge: Maintaining a consistent brand presence that delivers response
Rose Garretson, Safari Ventures' Marketing & Communications Manager, is a one-woman marketing department who says she is "very cognizant of maintaining her brand's integrity." As a brand-focused marketer, Rose has an informed outlook on why companies big and small should have an outstanding brand presence. But since she did not have the marketing budget that bigger companies have, Rose decided to focus her brand-building efforts on more economical marketing vehicles ... like email marketing.
Rose's first foray into email marketing was creating her own HTML e-newsletters using Outlook. "It was a painful process," she says. "Keeping our brand front-and-center was nearly impossible." Eventually, a colleague mentioned Constant Contact's free 60-day email marketing trial, and ever since then, Rose has been hooked.
It didn't take long for Rose to see results. "We loved the ability to track every single click in our emails," she reports. "It was great to see more traffic to our website as a result of sending different email promotions to certain segments of our mailing list."
As her trial drew to a close, Rose discovered Constant Contact's Professional Services option and knew this would be the perfect enhancement to her email marketing program. "Honestly, if you are already paying an outside agency or vendor to create your emails, then this is a huge bargain. Yes, Constant Contact has plenty of great templates, but you need to focus on the fact that you are investing in an overall strategic marketing plan. If you want to be successful, your prospects and customers need to recognize your brand. Why wouldn't you want your emails to reflect your brand too?"
Solution: Custom email templates that "pop" in the in-box
Rose reached out to Constant Contact's Professional Services team to have custom email templates created for Safari Ventures. "The team was very responsive and disciplined, and they met every deadline," she reports.
Once the work was completed, Rose had a series of custom templates that perfectly reflected Safari Ventures' brand. "I can't speak highly enough about the team and about this service," she says. "There is no way we could afford to have a professional designer create each and every one of our email templates. It would take too much time and, more importantly, too much money."
Results: A strategic marketing plan that starts with email
Rose now sends out emails every week that reflect the Safari Ventures brand; it's a dream come true for such a brand-focused marketer. "The cohesive branded look that flows from our print advertising to our website and now to our emails is what has helped us stay top of mind in our industry and what will hopefully help us continue growing into the future," Rose says.
