Brownell Turns Travel Experiences into Connections with Constant Contact

For Elizabeth Roberts, experiencing destinations like the South of France isn’t just a perk of the job; it’s a necessary part of it. 

As Director of Marketing and Communications at Brownell, these educational experiences help Elizabeth and her team experience destinations the same way that clients do. This gives them firsthand knowledge of luxury properties, travel experiences, and exclusive partner offerings. And that insight becomes the foundation for helping Brownell’s network of travel advisors better serve their own clients. 

“Learning about [vendors’] different products, what they offer, sharing how to market them best to the advisors and to the advisors’ clients has been really incredible,” Elizabeth shares, giving a glimpse into the unique balancing act of marketing at Browell: communicating effectively not only with prospective travelers, but also with travel advisors, as well.

Founded nearly 140 years ago, Brownell is the oldest travel agency in North America. While Brownell builds and markets its own brand, it also supports a network of more than 150 independent luxury travel advisors, each with their own brand, clients, and marketing needs. This means Brownell’s marketing team isn’t simply creating campaigns for one brand, they’re also creating resources that empower advisors to strengthen relationships with their own clients and maintain their unique identities.

Delivering marketing at scale

Every month, Elizabeth’s team creates professionally written, white-labeled newsletters that advisors can personalize and send to their own clients. To help their advisors expand on those communications, Brownell also provides each new advisor with a customized template that reflects their independent brand, so they can create their own campaigns. 

While some advisors build additional custom campaigns on their own, others rely on Brownell’s marketing team for more hands-on support, from simple needs like educational trip recap emails to helping build more complex, custom campaigns.

“We are there to help the advisors with whatever they need.”

However, providing that level of support to more than 150 advisor email accounts was a manual and time-consuming task. Every newsletter required manually copying campaigns, updating branding, and replacing links individually in each advisor’s account. 

“We have 150 advisors. We do it twice a month. You can do the math on how much time that is.”

Implementing the Central Send feature from Constant Contact Teams streamlined that process, allowing them to create an email just once and send it through each of their advisors’ accounts, saving them about five hours per newsletter or 10 hours a month. “Central Send has been life-changing for us.” 

But the impact of using Central Send goes well beyond time savings, as those hours are now spent creating stronger content.

“It’s been just a game changer in our efficiencies as a team and being able to provide the advisors with more and better emails because we now have more time to dedicate to the actual writing and developing of the emails rather than worrying so much about the intricacies of having to send it out.”

Turning relationships into revenue

As they’ve used their newly freed-up time to focus on storytelling, Elizabeth and her team have seen measurable improvements in email performance.

“Seeing our open rates improve and continue to improve above and beyond the industry average has been super compelling,” said Elizabeth.  “And that’s a compelling fact for our advisors, too.”

These metrics have encouraged more advisors to participate in Brownell’s email marketing program and reinforced the value of email as a relationship-building tool. More importantly, their advisors are also seeing tangible results from the program.

“We’ve heard of at least three examples in the last year where advisors have gotten direct bookings from those newsletters, and they’re big-time bookings,” Elizabeth said. In one case, an advisor booked a cruise from a direct reply to a white-label email Brownell had sent out on her behalf. 

“Within six minutes, she got a $230,000 booking directly from that email. So, we’re definitely seeing a direct effect on advisors.”

Looking ahead

As Brownell continues to invest in email marketing, Elizabeth’s team has plans to build on the success of Constant Contact by creating more personalized experiences for current and prospective advisors. By utilizing click-based segmentation and automation, they’ve been able to start sending timely follow-up emails and targeted drip campaigns with relevant resources specific to their audiences. Early results are promising: the team feels that these personalized experiences will strengthen relationships with prospective advisors while making the current team’s efforts more efficient and impactful.

“We actually had no welcome automation or any sort of segmentation, and we really tried to up our game with that for Brownell,” Elizabeth explained. “We’re at the beginning stages, but it’s going to be a huge tool for us.” 

These tools and opportunities, combined with the success Brownell has already seen, have made Constant Contact more than just an everyday email tool for Elizabeth and her team. “It’s elevated our email marketing to the next level and really allowed us to harness the power of email marketing and what it can do for not only our business, but being able to pass that along for the advisors to see that benefit, as well.