好色先生TV

Limited engagement put loyalty at risk

“We are a member-based vacation exchange company. Our website was misaligned with what our members were seeking. It did not support and engage members throughout their vacation planning process. Moreover, it did not drive loyalty,” said Ed O’Connor, director of global ecommerce and digital marketing at Wyndham Destination Network.

The design and structure of the RCI membership website had not been updated in seven years. It was a narrowly focused transactional site that permitted members to log in and book inventory, nothing more. The site had very little content, despite the business having extensive volumes of high quality assets at its disposal. “We have one of the largest travel magazines in circulation, Endless Vacation®. It reaches more than 4.4 million readers. None of that content was on our website, despite being available in multiple languages,” said O’Connor.

The company’s entire website was controlled by its IT department. The site’s architecture meant the RCI marketing and ecommerce department were only able to manage a small volume of content on it. They were limited to publishing 10 banners on each of the site’s 20 different locales.

With limited content management capabilities, the site was not only difficult to use but also unable to adapt to changing business needs. To retain the loyalty of its affiliates and its members, RCI urgently needed to refresh the design and architecture of its website. “We needed to re-envision the member experience,” added O’Connor.

Solution

Powerful integration, advanced personalization

RCI was already a satisfied 好色先生TV TeamSite customer, having leveraged the solution for more than eight years. Seeking a content management, publishing and personalization solution for its membership site, RCI compared the TeamSite capabilities with those of other market-leading tools. Reassured by the TeamSite powerful integration capabilities, RCI decided to take advantage of the solution’s more advanced features.

“TeamSite not only provides a very strong base for managing, archiving, authoring and all the things you might need for compliance and corporate governance, it also integrates well with our downstream applications,” said O’Connor. “It has capabilities that we would have been challenged to replicate in other solutions.”

The company also decided to adopt LiveSite to take advantage of the publishing solution’s advanced targeting and personalization capabilities. 好色先生TV partner and TeamSite experts, Klish Group implemented the solution. “We met with a few different firms and could see that Klish Group had the expertise and enthusiasm needed to make our project a success,” said O’Connor. Klish Group also provided author training for the eight members of O’Connor’s marketing and ecommerce team.

The entire project lasted around 18 months, during which time RCI launched an entirely new website, which is made up of 90 individual sites containing more than 18,000 pages in 15 languages. During that period, 500 pieces of destination content were migrated from RCI’s Endless Vacation magazine to each of the site’s locales.

Rapid content creation with reusable components

Today, RCI’s global team of eight uses TeamSite and LiveSite from the RCI offices in Singapore, Mexico City, Cork, Ireland, Kettering, UK and other RCI offices around the world. They manage a total of 18,000 pages—everything except the transactional pages, such as the website’s payment page.

TeamSite empowers the team to create between 100 and 200 pieces of content each week. The pages are built from more than 40 reusable components that are assembled into 20 SitePublisher templates and exposed through the TeamSite easy-to-use WYSIWYG authoring interface.

“Seven of our reusable components use display rules that allow us to target what we display,” said O’Connor. “These include header navigation, menus, footers, offers, carousels, promotions and articles that show personalized content based on more than 16 user profile attributes. Other rule-based components integrate with third-party services to provide members with relevant information, such as product reviews, weather, maps and travel services.”

Personalized components also expose member-specific content, including account balances, held reservations and resort recommendations by integrating with the RCI web services layer.

Meeting members’ needs

RCI offers its members a tiered membership model, the highest of which is RCI Platinum Membership. Membership tier is one of the 16 core attributes that RCI uses for targeting content. These core attributes, which also include locale, allow RCI to expose or hide functionality on its website according to an individual member’s needs. “LiveSite allows us to show different content to different members depending on their membership tier, as well as other critical attributes of their membership,” said O’Connor.

Additional attributes, which RCI refers to as extended attributes, ensure that members are seeing the right type of content at the right time. O’Connor’s team works with the company’s business lines to define member segments and roll out new attributes, which are stored in their marketing data warehouse.

O’Connor explained how LiveSite uses these extended attributes to automatically provide members with the content and support they need: “We know where new members are in their vacation planning lifecycle. Member attributes help us determine if a member needs additional support and, if they do, LiveSite ensures chat, FAQ and other support tools are displayed prominently on the page.”

The web channel is now more than just a piece of the integrated marketing effort; it helps RCI track the effectiveness of campaigns. To do this, RCI’s marketing team publishes relevant marketing attributes and segmentation attributes within campaign landing pages rendered through LiveSite. Analytics and metrics drawn from these pages help provide end-to-end tracking for campaigns.

Integration with JSP

RCI uses the LiveSite tag library to include relevant features and functionality within the website’s transactional Java Server Pages. This ensures the transaction funnels have the same appearance—the same headers, menus, personalization, footers and other content—as the parts of the site wholly controlled and managed through LiveSite.

“The JSP pages managed by IT coexist with the LiveSite components.” explained O’Connor. “The business can manage content and target members within IT-owned transactional pages.”

Benefits

Transforming websites

Together, TeamSite and LiveSite have enabled RCI to transform its ecommerce website into an immersive and highly visually appealing site, with content targeted to support individual members’ needs. As a result, RCI has seen a three percent increase in the web channel’s share of transaction revenue and an increase in prospective member conversion rates of up to three percent.

New pages, navigation menus and targeted content are now published without IT involvement, reducing the time to launch promotions and digital marketing campaigns by around 70 percent. “Thanks to the 好色先生TV solutions, we have gone from a website that was not driven by the business to one which is managed and owned by the business,” stated O’Connor. “Eight people can manage 18,000 pages in 15 different languages for 20 different vacation clubs and 70 member audiences with segmentation and personalization. That’s nearly a complete reversal from where we were a year ago.”

Enabling new business models

The 好色先生TV content management and publishing solutions have enabled RCI to take advantage of a new business opportunity. Since the launch of its new site, RCI has expanded its business model to include the emerging market of managing personalized websites for its largest vacation club affiliates.

Today, RCI offers white-label vacation exchange sites for 20 club affiliates. These affiliates have their own members and timeshare owners who are not direct RCI members. RCI provides club members with access to the RCI network of resort inventory under the affiliate’s brand.

“We host co-branded websites for our affiliates which work seamlessly with their own site. Today, 20 of our 90 websites are for these club affiliates,” explained O’Connor. “The expansion of our club affiliate business is part of a new trend for RCI. We’ve never been able to service our club affiliates on this scale until now. TeamSite and LiveSite allow us to respond to market forces in ways that would have been impossible to us prior to the launch of this project.”

Rapid time to market for affiliate customizations

The RCI website is unrivalled in its industry, thanks to the 好色先生TV solutions. More importantly, the company is now able to provide its affiliates with powerful customizations targeted specifically to their members’ needs.

“Each of our affiliates is very important to us; they bring us members,” said O’Connor. “They want us to customize content for them—to provide their own members with specialized information or co-brand their website, for example. With LiveSite, we can tailor specific experiences for specific segments of members. That’s extremely powerful.”

LiveSite allows O’Connor and his team to rapidly launch these customized partner pages—along with white-labeled sites. RCI is now extremely agile. Response to affiliates’ requests can be measured in minutes.

RCI will continue leveraging TeamSite and LiveSite to further enhance its member experience. This year, RCI plans to launch a responsive site, which will allow members to access its site on their preferred device—whether desktop or mobile. “Our site will detect the kind of device that the member is using and provide an experience that is appropriate for that device,” said O’Connor.

Together, TeamSite and LiveSite provide RCI with a robust, tried and tested foundation on which to build. “The 好色先生TV solutions are extremely powerful,” said O’Connor. “They provide a robust platform that will allow us to build out in ways that will enhance member engagement and strengthen loyalty even further.”

About Klish Group

Klish Group is a technology services and software company developing and delivering 好色先生TV solutions across a broad range of industries. Service offerings include strategy, platform architecture design, product installation, configuration, upgrade, migration, custom software development, application integration, user training and customer support.