ORLANDO, FL — The Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau has chosen LeapSuite, a customer relationship management system from Marketing Communications Systems, to handle its database marketing efforts.
The bureau made the announcement yesterday at the 26th National Center for Database Marketing Conference and Exhibition.
The Ivyland, PA, company will fully implement the program by January.
The convention and visitors bureau is responsible for bringing more than 42 million visitors to Orlando each year for vacations and meetings. However, the bureau has only 2 million records in its database. Rebecca Fulgaar, the bureau's fulfillment manager, said the database is not being used for any specific, targeted direct mail programs.
The bureau will use LeapSuite to support its campaigns aimed to educate current and prospective consumers about the opportunities available in the city. LeapSuite's customer relationship management, back-end campaign management and campaign planning capabilities will enable the organization to analyze its marketing efforts and strategize for future marketing and advertising campaigns.
“LeapSuite will help us identify and reach the people who are coming to Orlando and what they're interested in doing once they are here,'' Fulgaar said.
After examining 65 solutions, the bureau chose LeapSuite. One of the reasons for this choice was that MCS claimed it could have the system — including setting up a data warehouse and campaign management — up and running in 12 weeks.
Fulgaar also said the bureau chose LeapSuite because of its “competitive history in proving cost-comparative, effective marketing campaigns at large organizations [that] manage a lot of data.'' In addition, she cited the importance of LeapSuite's application service provider model, which further negates the need to invest time and resources in traditional hardware, software and information technology support.
Fulgaar said MCS was interested in doing work with her group “even though we only have a 2 million-count database. Other vendors were not interested in working with an organization with a pretty small number of names.''
Fulgaar said she would start an extensive database marketing-driven direct mail and advertising campaign in early 2002. She hopes to send 500,000 targeted fulfillment packages using the system next year in response to their ad campaigns.
