Hitmetrix - User behavior analytics & recording

New Zealand Promotes Tourism Through Online Brochure

An e-mail and online banner ad campaign for the New Zealand Tourism Commission persuaded about 68,500 U.S. consumers to download an electronic brochure touting the nation's natural beauty.

The campaign, designed by Australian e-marketing firm Wotch.com, targeted middle-class Midwestern American families. Wotch estimated that the campaign reached nearly 1.5 million consumers after its April launch and returned an overall 4.3 percent response rate.

Wotch ran banners, buttons and interstitial ads promoting the e-brochure on more than 1,000 affiliate Web sites and garnered about 1 million page views. Some 47,000 consumers clicked on the links and downloaded the e-brochure, a 4.7 percent response rate.

Wotch also sent 700,000 e-mail newsletters, of which 480,000 were opened. Of the consumers who opened the e-mails, 26,700 downloaded the e-brochure, a 3.8 percent response rate.

The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness of New Zealand as a tourist destination by getting Americans to download the travel page.

The e-brochure, which consumers downloaded from the Wotch.com site after following links through the e-mails or online ads, is a 1.2-megabyte file. Once it is downloaded and installed on the consumer's computer, the file opens an electronic representation of a book on the user's desktop.

The book contains 10 full-color, double-page spreads with information on New Zealand's features and attractions. It includes pictures of the island nation's luxurious landscape and has links to the tourism commission's promotional Web site, PureNZ.com. Users turn the virtual pages by clicking the bottom corner of the page or selecting a page from the table of contents.

The brochures cost 17 cents per download for distribution and production. Having delivered more than 4 million downloads in previous campaigns during the past 12 months, Wotch was confident the downloading process would not be too complicated for consumers, said Rysz Gancewicz, marketing manager at Wotch.com.

“Surprisingly, it was the non-e-mail campaign across external sites which achieved the greater response, so U.S. users as a whole seem to be quite comfortable with downloads, provided the process is communicated in a simple manner and the download represents perceived value for the recipient,” Gancewicz said.

The major advantage of the brochure format is its low cost and instant response, Gancewicz said. It also effectively mimics the look of a print brochure.

“The intention of the brochure format is to re-create the offline experience of reading a travel guide online,” Gancewicz said. “In all cases, our objective with the e-brochure is to duplicate a client's offline material for complete online-offline integration.”

Wotch continues to monitor downloads of the brochure from its Web site. The brochure contains a link allowing consumers to e-mail a copy to friends, thus helping to sustain the campaign's reach.

The success of the campaign has attracted the interest of other national tourism boards, Gancewicz said, although he did not disclose specifics. Wotch also has created e-brochure campaigns for Toyota, the Sydney 2000 Olympics, real estate broker network Christie's Great Estates and publisher Harper Collins.

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