How Echelon helped a leading marketer of fractional residences improve their audience targeting efficiency by 49% and put more people into the vacation properties of their dreams with Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index®.

Leading fractional residence brand was facing rising acquisition costs, intense competition, and an increasingly difficult challenge of identifying and qualifying new prospects.

This fractional residence brand has built a leadership role in the vacation ownership industry by offering exciting vacation properties that help build lasting family memories. They have also developed innovative marketing and sales practices that have enabled them to enroll over 300,000 owners who enjoy resort experiences in more than 8,000 villas worldwide.

But leaders don’t stay leaders for long if they let a “vacation” mentality take over. Our client was facing increasing competition and rising acquisition costs. They spend hundreds of dollars per prospect to get them on site at a vacation property, so every potential new owner who walks out without buying costs them dearly. For this reason they are always looking for ways to identify and qualify the best prospects: to keep their sales pipeline full of those with a strong affinity to the brand, a powerful desire for the vacation experience, and money to invest in a vacation property.

They already knew that many of their upscale segments had household income over $125,000 based on standard income measures. What they didn’t know was who really had the discretionary funds and investments to make the purchase.  And for many consumer purchases, including vacation properties, it is discretionary funds that separate the spenders ... from the pretenders.

That’s where Echelon comes in. Echelon Marketing provides strategic marketing solutions built on proprietary consumer economic data and customized analyses, for actionable insights into consumer income and spending capacity. By improving the company’s selection criteria, Echelon helped reduce their cost per lead and improve their conversion rate, ultimately reducing the cost to acquire a new owner.

Incremental improvement in marketing performance and conversion rates means millions of dollars in additional vacation property sales.

The objective:  Pre-qualify the prospects with money to spend

The solution:  Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index™ (DSI®)

Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index (DSI) is a modeled household index that offers the unique and powerful capability to score customer and prospect households from 1-1,000 based on their discretionary spending capacity. DSI enables marketers to achieve greater insight, higher performance, and a more personal and powerful level of relevance with their customers and prospects.

Echelon began by scoring five million records from the client’s databases with DSI and examining the resulting DSI deciles for rate of ownership incidence. DSI showed direct, linear correlation to ownership, with the top segment showing ownership occurrence of 10-1 against the mean. The higher the DSI score the greater the likelihood to buy.

Echelon then examined existing prospect segments from the client’s broader databases to determine correlation to higher DSI scores. Two groups stood out: luxury hotel guests and member-owner referrals. This provided direction as to which of its segments justify the greatest marketing investment against the highest probable returns.

Finally, Echelon helped the client refine its marketing approach to the “Tour No Sale” group of individuals who have toured a property but not made a purchase. The firm invests hundreds of dollars per household in this group, and personal follow-up calls and letters are expensive on a cost-per-contact basis. The client was considering a “life stage” measurement system that would help them to calibrate follow-up investment against different Tour No Sale segments, based on potential.

Adding DSI to this measurement proved more predictive of future purchasing than life stage alone, resulting in $31 million in projected incremental revenue.

Our client gains a powerful marketing tool

Echelon’s DSI has given our client the ability to refine its household selection model: spending more marketing dollars against the segments with the greatest spending power. DSI is also helping sales executives to “flag” prospects based on their value and propensity and to avoid squandering resources against prospects without the means or likelihood to buy. And DSI has provided strategic guidance for the firm’s follow-up efforts, while helping maximize investment in life stage marketing data.

Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index:

• Provided an extremely accurate predictor of potential ownership.
• Revealed the prospect segments that most closely align against spending power.
• Provided a 155:1 ROI on follow-up conversion rates when combined with life stage data.

Who buys vacation ownership shares? People who want to create family memories that last a lifetime. People who enjoy new and different vacation locations around the world. And, crucially, people with sufficient household spending capacity to make the purchase.  Identifying those prospects is the Echelon edge.

When a leader wants to keep its lead, there’s no room for complacency. Our client was looking for a strategic edge to help reduce its acquisition costs, improve its conversion rates and maintain its advantage over the competition.

With Echelon, they achieved all three.

For more information please contact:
Echelon Marketing  • 7927 Jones Branch Drive, Suite 400  • McLean, VA  22102 Phone:  703-770-9677  • Toll-free: 866-788-9677  • echeloninfo@echelonmarketing.com