With Yulsn Marketing Cloud, VisitAarhus can process and use content from different sources across channels, both automatically and manually.
11. juni 2022
VisitAarhus is the official tourist organisation for the Aarhus region, covering the city of Aarhus along with the surrounding towns and areas of Djursland, Favrskov, Silkeborg, Randers and Viborg.
VisitAarhus has 45 specialist staff whose job is to help develop tourism, market the 7 municipalities as a destination for leisure and business travellers, and ensure that tourism in the area delivers results locally, regionally and nationally.
Among those 45 staff, one person is responsible for email marketing aimed at consumers.
With over 3,000 "products" in the region to market, a large number of events running at any time, more than 400 partner businesses and 2,000 volunteers, there is plenty to communicate about.
It is worth adding that communication currently happens in Danish, English and German.
Development of a new dynamic campaign site that, from the answers to a few questions, can recommend relevant experiences in the region to the tourists using it.
Establishing an automated weekly newsletter to market current events in the region.
Rebuilding and relaunching 5 English email flows, with over 50 individual emails, where both content and rules needed to be far more dynamic.
The foundation for all 3 solutions is that all content for both the campaign site and the emails is gathered in the relational database that comes with a Yulsn Marketing Cloud solution.
With this solution it is possible both to process the content and to use the combined, processed content across emails, the campaign site, and later other channels too.
When VisitAarhus runs online campaigns, the time visitors from those campaigns spend on the website is one of the key figures for measuring campaign effect..
The dynamic campaign site has proved highly effective at achieving exactly that high engagement from visitors. On the site, visitors answer a few questions about what they are looking for, and are then shown the experiences that best match.
To do this in a way that both gives the visitor relevant results and at the same time satisfies the wishes and needs of the many different stakeholders across the region, an extra layer of metadata has been added to the information already used on the website.
The new metadata covers partly the prioritisation of experiences from the different parts of the region, and partly a simplification of the categorisation, so that some of the categories from the website are merged into new ones that make it easier for the visitor to choose.
During design and development, user testing was carried out, which fed into the finished layout and the categories available to choose from. The site was designed and developed by Heyday in Aarhus, in close collaboration with the staff at VisitAarhus. Yulsn Marketing Cloud is the backend for all content and for collecting user data.
The solution is hosted on VisitAarhus' account in Yulsn Marketing Cloud, and behavioural data is collected with server-side tracking via Matomo, which is also hosted alongside the Yulsn account.
You can see and try the site yourself at discover.visitaarhus.com.
Right now the site is used only as a targeted campaign site in English, but more languages and features can easily be added, so further uses are already on the drawing board.
The basis for the automated newsletter is that event data from VisitAarhus (GuideDanmark) and data from Kultunaut are matched, creating a data set of unique events in the region.
On top of that come a number of rules for:
Personalised subject lines
Which events are highlighted in each email, so that events from across the whole region get their turn.
How many events are shown in each category – depending on the interests selected.
Timing and prioritisation of when events are shown relative to when they are on – including events running over a longer period.
Avoiding the same event reaching the same recipient several weeks running.
Finally, the visual details have been attended to by showing dates and town name as part of the image belonging to each event in the email itself.
You can sign up and see the newsletter for yourself here.
The first thing that mattered to VisitAarhus was improving how current the content of every email was, while minimising the work of maintaining the content for the different emails.
For this project too, the foundation was that all content from VisitAarhus (GuideDanmark) is updated automatically in VisitAarhus' relational database in Yulsn Marketing Cloud.
Added to that are extra tables with email-specific content and metadata, further categorisation and prioritisation.
New email templates have been set up that automatically display the content as intended in the defined modules of the email.
In the previous solution each person could belong to only one lifestyle segment, which placed a number of limits on the communication. The new solution is built so that each person can have interests across several areas, and therefore receive more relevant communication.
A great deal of content is reused across the different flows, so it is a considerable relief for maintenance that the content now only has to be updated in one place.
You can sign up and see the English emails yourself via pop-ups on visitaarhus.com.
The three concrete projects are just the beginning of an entirely new and more efficient way for VisitAarhus to work with their content.
Using AI to process and adapt content for different audiences and situations is high on the list at VisitAarhus – and can readily be implemented in their set-up at Yulsn, with direct integration to the AI models they want.