Families make up a significant portion of the travel and tourism market. Understanding  customers’ family situations can help companies significantly improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Meet the Knight family – Stan, Sue and their two young children Emily and Tommy, ages seven and five respectively. They’re a decent bunch– hard working, good-natured, fictional. The Knights want to go on a holiday, so they choose a planned activities trip by the seaside. It’ll mean that the kids have plenty to do, and Stan and Sue can relax a little. Flash forward a few years. The Knights want to go on another holiday. A mail shot about a planned activities trip arrives, but the kids are older so that type of holiday is no longer attractive or appropriate. Inevitably, the message ends up in the bin.

The family unit is not static. It’s constantly evolving, and its needs change as it does. Children are born, they grow up, move out; family members get married, divorced, they age, they die. If a travel and tourism company is to market to families effectively it needs to understand its customers’ current needs, not its past ones. To do this, it needs to have developed a clear understanding of its customers. There are so many different channels available for customers to arrange breaks – online, over the counter, over the phone, and many businesses establish separate data stores for each of them. However, if the company is to establish an accurate understanding of the families, it needs access to all the information. By establishing a single customer view, the organisation can identify and track customers as families, and plan its marketing accordingly.

I’ve already mentioned that the holiday needs of a family change surprisingly quickly when children are involved. A family with pre-school age children is likely to want a very different holiday package than they will when their kids are in their teens. As the family ages, they will inevitably start wanting different things from a holiday. A single customer view, alongside dedicated marketing software, means that marketers can ensure they are not sending the family members messages that will be of no use to them - for example, promoting a holiday to take place during the school term, or something that is no longer appropriate to their age range.

Maintaining accurate information about families provides marketers with invaluable intelligence. The information gained through examining elements such as typical spend, or the types of holiday the customer has previously taken, can be used to create accurately targeted campaigns. For example, if a family has a history of staying in expensive five-star hotels in exotic locales, will a camping trip to the Lake District be of interest to them? Probably not. However, sending the family messages promoting a break in Hawaii could very easily be something that gets their attention. Of course, it’s possible that this will change over time. If a family breadwinner loses their job, for example, this could be reflected by a change in the types of holiday the family takes. This highlights the importance of keeping customer information accurate and up-to-date. With the help of marketing software, a business can identify this change in behaviour, allowing it to adapt its campaign targeting to better fit the change in the family’s situation.

Having accurate and up to date information on families also allows marketers to optimise the amount of physical material they send out. For example, Stan Knight orders a holiday online, and a few months later, Sue orders one over the counter. If the information is stored in separate stores, it’s more than likely that Stan and Sue would be identified as separate customers and be sent two mail messages in a direct mail campaign. By identifying that Stan and Sue are part of the same family and live in the same place, the company need only send out one message, saving money and reducing unnecessary waste. Of course, the ever-shifting state of the family unit comes into play once again, and family members may not always share addresses. Family members move out, for example the kids go off to university, or people get married or, sadly, divorced. Keeping track of where each member of the family lives, and when, is important if a business is to market in an intelligent way.

Families are a rich market for travel and tourism companies, and for a tourism company to make the most of this market, it needs to understand them. To do this it can’t have incomplete information – it needs to have all the necessary information easily to hand. Understanding customer’s family situation allows for better campaign targeting, reduced output and increased ROI. Now that’s family value.

Curt Bloom is managing director, international of smartFOCUS, the specialized supplier of multi-channel marketing software for direct and database marketing, headquartered in Bristol, UK, with offices in the US and continental Europe.