The challenge

With the COVID-19 lockdown effectively halting all cave tours for a large part of 2020, Jenolan Caves needed a way to stay in touch and build engagement with previous and prospective visitors ahead of reopening.

The solution

Working closely with the Jenolan Caves marketing team and brand strategy partners Destination Marketing Store, the concept of ‘Reminiscence’ took shape to foster fond memories and keep a return to the Caves in the minds of visitors alive.

A stunning campaign mobile responsive microsite was built incorporating historic imagery and facts, videos of tour leader’s favourite cave tours and for fun, a crazy cave maze game for all ages.

A digital marketing campaign driving traffic to the site and entries into a competition for the best remembrance in 25 words or less supported the campaign microsite. The campaign microsite was updated at regular intervals to keep it fresh and interesting to create a reason for online visitors to return.

As the caves began reopening with only very limited numbers allowed, special packages with dining and accommodation options were added for visitors to book and in doing so, generate a high yield per visitor.

The results

Primary Objective: Enter Competition. Secondary Objective: Click on package deal

• 1,390 competition entries
• 13,347 users to reminiscence microsite
• 3,411 total package deal button clicks

Campaign KPI’s:

• Social Media KPI : 0.90% CTR
  Achieved: 2.19% CTR
• Google Search KPI: 2% CTR
  Achieved: 17.02% average CTR
• Google Display KPI: 0.07% CTR
  Achieved: 0.27% average CTR

How did this translate into dollars and yield?

Below client’s performance notes:

Revenue for November was 35% of that of November 2019, which is incredibly impressive given we only had approx. 3,500 tour spaces available vs. approx. 18,000 spaces, only 20% capacity for 2020 vs. 2019.

This suggests we are getting far more yield from our cave customers compared to 2019.

Amy Korfias,
Visitor Experience Manager, Jenolan Caves.