The Challenge

Operating a series of travel comparison sites, Travel Media Direct provides aggregation, lead generation and traffic acquisition services for airlines, hotels, cruise operators and more. But Travel Media Direct delivers a unique advantage by providing highly targeted, very efficient qualified leads. For example, agencies can bid on leads for very specific users—instead of all travelers looking for a hotel in San Francisco, they can filter for only travelers from a specific region, or international travelers, or any other targeted parameter looking for a hotel in the Bay Area.

“We qualify the leads for them, so they can purchase whatever user they want,” said Travel Media Direct founder Yaniv Frenkel. “This way, they can target their marketing and remarketing campaigns very precisely for greater likelihood of conversion.”

To generate those leads, Travel Media Direct distributes 3-5 million email newsletters a month to its extensive list of subscribers. While most are sent semi-monthly, they’re also segmented by user and their activity, so that Travel Media Direct can increase the cadence when it’s clear a user is looking to travel in the next 2 weeks or 30 days. Travel Media has struggled to find the right solution to send out their numerous newsletters and turn those pennies into leads that drive traffic and increased business.

The Solution

“Like Getting our Email Distribution for Free”

Looking for a way to add new revenue to increase its lead generation budget, Travel Media Direct implemented email monetization from Jeeng. Jeeng lets Travel Media Direct place CPC ads from reputable brand partners into its regular email newsletters. With just a simple copy-and-paste of a small HTML snippet into its preconfigured templates, Travel Media Direct subscribers see highly targeted ads that update at the moment of open with timely content that’s curated based on their known activity.

“I had used Jeeng at a previous company, so I’ve now been using it for probably four years,” Frenkel said. “We’re extremely pleased with the results. We see anywhere between $1,500 and $2,000 a month in revenue, which pays for our email service provider costs. It’s like getting our email distribution for free. Anything more goes into buying more traffic on Google or Facebook to keep the leadgen ball rolling.”

The Results

Frenkel says one of the key benefits of Jeeng is the fact that it’s extremely easy to use. “Just a copy and paste, it’s that easy. It’s low-maintenance and delivers extra revenue without any additional effort,” he said. “Once it’s there, it works and it’s like you just pick up money from the floor.”

While some may fear that inserting ads in email newsletters might hurt performance, Travel Media Direct has not seen any remarkable decline in subscriptions. “That was the first test, and the results were clear: Jeeng is safe and does not cause users to unsubscribe. The ads also don’t hurt conversions or click rate on our newsletters.”

According to a recent survey, consumers say trust in the publisher is a strong motivator in enticing users to open emails and click on ads. About 2/3 say they’ll click on an ad if they trust the publisher sending the newsletter. For Travel Media Direct, cultivating that trust has been key to its email monetization success.

“In the business of travel, margins are so low that every cent matters,” Frenkel said. “Every cent we bring in, we use to purchase more traffic, to send more newsletters. We’re always testing new tools and if they’re good, we keep them. Jeeng not only drives revenue, but it does it with practically no effort on our part, which is very important for a small team.”