Meet Eran Pe’er – Tourism and Travel Entrepreneur / Manager of Israel’s Largest Camping and Travel Community.
Eran, a former tech professional, manages Israel’s travel and camping community, which has over 111,000 members, along with several other travel-related groups.
What started as a hobby, writing a travel blog with recommendations for trails and destinations, evolved into a thriving Facebook group and community, thanks to loyal followers.
Eran is deeply committed to his community, investing more than 100% of his effort and spending most of his time in the field promoting various projects (we know this firsthand, as some of us go camping occasionally). Even our conversation with him takes place while he’s driving to Jerusalem for a current project.
Tell us about the beginning
“My main challenge was communicating with the community members and sending updates and tips. As the community grew, attracting members from both the website and the blog, as well as Facebook, the audience became more diverse. The information needed to be tailored to each member, and I was looking for a smart email marketing system to help with that.”
What exactly did you need?
“I needed a system that could handle multiple email registration functions. Once I outgrew the free systems, I realized I needed a more comprehensive solution, especially for the visual aspect of the content, so I chose smoove.”
How do you use the system now?
“smoove is basically my back door, right after the website. If the website is the content, smoove is the way to communicate with the customers. My main use of the system is contact management. I send out a newsletter once a week and occasionally create landing pages, but mostly I manage contacts. I also built a database of campsite managers using the system, with an embedded form and custom fields.”
Do you work with multiple mailing lists, or are they all in one main list?
“I have dozens of mailing lists. Each registration source, each campaign, and every area I work in has its own list. Every product I sell has an interested list, and I track payment processing and more. Everything is organized into lists.”
Recently, he launched a membership club for his community, offering group sales, exclusive benefits, and special discounts on gear and attractions. All group sales are managed through smoove lead forms on his website, which then connect to a payment processing system.
What other uses do you have for managing the club?
“I have a dedicated list for club members and use a custom field I created for the membership number. When I send the welcome email to each member, this field appears along with their other details. It helps with customer identification and tracking.”
Would you say using the system is easy for you?
“Most of the time, I have no issues, and since I come from the tech world, I understand how it works. When there are problems, I rely on support, and at the beginning, I used the guides to learn how to operate the system. It’s pretty straightforward for me.”
“I think most people don’t really know all the capabilities of the system,” he adds. “I mainly focus on list management as I mentioned, but I know there are other features and capabilities I haven’t explored deeply yet.” He refers to automation, which he currently uses primarily for creating email series about purchased products but plans to expand to more uses in the future.
What’s the feature that excites you the most?
“Custom fields. Although I’m at a fairly basic level of use, I already see how it helps me control and analyze data in the most convenient way. I also really like the ability to create mobile-optimized landing pages; it’s very convenient for people working from their phones.”
Finally, do you have any tips for using the system efficiently?
“If you have many products and services, it’s important to create as many contact lists as possible to help you segment customers and processes. If you have sub-services and sub-products, this will help you a lot.”
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There’s no doubt that when it comes to building relationships with customers (and we certainly are talking about that), Eran provides a great example of how to do it right, and there’s much to learn from his approach.
We were particularly impressed by his ability to manage personal contact fields while simultaneously handling multiple focused lists to provide each person with relevant content, thereby strengthening the community connection. If that’s not the core of relationship-based marketing, then what is?
How about you? Do you use different lists to segment and manage your contacts? Share your experience with us, and maybe we’ll feature you in our blog.
