Optimising Customer Engagement and Personalisation in the Travel Industry

Implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) for Traveldeal, a leading travel platform in the Benelux, proved to be a successful endeavor with the support of YellowGrape and the technical capabilities of Squeezely. Through an email and personalization strategy, Traveldeal achieved impressive results, including a highly segmented customer database and a significant increase in click-through rates (CTRs).

Expanding Traveldeal's Offerings

Traveldeal, part of Bookunited, offers a diverse range of travel deals, holidays, overnight stays, and day outings at competitive prices. By regularly updating their offers and featuring time-limited deals on their website, they effectively create a sense of urgency and encourage impulse purchases among visitors.

Challenges in Targeting and Email Marketing

As Traveldeal experienced rapid growth and expanded their offerings, targeting a broader audience became more challenging, particularly in their email marketing efforts. Email was a crucial channel for them, but delivering engaging content that resonated with their expanding customer base became increasingly difficult. To address this, they set two key objectives: increasing the click-through rate of their newsletters and consistently growing their customer database.

Relevance as the Key to Improving CTR

Improving the click-through rate within email marketing goes beyond technical considerations and primarily focuses on relevance. By providing more personalised and relevant information to their customers, Traveldeal aimed to increase their click-through rate, which, in turn, would drive repeat visits, rebookings, and ultimately, increase customer lifetime value (LTV). Now, let's dive into the specific approach they took to achieve these goals.

Strategic Planning and Partner Selection

When implementing a powerful Customer Data Platform (CDP), selecting the right partners and asking the right questions are crucial. Traveldeal aimed to leverage their existing strengths and enhance their e-commerce capabilities without overwhelming their IT department. Planning the layout and identifying desired end goals, both in the short and long term, were essential initial steps in establishing the CDP. It was important to carefully consider the use cases that aligned with their overall strategy.

Evaluation and Migration to Squeezely

While Traveldeal had been using Copernica as their Email Service Provider (ESP) for years and had a CDP in place, YellowGrape conducted a thorough evaluation and recommended Squeezely as the new CDP. The existing CDP did not fully meet the requirements of the new strategy, and the increasing importance of first-party cookies necessitated a more flexible CDP solution. After careful consideration and a trial period, Traveldeal decided to migrate to Squeezely. Squeezely's standout features, such as precise data collection capabilities and the ability to sync values from the data warehouse at the profile level for tailored campaigns, influenced their decision.

Comprehensive Analysis and Customer Journey Mapping

YellowGrape's involvement extended beyond optimising the email channel. They conducted an extensive analysis of Traveldeal's customer database, evaluated the data landscape, and mapped out the customer journey to develop valuable customer journeys that seamlessly aligned with Traveldeal's strategy.

Leveraging Customer Behaviour and LTV

Through the analysis of five years' worth of order data, Traveldeal gained insights into customer behavior and associated Lifetime Value (LTV). The findings highlighted opportunities for improvement, particularly in customer retention. While Traveldeal excelled in customer acquisition, retaining existing customers proved more challenging than expected. Based on these insights, new customer journeys were designed to stimulate cross-selling, upselling, and retention, ultimately increasing the average order value (AOV). Improving customer retention and AOV had a positive impact on LTV, a critical objective within their new strategy.

An Exceptional Master Template

The email template played a vital role in Traveldeal's customer journey. In collaboration with Traveldeal's in-house team, YellowGrape's

Your next best trip

This campaign is specifically aimed at improving food. Through this campaign, they proactively approach customers with a recommendation for their next holiday or outing at a carefully determined moment. When you see the email, you may not expect that a huge amount of intelligence and data analysis is hidden behind it.

Nothing is less true.All available, raw data within the Google Cloud environment is brought to a machine learning platform. Within this platform, it is then calculated which deals, in theory, best suit the customer and when they should ideally be sent. This data is sent back to the Google Cloud environment, which then transfers the relevant values to the ESP and the CDP. This allows us to not only adjust the product feed in the mail, but also show the same recommendations on site.

Prepared for the future

In the future, first-party data will become increasingly important. Building a one-to-one customer relationship is the most valuable asset a company has. When you are better able to understand the needs of your customers than a competitor, it will be good for the growth of your company.

This translates into technical possibilities to share data with, for example, advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google, data exchange with e-mail packages, personalisation of web experiences, customer service and all future ways to communicate with customers. By investing in customer confidence to share data with your organisation, you are in the best position to respond to all changes in the landscape of the future.