Case Study

Using website behavioural data to drive email relevance increases enquiries by 254%

One of our travel clients offer locally distinctive, authentic holidays from across the globe that are better for destinations and local communities. This case study focusses on how we have helped them use behavioural emails to boost enquiries.

The Challenge
It was clear from looking at our client's trend reports that open and click-thru rates from their e-newsletter were steadily falling, a classic sign of list fatigue. The newsletter needed to become more relevant in order to reverse this decline and improvements needed to be made in the conversion activity from the email channel.

Some past booking & enquiry data was used to segment the newsletter but this approach was seen as flawed as subscriber's holiday preferences would change year on year. In addition it was not always obvious what might have interested a subscriber to book a particular holiday previously, as many of the holidays can be categorised as family, activity and adventure holidays all at the same time.

The newsletter was also irrelevant from a timing point of view as customers spend only a few weeks a year researching their holiday, yet they would receive an email about holidays on offer every week of the year.

The Solution
Cognesia tracking tags have been placed on our client's travel website which matches each person's search activity with their email. This enables them to identify both when someone is in the market for a holiday and to see exactly what they searched for.

Using the feeds of customer's website activity in conjunction with feeds of the bestselling products within each of the thousands of holiday categories/location combinations, they used their existing email tool to implement a variety of automated emails to communicate with browsing customers in a far more timely and relevant manner.

An email is automatically delivered 24 hours after the customer's initial search with a tailored subject line and a series of 10 best selling holidays relating to their website search. Other tactics included tailoring the top of each regular newsletter with similar targeted products and triggering emails several days after an enquiry form had been completed to drive bookings.

Results
Due to reaching these customers at the right point in their holiday decision making process with highly relevant content, enquiries increased by 254% compared to the control group who did not receive these emails.

Overall, email engagement rates improved significantly. Over several months, open and click rates averaged 56% and 44% respectively.