In travel, marketing and revenue management teams are under tremendous pressure to grow revenues while maintaining low costs. In order to leapfrog the learning curve of the online retail space, many travel operators are adopting digital consumer marketing best practices from companies such as Amazon that engage each customer more personally for higher conversion.
Ecommerce is now dominated by personalization technologies, designed to match a customer to an offer or product as early and appropriately as possible. This not only serves the customer by providing more value but also adds more to the bottom line – a happier customer is a better customer.
Business as usual risks leaving valuable revenue behind – or losing customers to competitors.
The path to personalization can be expensive and risky. Options range from buying all-in-one complex marketing solutions to cobbling a variety of marketing tools together to build your own system.
But even the most basic personalization of offers can lead to increased acquisition, conversion and retention of customers. According to Forrester research, just a 10% improvement in customer experience translates to $600 million for an airline.
At Boxever, we’ve seen it first-hand – one of our customers recently reported an additional 4.3% of revenue per month after only two months deployed. By personalizing at select points in the customer journey, our customers have seen millions of dollars of revenue, 4X conversion rates and significant increases in NPS scores.
Many ecommerce businesses see the value of 1:1 personalization, yet few travel operators today take full advantage of even the most obvious channels – web, mobile and email. So, what’s the hold-up?
Knowing your customer
Creating 1:1 personalized customer journeys for every single customer is harder than it looks. Big brands, in particular, are investing in technology stacks that will facilitate data-driven marketing that can accommodate thousands or millions of customers. They’re choosing to bank their future on knowing their customer better so they can offer more value. Having made that decision, many are then faced with other tough calls regarding cost, delivery times and return on investment.
