NB: This is a guest article by Corrina Murphy, business development director at e-Dialog.
As a travel brand you’re encouraging consumers to see the wonders of the world but you need to understand the wonders of the web first.
Obviously the revolution of big data hasn’t passed travel brands by but with the incoming EU privacy laws, brands need to be more intelligent about engaging with customers.
Here’s a simple solution: rather than gleaning lots of biographical data about the customer, profit more from understanding the digital journey of the customer - understand the concept of time and how travellers spend it looking for trips.
Map out a marketing strategy
Attribution modelling allows travel brands to pinpoint every stop on the customer’s digital journey on the way to purchase and through any subsequent purchases, an upgraded model of "last click", if you will, giving marketers more insight than ever before into what customers research when looking at holidays.
For the surfing of the web is bypassed completely with last click attribution, missing, to be exact, 98% of consumer interaction along the purchase path.
This means a lot of vital information is lost when learning about what customers are looking for in a holiday, especially since more and more people are booking holidays online.
Travelzoo, for example, illustrated this by looking specifically at cruise holidaymakers, finding that 78% of cruise passengers researched their holiday online before seeking information offline.
According to our recent research on email, 60% of consumers said the most effective and relevant emails were from brands that knew them.
It’s an easy correlation to see, if travel brands want to truly know their customers, they need to know what they’re interested in and what their preferred channels to find this information are before they make a purchase.
The need to understand the audience and increase levels of engagement is even more pertinent for travel brands because travel is viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity in the current economic climate.
So if you want to increase the chances of customers considering your offer at the very outset of the holiday decision-making process, you need to make sure they receive relevant, timely messages over their preferred channel.
It might seem common sense but in order to do this, you need to know which channels your customers are using and what topics they’re researching, no easy feat without technology.
Choose the right mode of transport
It takes sophisticated technology to monitor purchase paths and predict consumer behaviour precisely because there are billions of interactions over an ever-increasing number of platforms.
For there are as many digital paths as there are travellers nowadays - email, SMS, social media, blogs, forums, retargeting, search, etc.
By using attribution and analytics software, travel brands can pinpoint the most engaging channels for a particular demographic based on their ability to introduce, influence or close in the path to purchase.
To give you an example, the time-poor business executive reads a lot of emails on the go. If you want to get high interest for a promotion on business class seats, you need to profile what businessmen and women look for in transport, when they normally travel and what device they view emails on.
If this is mobile or iPad, you need to make sure the email is optimised for these devices.
British Airways is another exmaple, with the launch of its Executive Club app, a product allowing people to easily book flights and access the latest flight information.
After analysing email data targeting the business sector and seeing that most emails were opened on smartphones, we optimised the email announcement for mobile, matching the email to the device it was viewed on and linking through to an appropriate application via mobile.
And it paid off - open rates for the e-mails targeted to mobile devices far exceeded opens for desktop versions and were in excess of 50 per cent for iPhone and Android.
Make use of time travel
The reason attribution is an upgrade on last click is not only that it provides all steps in the customer purchase path rather than just the final destination, but also that it allows qualitative analysis in addition to quantitative.
Recent research from Clearsaleing tells us that the average purchase path is 3.8 consumer interactions longi. So, with this technology, you can even measure conversations on social media, forums and blogs, finding out exactly what travel products and services customers are talking about.
With the ever-increasing influence of social, this is vital information for travel brands, allowing them to tailor packages and products for customers based on what they know the customers will like - something that has worked very well for brands such as Amazon, whose attribution and analytics technology personally recommends products to customers.
As we’d all agree, learning the intent of consumers is the Holy Grail for any marketer.
To illustrate how this foresight is even more advantageous for travel brands is because purchase patterns are seasonal, for example, more families book inside school holidays, more Brits look further afield than Europe in the winter months and more people plan travel around annual holidays, Christmas, Easter etc.
Being able to segment busy periods from non-busy periods allows you to see trends in consumer behaviour, understand which channels most people use when they start researching and booking during busy periods and which timeframes are best for acquiring new customers during this period.
This ability to segment holiday purchases from non-holiday purchases therefore helps marketers more effectively plan for holiday traffic and set realistic expectations when planning their marketing strategy.
Summary
Attribution and analytics technology allows marketers to know their audience, seeing what they’re interested in, when they’re interested in it and how they like to be contacted.
This is more pertinent than ever before for travel brands and offers a simple means to a simple end; work out the customer journey to increase sales. It is therefore staggering that 58% of marketers have little or no understanding of the process, which offers them a sure-fire way to connect with their customers.
Remember, it’s not the destination but how you get there that counts.
NB: This is a guest article by Corrina Murphy, business development director at e-Dialog.