TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring UK and US-based website booking recovery service SaleCycle.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
SaleCycle helps ecommerce businesses recover abandoned bookings online. Through our unique capture code, we are able to trace user through the booking process and re-target them if they don’t complete the process.
We’re currently working with a number of travel/leisure clients who are seeing a monthly increase in sales of more than 5%.
The most effective method of re-targeting is email and we work with each clients’ Email Service Provider’ to ensure our message hit the inbox.
The business operates out of two offices (UK and US) and from starting with a small team of developers; it now employs 20 full time staff.
The business founder is Dominic Edmunds, who after more than a decade of working in an agency environment, facilitating high profile travel and leisure clients formed SaleCycle with the backing of The Leighton Group.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
The business is privately funded and after its formation in February 2010, turned profit in December 2010.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We’re helping businesses to recover lost bookings by re-targeting users who don’t complete the booking process. A problem in which less than 15% of online companies are actively addressing.
Describe the business, core products and services?
SaleCycle recover abandoned bookings online. We are a SAAS business that allows each client access their own live dashboard and reporting suite in order to monitor performance of direct sales, abandonments and recovered bookings in real time.
We respond to every abandonment individually in real time to increase conversion rates and improve the customer experience. Each response is fully personalised to the individual customer and their prospective booking
Each client defines the amount of time that passes between abandonment and response, this ensures that we achieve an optimum level of performance and maximise recovered revenue.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our first leisure client was the Malmaison Hotel chain.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Our business was built based upon live proof of concept testing with our partners. The results of this testing highlighted the business potential and the requirement for investment.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
The business turned profit in December 2010. Our model for growth is based upon sales as we charge commission on very booking we recover.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Our platform is independent, allowing it to work with any booking engine/ecommerce platform/email service provider.
- Our capture code is very light and can be implemented in a matter of hours.
Weaknesses:
- As our revenue model is commission based, we only get paid if we recover sales. That means that is the service doesn’t work, we don’t get paid. That said, we have team of dedicated account managers who are targeted to optimise all recovery campaigns to ensure success.
Opportunities:
- We capture a variety of data which can be used to create individual user records and identify virtual preferences. Although this data is a by-product, it has immense value in creating vertical based benchmark reports which we hope to produce soon.
Threats:
- Although we are the market leader, competition is currently very thin on the ground. As time passes we expect to operate in a more crowded sector.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?In truth, no-one. The business concept is simple, it’s engaging and easily translates to real life case studies.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
The growth targets for the business are aggressive and we hope to increase our turnover by 12.5x.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.