We’ve all done it. At work, on the train, on the way home, sitting in front of the TV. We’ve even done it with multiple devices.
Browsing the web.
From searching for that next big holiday, the weekend break, or the dreaded half-term holiday.
Across the travel landscape, airlines and online travel agencies (OTAs) are struggling to understand how their customers interact digitally with their brand: Google calculates that 90% of consumers use multiple devices to accomplish their online goals - when planning and booking travel, however, this figure drops to 46%.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Jonathan Collins, a data scientist at Boxever.
This is still a meaningful percentage of potential customers who are executing a non-linear journey of engaging with a brand, which introduces complexity to the travel marketer who’s trying to communicate with and ultimately convert them.
For context, let’s dive a little deeper into how a physical buying journey differs from an online buying experience.
The good ole days - bricks & mortar
Walk into your favourite store, or even one for the first time, and you instantly know the mechanics: Products are here. Help is there. That’s where I check out.
The challenge for brands is determining how the physical world’s path to purchase is affected by the various barriers along the way. Factors such as staffing levels, inventory availability, and even the physical shopper experience all influence whether products fly off the shelves or are abandoned on the shop floor.
Decades of research have gone into developing the optimal physical buying journey that drives purchases as well as positive experiences - although mobile and social are forcing even in-store experiences to change. Now imagine a place with endless products in all shapes and sizes - where everything a customer could want is only a search, or click away.
In this world however, brands see the same customers drop in day to day, look around but don’t purchase and they can feel helpless.
Digital delight
In the digital world, data reigns supreme; everything can be measured, tracked and quantified - every CEO’s dream. Brands now have the ability to obtain complete insight into how and where their customers dwell, browse, and purchase.
Customers are slowly moving from the physical world where the mechanics are well known; however, the digital terrain still poses customer-centric difficulties: no welcoming face, little help when you need it, and endless rounds of form filling just to get that product.
The customer journey in the multi-device, multi-connected world of online retail is no longer the linear process marketing consultants used to try and sell you - it’s a windy, twisty myriad of data, devices, and behaviours. Digital interactions can take place anywhere, anytime and can become a nightmare to understand.
Understanding behaviour through data
At Boxever, we process millions of customer events every day. So, we sought to understand if similar trends and behaviour exist in travel browsing: Our analysis confirmed 80% of online travel browsing occurs on desktops, with 13% via smartphone and 7% on a tablet.
Additionally we correlated the device usage with three types of users: visitors (no purchases), one-off purchasers, and frequent shoppers. The browsing behaviour of these cohorts shows some interesting trends:
Visitors exhibit browsing behaviour seen in other industry studies: 80% desktop, 20% mobile.
Shoppers interact less on mobile devices: Mobile-device interactions of one-off and frequent shoppers only account for 11% and 8% respectively - half the share seen with visitors.
Visitors average just over 1.5 digital interactions per user whereas one-off shoppers average 2.2 interactions per user. At 8.6 interactions per user, frequent shoppers are the most digitally active.
That last point may seem obvious; however, we looked at the ratio of trips to interactions and found that frequent shoppers average four trips per user meaning they interact digitally at the same rate the one-off purchasers do.
This means the difference between the users who purchase at least once and those who don’t is on average one extra digital imprint. One extra website browse. One extra click through from a brand email. Powerful stuff.
So, think about these two questions:
- How can brands ensure they understand where along digital purchase journey customers feel pain?
- How do brands turn browsers into shoppers with just one more engagement?
It comes down to contextual communication, personalisation, and optimisation.
The travel industry is awash with untapped data. Collect the right data, extract the relevant insights, and turn those insights into operational actions, and you can revolutionise how you personalise your customer interactions and communications with the appropriate content.
Optimise each channel so that every users feels you understand them, reducing that frictional path to purchase. Data and insight can be a powerful tool to help you understand what’s the right approach to turn that casual browser into a loyal customer.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Jonathan Collins, a data scientist at Boxever.
NB2: Loyalty image via Shutterstock.