2023 Bronze Marketing Automation

Agency: RedEye

Client: Travelodge

Entry Title: Abandoned journey with unprecedented personalisation

Executive Summary

Multi-stage, hyper personalised abandoned emails are rare in the travel industry, so when Travelodge identified the need to drive more business revenue outside of promotions, it needed to think of something truly different to persuade their increasingly cost-conscious booker that it was a good choice for their upcoming stay.

Strategy

With a marketing objective to reduce the potential revenue gap from fewer promotions, the team identified the automated abandoned booking journey as the perfect aspect to galvanise. It also needed to change the current journey from a conversion-led approach to educational-led, to drive more purchasing behaviours by educating prospective bookers.

With Travelodge’s marketing strategy to always keep the customer in mind, the team devised a hyper-personalised, 14-stage abandoned journey with the sole purpose to take friction away from the hesitant booker.

As Travelodge always has the customer in mind, it knew bookers often be interested in information about the local area. This led to a strategy of personalised locational information in each stage of the email series, to enable prospects to make a better-informed decision.

Creativity

The campaign highlighted, over stages, the key benefits of a specific hotel with vital information around potential booking dates. Personalised location details were included in each stage of the series.

Each email became truly individualised to the prospective booker. This was powered by a product table integration, which contained 157 columns of data on 598 Travelodge hotels. The number of permutations that could be generated to deliver one-to-one personalisation ran into thousands; impossible to deliver at scale without the power of efficient and impactful marketing automation.

Results

The end goal of any abandonment email was to secure a booking that might otherwise have been lost, and the enhanced 14-stage journey was highly successful in not only driving 37% more bookings but also 52% more revenue than what the previous abandoned journey did in the same period.

This helped drive an increased engagement with prospective bookers seeing a

• 28% higher open rate and a 466% higher click-through rate for this journey in comparison to the Travel industry average
• 14% higher open rate and a 347% higher click-through rate than Travelodge's less personalised tactical sends.

The Team

RedEye - Nicole Williams, Senior Account Manager - Tom Forster, Senior Executive Client Services - Nikesh Parmar, Application Support Programmer - Claire Treloar, Account Director - Evie Holland, Senior Account Executive

Travelodge - Stuart Dessler, Senior eCRM Manager