2024 Gold Marketing Automation

Agency: MoEngage

Client: Travelodge

Entry Title: Guest-centric emails delight Travelodge guests

Executive Summary

Travelodge wanted to differentiate itself in the budget-friendly hotel sector, offering customers affordable prices for every occasion - but with premium, personalised guest experiences.

Strategy

In an already fiercely competitive market - made tougher by cost-of-living pressures - price remains a major battleground, with discount and offer-based bookings rife, and online aggregators serving travellers one-click-away price comparisons.

Travelodge’s post-booking strategy sought to increase guest anticipation and decreasing travel anxiety, while lightly upselling additional hotel services including food & drink and hotel extras.

Creating new post-booking email journeys, Travelodge used AI-powered automation to blend product communication (hotel information) with personal communications (customer data it had collected but hadn’t fully leveraged). The result was highly personalised, contextual recommendations based on primary insights about individual customers and where they planned to stay - helpful tips, booking reminders, itineraries and personalised offers - each offering different information for individual guests, and all delivered at the perfect moment, to the right guest in the right channel.

Creativity

Travelodge understood it would need to build insight-led customer engagement, driven by marketing automation, to deliver the personalisation needed at the scale required. The AI-powered automation ingested primary customer information and built insight-led engagement opportunities throughout individual customer journeys.

For example, it might offer family-oriented versions of an email series to those travelling with children, or serve a personalised offer for breakfast if a guest stayed in a Bar-Café hotel but hadn’t yet made a food and drink purchase.

Travelodge also data integrations into the email journey to make the information sent to guests even more personal and helpful. For instance, it built out Google Map IDs for nearest train stations to its hotels, allowing it to offer door-to-door directions in one click.

Results

Moving from its previous marketing automation platform has allowed Travelodge to unlock value in customer engagement by using real-time data and AI within the platform to drive automation where insights improve performance.

Previously its legacy solution only joined the dots between SMS and email, but now MoEngage has also created enhanced cross-channel opportunities, extending to web and app push, and WhatsApp engagement within the customer journey.

By leveraging AI-insights to optimise engagement, post-booking emails delivered a 58% open rate and 47% CTR, while pre-arrival emails saw a 72% open rate and 87% CTR. Pre-arrival app messages delivered a 61% open rate and 14% CTR, and web push notifications during the campaign generated 94,300 impressions.

Ultimately, while the email campaigns were focused on improving customer journeys rather than generating direct revenue, the improvement to customer experience created has been commercially successful, leading to a +354% increase year-on-year in post-booking revenues. In H1 2024, Travelodge drove £4.3m in post-booking revenues from the post-booking journey optimisation.

The Team

Travelodge -Gian Luzio, Digital Director - Stuart Dessler, Senior eCRM Manager - Jakub Olsiak, eCRM Executive - Yasmin Upton, Digital Content Executive - Isobel Hall, Digital Content Executive

MoEngage - Anirudh Kulkarni, Engagement Manager - Kuber Yadu, Senior Engagement Manager - Ayca Taskin Didszuweit, Director, Customer Success