Check out time: Hyper-personalised basket abandonment journey increased email revenue by 50%

At a glance

• New innovative 14-stage abandoned basket journey delivers a 50% increase in email revenue

• Delivering a true 1-2-1 personalised experience for prospect bookers

• Unique Open Rate risen by 12% and Unique Click Rate increased by 15.7%

• A collaborative approach to email builds enables Travelodge to develop marketing automation activities at scale

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RedEye x Travelodge

Travelodge and RedEye have partnered for over 8 years, pushing each other to create even greater customer experiences based on the wealth of data Travelodge holds on its guests.

This has resulted in exponential growth of Travelodge’s CRM programme and the successful implementation of hyper-personalised emails years before it hit mainstream marketing – encapsulated with the success of Travelodge’s pre-stay email journey which achieved a 40% increase in email revenue.

Never one to rest on their laurels, Travelodge regularly review their marketing automation workflows to identify gaps, opportunities and optimisation ideas.

Optimising the abandoned basket journey for the ultimate check out experience

During one of Travelodge’s and RedEye’s regular business reviews an opportunity was identified to optimise and enhance the existing communications strategy with a new abandoned basket series.

Abandonment series offer the perfect opportunity to re-engage bookers, playback Travelodge’s offers and drive more purchasing behaviours.

However, it was identified that this journey would be the first touchpoint a prospect booker would receive from Travelodge. And for all bookers, the lead time between researching hotel availability to finally completing a booking purchase can be a long window.

It was important to consider a prospect bookers’ considerations and purchasing behaviours when scoping an abandon journey.

The existing abandonment series focussed purely on the conversion opportunity, rather than educating the prospect on why Travelodge is such a great choice. The journey also ended relatively quickly, so didn’t utilise the full buying window potential.

To cater for these gaps, a new journey was proposed.

Working collaboratively to deliver a 5 star data-driven solution

Both teams worked together to flesh out a new journey based on the plethora of customer behavioural data they had at their disposal.

Using a customer-centric approach an enhanced, and hyper-personalised, 14-stage abandon basket series spanning a 60 day period was devised.

RedEye’s Client Services team took on the challenge and worked collaboratively with Travelodge to build, test, optimise and implement the email creatives needed for this 14-stage journey.

“Not only are RedEye’s Client Services team skilled coders and designers, they were also excellent collaborators throughout the process. They’ve been proactive in communicating with our team, providing regular weekly updates, and soliciting feedback to ensure that the end result meets our needs and exceeds our expectations.”

Stuart Dessler, Senior eCRM Manager, Travelodge

Creating a memorable customer experience which increased conversion

The previous abandonment emails included much of the hotel details all in one creative. However, with the new creatives, this level of detail was split out over the course of 10 days to highlight each particular benefit – resulting in higher levels of recall and understanding of the options open to the booker.

The first 7 days after abandonment the booker would receive 6 emails in quick succession to increase the chance of conversion.

Day 1: Amenities focussed including vital hotel information such as saver and flexible rates

Day 2: Room choice focus including room type availability and Bar/Café options

Day 3: Location focussed including map of area, travel options and parking

Day 5: Ancillary focussed including breakfast/dinner options, check in/out upgrades, WIFI and Pet add-ons

Day 7: Alternative hotels/rooms focus including the 4 nearest hotels to the original selection and Travelodge’s SuperRoom availability

Day 10: Content focussed through tailored articles

If no purchase was secured during the first 10 days since abandonment, the journey would continue, recapping the above benefits over a longer time period – roughly keeping in touch with the booker once a week.

On day 45, bookers received an email encouraging them to enter a competition to win a free stay with Travelodge.

As soon as a booker converted and purchased their hotel room of choice, they’d drop out of this workflow and be auto-enrolled into Travelodge’s pre-stay journey.

“From start to finish, RedEye was an instrumental part of the process and worked tirelessly to bring our vision of highly curated and individualised emails to life.”

“RedEye’s Client Services team’s technical expertise, coding skills and knowledge of email best practice have been crucial to delivering this project and resulted in a series of beautifully designed, highly effective emails that have already generated impressive results and added significant value to the customer experience.”
Stuart Dessler, Senior eCRM Manager, Travelodge

Hyper-personalised emails at every step

Sending abandonment emails at a high frequency rate for the first week demanded that each one needed to be relevant, personal and of benefit.

To avoid unsubscribe rates increasing each email creative needed to harness all the personalisation power that data-driven marketing automation can offer.

Each creative was powered by a product table integration which contains over 150 columns of data on each hotel that Travelodge operates – that’s nearly 600.

The number of permutations that can be generated from this campaign to deliver a 1-2-1 personalised email runs into the thousands!

But it is exactly this level of personalisation – across both what a booker has engaged with on site in addition to what Travelodge then recommends to the booker’s original selections – that have created such wonderful results in conversion uplift and increase in email revenue.

“RedEye excels at combining large amounts of customer and hotel data into actionable content that powers our campaigns delivering 1-2-1 personalisation. They’ve been making the complex, simple for many years and are a joy to work with. The combinations of personalised messaging we can now create is staggering.”

Stuart Dessler, Senior eCRM Manager, Travelodge

The results

Comparing performance against the same period last year the results of the new journey are amazing!

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increase in email revenue

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increase in UOR

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increase in UCR

And the unsubscribe rates have dropped to a very healthy 0.04% for the new journey – reenforcing the fact that subscribers are more than happy to receive more emails if they are personalised and relevant.

“When we first had the idea to extend the abandonment series into 14 emails over two months, I was confident it would increase conversion.

“I’m delighted with the performance from the first 6 months, increasing email revenue by 50% whilst also improving all our engagement metrics.

“We’ll be rolling this out across more of our abandonment journeys.”
Stuart Dessler, Senior eCRM Manager, Travelodge

Developing future large marketing automation journeys at scale

With the abandoned basket series proving popular and successful, a similar template approach will be rolled out to include Travelodge’s other abandonment campaigns such as hotel page and search abandonment. These will turn into a 10-staged journey.

However, setting up large scale automations is one thing, but the on-going management is another. This was identified right at the start of the project with both Travelodge and RedEye working together to minimise the effort required to manage these journeys.

Whilst the hotel and product feed take care of the data-driven content automatically, other areas in the creatives need some manual intervention.

With this in mind, the email templates have been designed in a manner which allows Travelodge to update and change the imagery outside of the build process – saving huge amounts of time.

Each creative also include dynamic banners advertisements which can be toggled on or off to promote upcoming events or offers, such as Black Friday sales, without having to stop the workflow and amend the emails.

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