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How Personalized Offers Increase Bookings & Keep Travelers Coming Back

Feb 04, 2022
Danielle Briner

Evolution of Travel Marketing Messaging

How did our ancestors traverse time and space? When did the idea of travel become a luxury rather than a necessity? When there’s a need, there’s a market, and now we have brands constantly spamming us with deals and destinations that are sometimes downright outrageous. 

Today, we’re going to focus on why, how, when, and where our customers interact with us the most. For enterprise travel brands with an ever-increasing digital footprint, it’s not just in the inbox, but also across mobile push and SMS. 

Why Do We Market To Travelers?  

They say, if you build it, they will come. But in a world with thousands of options, how can you ensure a customer is going to pick your airline over another? Your luxury hotel over another? 

Easy! Make them feel at home. But how

You want them to make that ticket purchase or book that stay, and hopefully have an excellent brand experience, spread the word, and become repeat customers. 

What creates these special experiences? 81% of travel respondents say it’s crucial for travel brands to provide personalized experiences. 

Bingo! MessageGears allows brands to provide these personalized experiences through MessageGears Segment, our thorough and flexible audience builder tool. From there, marketers can activate those audiences on external and internal platforms or send them off to an ESP, or MessageGears Message to send cross-channel campaigns. 

How Do We Market To Customers? 

What’re the last five apps you had open on your phone? Odds are, at least one of them was social media of some kind — which makes the claim that 79% of travel marketers use Facebook Ads extremely relevant to our conversation today.  

Not to mention, more than 50% of tourism website traffic comes from a mobile device; and, reaching travelers in a mobile landscape, whether it’s to book a trip or reach them with travel updates, is an ever-changing target. 

Let’s unpack our bags and see what MessageGears can help you do! 

Reduce Resources and Increase ROI: Worldwide Travel & Hospitality brand, Expedia, uses MessageGears to reach and send over 170 people on trips every minute, every day. Not to mention, they sell enough plane tickets to fill over 600 737s. They’ve experienced over 100% ROI in their email marketing since switching to MessageGears and a 50% reduction in needed I.T. resources. 

Relevance at Scale: Top-Tier Technology Retailer Best Buy uses MessageGears Segment plugged directly into their Google BigQuery database in order to allow them to use their customer data live and in real-time for campaign personalization. In their first month live with MessageGears, Best Buy sent over 200 million messages at scale, allowing them to focus on their marketing and not worry about their throughput or stale data. 

Powerful Personalization: Powered by a suite of contextual data, MessageGears Message delivers email, push notifications, and SMS to customers. Our contextual data suite is available for marketers to plug into cross-channel messaging to engage customers with information like their name, favorite store and deals specially curated for them. The opportunities are endless for personalization direct from your modern data warehouse to their inbox. 

Real-Time Data Interactions: Top-10 Big Box Retailer The Home Depot uses MessageGears Engage to power emails at the time of open for each customer’s last viewed items, and suggested items based on their Business Intelligence team suggestions. Not to mention, The Home Depot’s website is also driven by MessageGears Engage APIs to drive the user experience from directed product suggestions on the home page based on each user’s brand interactions. 

When Do We Market To Our Customers? 

How often do you research a trip before you book? How many “{first.name}, only a few left, book now” ads have you gotten? How many have you fallen victim to? 

53% of travel and tourism brands use personalized email content in their marketing strategy. 

While not shocking, it helps soften the messaging, knowing that a brand has been tracking your preferences and are seemingly sending you a tailored message. 

Statistically, 95% of travelers browse deals before booking a trip. But guiding a customer along with a few subtle nudges or reminders via push notification from a downloaded app like Southwest or Marriott Bonvoy could keep the trip top-of-mind.  

The age-old question persists: how does a brand know what I’m browsing online, and how are they showing up on my newsfeed? Cookies! 

Whether you’re at the start of a purchase, abandoned cart, or just completed a trip booking, the customer journey is far from over. A “Here Are Your Booking Details” message kicks off a new round of messaging regarding “Your Upcoming Trip.” Recently made booking emails, or push notifications may include ads for suggested “add-ons,” rental car, or restaurant reservations. 

MessageGears can not only enable travel brands to send these customizable messages to customers, but also to inject information into them in real-time with context data in Engage

Where Do We Market To Our Customers?  

Take a look to your right, now your left. Where’s your phone? You may not be able to see it, but it hears the conversations you’re having, it knows the content you engage with on social media, and the trips you search for with aspirations of getting out of the day to day. 

This may not surprise you, but 83% of Millennials said they would let travel brands track their digital patterns if this would provide them with a more personalized experience. 

Perhaps more compelling, 85% of respondents of all ages thought that customized itineraries were much more desirable than general, mass-market offerings. 

So, going the extra mile, or may we say sky mile – hello to our friends at Delta –  to reach your loyal customers and new customers is imperative. This may mean using their preferred channels, whether it’s an external channel like Facebook, Google Ads, or push notification to their app on their mobile device. 

A smooth landing for your marketing, MessageGears Segment supports activating your customer data on any channel you need, turning audiences into customer engagement. 

Takeaways 

Let’s depart with a compelling statistic, 148.3 million people and counting use the Internet daily to make reservations for their accommodations, tours, and activities. So, if you’re not heavily investing in your digital-first strategy, don’t fret, we are here to help! 

MessageGears enables travel and hospitality brands to invest in their customers, which reflects in their bottom line. Pick a tool with a high ROI and promise for growth at scale in the future. 

Want to see for yourself? Get started here

About the Author

Danielle Briner

As the Product Marketing Manager at MessageGears, Danielle Profita Briner oversees the creation and execution of our Go-To-Market Strategy for the entire MessageGears product suite. She applies her background in content strategy and software to organize, establish, and produce meaningful content for our current and future clients.