Marketing To Travellers Across The Online World
The number of people using multiple digital channels to plan and book their holidays continues to grow with the typical traveller using 22 websites to research a trip in multiple shopping sessions before they book. Although this presents a challenge, it is a challenge organisations in the travel sector can embrace by adopting a personalised approach to smartly address each phase of the customer journey. Download our Travel Solution Guidebook and explore how today’s advanced and automated platforms help to ensure extreme personalisation of email, by using content that matches the needs of each recipient at all times.
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Executive Summary
Like many industries, the travel sector has been transformed by the Internet. People use multiple digital channels to plan and book their holidays, with the typical traveller using 22 websites to research a trip in multiple shopping sessions before they book. With the growing penetration of Internet-capable mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, the number of people being informed about travel and researching their trips online can only grow.
While this shift is proving challenging for some traditional travel agents, it is on the whole an opportunity for all types of organisations in the travel sector to improve their customer relationships. This is most effectively achieved by personalising communications with customers, moving from the broad-brush approach of delivering the same message to everyone, to one-to-one marketing in which each individual recipient gets highly tailored content.
Email in particular is ripe for such tailoring. Today’s advanced and automated platforms help to ensure extreme personalisation of email by using content that matches the needs of each recipient at all times. This capability is achieved through powerful cloud capabilities that help travel companies to build up detailed profiles of customers, combined with dynamic email design techniques to ensure that the content looks great on all devices – whether fixed or mobile, big screen or small.
There are many solid examples of how travel sector organisations have adopted this personalised communication approach to boost their businesses.
Deploying such a strategy today will reap real rewards for travel companies long into the future as people’s digital capabilities and needs evolve.
The Market
Most trips start with a click
According to the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), 2012 saw one billion travellers crossing international borders for the first time, while 1.8 billion international trips a year by 2030 are forecasted. In a world still dogged by economic woes, tourism is one of the brightest beacons, with UNWTO claiming 4% growth in travel and tourism numbers worldwide in 2012, and 3% to 3.5% expected for 2013.
The total (offline and online) amount spent for US leisure and unmanaged business travel is expected to rise from $214.6 billion in 2011 to $270.1 billion by the end of 2016.
In a world gone digital, much of this growth is being enabled by online spending. At the same time, as with many other industries, the Internet is profoundly changing the way the travel sector operates. That’s because, thanks to online booking services and the ability to research all the elements of a trip, people are much more empowered today than they have ever been.
The result is that in 2013, online leisure travel spending in the US is estimated to be $87,500,000,000 on airlines and $36,000,000,000 on hotels.
In mature markets, most travellers have good quality Internet access at home and increasingly on their mobile devices. And they’re using it. In the UK in 2012, 78% of trips were booked over the Internet, representing a 47% increase in Internet bookings over 2008.
Furthermore, with smartphones now outselling conventional feature phones globally for the first time in early 2013, people have information at their fingertips at all times. Wherever they are, consumers can look for nearby activities such as museums, restaurants, theme parks and excursions. Equally, if they don’t like what they are experiencing, they can find alternative providers, such as hotels. In fact, 44% of people use their smartphone to research travel while they’re travelling.
This new status quo is challenging many businesses, including traditional travel agents and tour operators with only basic digital marketing and online sales capabilities. In West Europe in 2008, an average of one in three trips were booked through travel agents whereas in 2012 it was only one in five. But it is also opening up tremendous new opportunities for any travel company offering online booking services. Also benefiting are specialist travel agents focusing on a specific destination, or a specific “theme” or sport, such as scuba diving.
Social media – deal maker, deal breaker or both?
The impact of the Internet doesn’t end there. The phenomenal rise of social networking is exerting a powerful influence on how consumers choose the various components of their trips. As far back as Q1 2011, Forrester reported that 77% of US online leisure travellers engage in social media, up from 72% in 2010.
Accommodation in particular has felt the power of review sites such as TripAdvisor to affect bookings, while most hotel booking engines, such as booking.com, also come with review functions. People tell others about their experiences, and they actively read and react to the opinions of others.
It is abundantly clear that consumers are becoming increasingly savvy about how to take advantage of the online world to find bargain deals, to tailor their trips, to explore new experiences and to just make their lives easier through online check-ins and other convenient services.
What does this all mean for the way people plan their trips? And how can companies in the travel sector design their marketing to take advantage of the new opportunities?
Turning dreams and fantasies into business
The travel industry is characterised by a wide range of products and services that people can purchase pre-trip, during the trip and post-trip. Typically, the buying process (the customer journey) for a leisure traveller is split into four stages – Dreams, Anticipation, Experience and Reflection.
Depending on the product or service they offer, companies will market to travellers at different points along this customer journey. A rental car company’s most opportune period of promotion towards potential customers will differ to that of an airline’s
During the Dreams phase, people are researching and gathering ideas for their trip. They may be completely open to new destination ideas from companies, or have a preconceived notion of what they want to do for their trip. Either way, effective marketing, particularly direct digital marketing by email, is essential to attract a potential customer’s attention and then build their interest.
As people move into the Anticipation phase, they are making concrete decisions such as how they want to travel, where they want to stay and what they want to do during their trip. Companies must convince customers that they want and desire their product or service because it will satisfy their needs. This is also the most critical pre-trip phase because it’s where bookings are made and typically most of the money is spent.
During the Experience phase people are realising their dreams and plans. For local attractions, restaurants, excursion operators and other services, this is often the most productive period for sales.
Finally, when they return home, people want to tell their friends and family about their experiences and may be willing to buy additional souvenirs, perhaps a coffee table book or a personal photo album. This is also a great time for companies to send the customer back into the Dream phase by contacting them with personalised ideas for their next trip. The customer journey begins again.
There are opportunities for customer engagement throughout this lifecycle. Tour operators, for example, will want to consider using social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter to ensure they communicate with their customers at every stage of the lifecycle. Giving customers the opportunity to review their experiences will improve the likelihood of maintaining relationships based on engagement, not pure sales.
Using this approach, various tour operators have been able to identify the exact interests of each individual customer and target email marketing activities accordingly. A quick reaction will make the most of the small window of opportunity to capture the booking of travel browsers.
Case Study: Innovative and Creative Email From IrelandTourism Ireland’s aim is to increase the number of tourists visiting Ireland and generate a higher turnover. To help achieve these goals, Tourism Ireland has implemented an integrated marketing campaign to give people in Germany an insight into all things Irish.
Not only does Tourism Ireland send regular newsletters, it also broadcasts email campaigns focusing on particular promotions. Teradata Applications develops and distributes these campaigns, with all email recipient addresses deriving from Teradata Applications’ extensive permissions database. Tourism Ireland’s eye-catching emails are themed around Irish traditions and customs to drive traffic to its website and generate addresses via competitions and prize draws.
To encourage repeat visits to its website, Tourism Ireland employed a 24-day advent calendar campaign. Recipients were invited to open a door of the calendar each day in the run up to Christmas to reveal a seasonal anecdote. The campaign helped to double the number of recipients of Tourism Ireland emails, with open rates reaching 72%, click rates more than 80% and peaking at 97%, even during the campaign’s final stages.
Tourism Ireland also deployed a highly profiled, customised campaign themed around Celtic horoscopes. 140,000 customers received an email each having the chance to find out their Celtic horoscope and additionally take part in a prize draw. Following the initial email, recipients were sent further personalised, Celtic themed emails on their birthday. Their horoscope prediction was given and a tour operator and holiday break were suggested.
Tourism Ireland’s success is a great example of how a tourist board can use clever email marketing to engage prospective visitors and promote a region as a holiday destination.
The Customer Experience
From awareness to decision
Although each organisation will have different opportunities to influence buying behaviour, there are some common aspects that need to be addressed to create the right customer experience.
The first aim is to create awareness of the product or service being offered and capture the potential customer’s interest. It’s also important at this stage to obtain information to build a personal profile, for example planned travel dates, departure point, potential destinations and budget.
This kind of data makes it possible to build a relationship with the customer through more personalised and targeted communications. Poorly optimised, impersonalised, ‘shot in the dark’ communications that guess what consumers want, rather than accurately delivering what they need, are destined to fail. Personalisation doesn’t just mean greeting your customers by name at the start of the email. It’s basically using knowledge about each individual customer as a way to keep the customer happy at every stage of the customer journey.
Travel firms now have the means to talk to their customers as individuals and genuinely understand their travel habits; what they like to do and where they like to go. Not only does this allow them to target customers accurately, it also equips them with the ability to identify potential segments to target.
Providing useful and valuable content for travellers is achieved by looking at the demographic, previous holiday destinations, and choice of holiday, whether it is a European break, a long haul sun seeker, an adventure or a business trip. This combined data can then be used to automatically generate email messages that are highly personalised, precisely targeted and detail rich, which can then be delivered to millions of customers quickly, with every customer getting a tailored version of the same message.
It’s also important not to cut off potential customers by omitting any contact details, including phone numbers, postal addresses and anything else that will make it easier for customers to get in touch. For example, they may be happy to receive the initial information about holidays via email but prefer to talk about the options over the phone.
Personalisation vs PrivacyAlthough personalised offers have to be balanced carefully with privacy, a survey by Accenture shows that consumers prefer individually-relevant communications. Nearly half of all survey respondents were found to be receptive to their favourite brands using their tracking data to inform them about potential future purchases and make them aware of product availability.
When asked to make a choice, 64% of respondents said it is more important that companies present them with relevant offers against only 36% who say companies should stop tracking their website activity.
Not only should the content of the communication be personally relevant, but it must also offer excellent usability, with clear and easy-to-understand language in emails and campaigns, good navigation on landing pages and a booking engine that works perfectly
An example of the solid benefits of clear, personalised email is illustrated by Center Parcs, which was able to save its customers time by encouraging them to pre-book holiday activities before they arrive, and thus increase the relevancy of their emails and improve the overall customer experience. By splitting the emails by location, Center Parcs could highlight different activities and promotions by site and guest arrival dates. Over 20% more click-throughs were generated plus revenues from pre-booked activities increased and over 80% of pre-booked activity booking now comes from online.
[Download PDF to see Figure
Case Study: Virgin Limited Edition Boosts Customer Engagement Through EmailVirgin Limited Edition is a collection of retreats owned by Sir Richard Branson, chosen for their stunning locations, magnificent surroundings and offering style, luxury and exceptional personal service.
Email is at the core of Virgin Limited Edition’s multichannel strategy as it is closely integrated with direct mail, all marketing collateral and other online channels including social media, blogs and the website. The aim is to capture interest using the speed and frequency of email and also to generate enquiries for the different resorts. Increased engagement is the key performance indicator because bookings cannot be made on the website.
Teradata Applications’ content management system (CMS) enables Virgin Limited Edition’s non-technical teams to create high quality professional messages easily without compromising on design. The CMS template and email creative were both created in-house by Teradata Applications, offering Virgin Limited Edition a full email marketing solution to accommodate all of its requirements.
New and improved email designs offer a simple and consistent brand experience through the email channel. The development of cutting-edge HTML, that could be used time and time again, was a key component in the project’s success. The year-on-year results to date include a 5% increase in open rates. This was gained through long-term loyalty and the increased value offered with the new design templates. The new creative approach has also yielded more than a 100% increase in click-through rates which have generated many more leads for the business.
Making it all work on mobile too
Many booking engines were originally developed for use with PCs with fixed screen sizes. Making all communications and web tools work on mobile devices is critical.
In addition to websites and booking tools being mobile compatible, emails need to work on every device because it is estimated that up to a third of all emails are opened on mobile devices.
Email templates must be designed for varying screen sizes, whether on mobile devices or desktops. Conventional email design falls into the same trap as conventional web design, which is ineffective when transferred to a smaller, touchscreen device. The text can be illegibly small, or the user may have to scroll horizontally to see everything and buttons may be too small or crowded together to achieve the desired transaction.
Smartphones are especially challenging. Not only do they come in various screen resolutions and sizes, they can also be tilted on the move. Some people want to read an email with the device held upright, in “portrait mode”, while others like to use “landscape mode”. In any case, readers want the message to adapt flexibly to the screen orientation they choose.
There are quick fixes to optimise email for both desktop and mobile devices, such as using a simple one or two column design template, using bigger buttons and font sizes, and using the pre-header that appears in the top few lines of the message to promote offers or key information to entice the user to open the email.
Case Study: Emails That Capture More AttentionIn a consumer’s crowded inbox it’s essential for travel companies to make sure their emails stand out. An effective way to do this is through multivariate testing, which is a process that enables more than one component of an email to be tested in a live environment. In effect, a campaign is run that enables recipients to decide what they like best – all in real time
The technique has helped Hostelworld, which offers online booking services for thousands of hostels worldwide, to achieve an average 209% increase in its click through rates. Working with Teradata Applications Hostelworld tested four different header images across four segments based on currency – USD, GBP, EUR and AUD.
The multivariate testing project has been a very productive exercise. Any future newsletters that we send now will be highly targeted with content that we know our subscribers are interested in receiving.
From responsive design to Live Email
A more effective way to optimise emails is to create adaptive layouts and to use responsive design techniques. Applied correctly, these will adapt the layout, presentation, and functionality of content to the device’s screen size, making it easier to see company branding, product information and calls to action, across a variety of mobile devices.
Responsive design comprises of three main components. CSS media queries which control the fluid design of an email, fluid media which controls what is shown, for example images and buttons, and fluid grids, whereby the email layout changes and columns drop at designated break points so the layout always fits the screen size.
Adaptive layout on the other hand is quicker to produce and has only two layout options, desktop or mobile. Although it is similar to responsive design, adaptive layout does not use fluid media queries, however it does cover the majority of layout scenarios from mobile to desktop and is a viable option.
The final and most effective approach to email marketing though is Live Email, in which the email considers the context surrounding each recipient’s viewing of the email. This can be particularly effective for targeting travellers, especially during the Experience phase of the customer journey.
Live Email updates the content when the user opens the email, not the time it is sent out. Live data can be used to show relevant offers according to the location of the device and the current time. With Live Email, a specific email can sit in the recipient’s inbox and be opened more than once – each time displaying different information depending on the user’s context such as where they are or the time of opening.
Social Networking
Travellers and the power of social networking
Like many sectors, the travel industry has felt the influence of widespread social networking. People are much more engaged with travel brands on social media and regularly use recommendation engines such as TripAdvisor. This makes better and more personalised use of these mediums essential for travel brands.
Social websites can exert a powerful influence on people researching and booking trips. For example, an increasing reason behind a specific destination choice is ‘seeing a friend’s holiday pictures’ on Facebook. As a result, there is a fantastic opportunity for brands to exploit this trend and use their own Facebook page in a similar way to offer a more personal, unique insight into a location. Any travel company that can link that positive feedback into their communication, whether through email or Facebook, is going to benefit.
Social networking also makes it easy for customers to share good content and communications they receive. This makes it essential for travel companies to always include links in their emails to appropriate social media channels, to encourage wider discussions about a particular offer they are making.
On the flip side, social media channels are also often the first places people visit online to complain when something goes wrong or they feel they have had a less than perfect experience. Travel brands have a responsibility to deliver answers and insight faster than ever. How travel brands react to bad experiences is key in driving trust with customers.
Case Study: Leading Tour Operator Starts Dream Holidays With Social MediaA leading Italian tour operator specialising in holiday villages, wanted to enhance its social customer service. By implementing its own company blog, YouTube channel, Twitter profile and Facebook fan page, it set about creating direct channels to listen to customers and support them in their choice of holiday, plus identify trends to help build an even richer and varied product range.
To manage the publication of content on the various social media channels and monitor online user enquiries in real time, the brand chose Teradata’s social media management platform.
Using this simple and intuitive platform, it allowed the travel operator to centrally control the editorial flow of content and its publication on different channels and analyse the performance of each activity, which enabled them to to devise effective offers in line with customer demand and increase loyalty.
With its new focus, the travel operator developed a strong social media presence, achieving almost 39,000 Facebook fans within 10 months of becoming active on social media.
The Rise of The Cloud
Using the cloud to build extreme personalisation
The evolution of cloud technology offers travel companies a whole new way to structure, connect and access their data, as well as gather and use information to connect and talk to customers. With all this data at their fingertips, they can build much deeper personalisation to develop long-standing relationships with their customers.
The cloud allows companies to make use of a vast range of information to personalise their communications. Even extremely large databases, constantly changing data sets, recipient-independent data, product catalogues and extensive customer purchase histories can be uploaded directly into your private data cloud and used for your digital messages.
Furthermore, existing data in the cloud can be pulled in to provide valuable content for individual customers, perhaps a weather forecast for their destination. The cloud gives greater flexibility for those companies that need to nurture and build long term relationships. Booking a holiday or a trip away involves much research, advice and collaboration with fellow travellers, and with so many variants in a decision process, cloud technology is ideally suited to travel firms looking to give their customers added value.
And it is with exactly this kind of highly personalised customer service that travel agents can re-invent themselves to deliver extreme value and thereby compete against bland booking engines.
A further benefit of the cloud is that it provides companies with the complete flexibility to change and modify their email campaigns as new data is collected. This is in addition to greater insight into the campaigns’ performance, which can provide better targeting for future communications.
Teradata Applications’ Cloud+ Data Management platform can source data from almost any system connected to the Internet and make it available for digital messaging. This enables a travel company to store, connect and update customer profile data, from their interests to their purchasing history, allowing the creation of smart, personalised campaigns.
Customer segmentation and targeting become very straightforward. For example, users who abandoned their online shopping carts can be targeted with a personalised message using information like departure airport, destination, travel dates, holiday ID, abandonment date and time, discount offered and total trip cost. This can be extremely effective in recovering what would otherwise be a lost sale.
Case Study: Tuifly Takes Off With a Broad Email Marketing StrategyFor Germany’s third-largest airline, TUIfly, the Internet is an integral part of its business with more than 80% of TUIfly-controlled flights sold directly online. The company also uses online marketing to promote its wider offering, including hotel accommodation, car rentals, insurance and holiday homes.
Email is TUIfly’s main marketing tool. Its “TUIfly Luftpost” weekly newsletter focuses on increasing the sales of new or under-booked destinations, offering discounts, prize draws, price cuts and other promotions to build immediate bookings. Limited duration offers, plus extra schemes on hotels or hire cars, help to increase sales with newsletter recipients able to reach the relevant section of TUIfly’s website directly.
The complete broadcast, tracking and evaluation of TUIfly’s newsletters, is undertaken by Teradata Applications’ Digital Messaging Centre. As well as automating email broadcasts, Digital Messaging Centre enables very personalised content.
Cart Recovery is a Priority
However, a challenge for TUIfly has been a 76% cart abandonment rate, compared to typical rates of 72% for retailers and 67% for the fashion industry. In other words, more than three-quarters of people who get to the final stage of purchasing from TUIfly online decide not to go ahead.
Clearly, converting these cart abandoners holds huge potential for generating extra revenue. Success depends on being able to track these customers and gain their permission to send a recovery email to them.
TUIfly increases the effectiveness of its recovery emails by gathering data from the abandoned carts, such as travel dates, prices, currency and carriers. Combining this with data from its own systems, for example flight and seat availability, as well as pricing, TUIfly creates personalised emails with strong offers to entice customers to buy.
Using this process of tracking, sending newsletters, emailing offers and alternatives along with conversion targeting has enabled TUIfly to achieve a 50% uplift in the success of its emails with a 6.4% conversion rate.
Building a Digital Messaging Strategy Step-By-Step
Consider a fictitious airline, let’s name it Proactive Airways, that wants to evolve its digital marketing strategy. Currently, Proactive Airways sends regular newsletters to all of its customers as a means of generating sales leads. The airline also has a sign-up process for the newsletter.
What Proactive Airways really needs is a more sophisticated digital messaging framework that will allow it to engage with customers at all points along the customer lifecycle using highly personalised content that will build closer customer relationships. The objective is to create additional revenue and intensify customer loyalty.
But how?
There are 13 key programs that the airline could implement to vastly improve the ROI of its digital marketing.
- Lead-warming program: The first step is to respond immediately to customers signing up for the newsletter by sending them content they have requested or they will find useful. This email could also invite the customer to visit Proactive Airways’ other online channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and its frequent flyer program.
- Profile enrichment program: Having begun a dialogue with customers, it is then time to encourage them to share their interests and other profile data. This could be anything from location and preferred departure airports, destinations and travel times to marriage status, income and more.
- Click behaviour program: Now the airline can start to analyse which links in its emails are being clicked, and which are not. The most clicked links are given prominence in future emails to steadily improve targeting.
- Search/browse behaviour program: The airline looks at which sections of its website are of most interest to a customer using integrations of web analytic services like Adobe Omniture.
- Anniversary program: An obvious but sometimes overlooked opportunity to keep the dialogue with the customer running.
- Cancellation program: A further opportunity for contact and to raise revenue is to follow up and try to re-activate customers who have abandoned a booking process before completion.
- Booking confirmation: Post booking is the perfect time to offer further services tailored to the customer based on their travel times, departure airport, destination, hotel, price range etc.
- Preflight message: A straightforward touch point that not only reminds the customer of their forthcoming trip, but gives another opportunity to provide useful information and targeted offers.
- Post-trip message: This can be a simple “thank you” or include additional offers, perhaps a discounted photo book.
- Bonus program: The aim here is to encourage the customer to join Proactive Airways’ reward scheme.
- Satisfaction survey program: Another way to keep the dialogue open after the trip and to encourage feedback on the travel experience.
- Reactivation program: When a customer has been dormant for a while, the airline needs to regain their attention.
- Win-back program: Should the customer remain inactive for a longer period, the airline can send targeted offers to encourage them to respond.
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Future Trends
Location-predictive marketing
Location-based marketing is a topic talked about for several years, made possible largely by the growth in smartphones. The idea is to deliver targeted marketing content based on the customer’s actual location and time of day. So, for example, a restaurant or attraction may send an SMS or email to a potential customer in the vicinity with a short-lived discount coupon.
However, humans tend to be quite inflexible in what they do in a busy day. They follow their plans and are not so willing to be deflected by on-the-spot offers if they are walking to a specific destination.
Location-predictive marketing promises to overcome this limitation by using a variety of data sources to enable a company to predict the future location of a customer, and send them a relevant offer well in advance so they can build the offer into their travel plans. Forrester Research defines location-predictive marketing as “Predicting a person’s future locations and needs on the basis of their past locations and needs.”
By collecting data from a variety of sources, an organisation can build up a prediction of the future location of a customer. These data sources include:
- location data from mobile devices to establish the customer’s current and previous whereabouts
- indoor positioning services
- purchasing history of physical stores visited and when
- knowledge of the customer’s plans, i.e. a booked trip
- Interest in certain locations on the web, e.g. map queries, visits to pages dealing with specific local services and offers
So, by knowing that a customer holds a flight ticket, a company can be confident of where they will be (departure airport and destination airport) and when (waiting for their flight and flight arrival). This enables offers to be sent relevant to this location, for example information for getting to a car rental collection location, or vouchers for shopping discounts at the airport.
meeting consumers’ changing needs
It’s estimated that 43% of people will start planning a trip on one device and then continue or finish their research on another device. With multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and PCs available to them, the way people behave online is becoming more complex and harder for marketers to tap into.
According to Forrester Research, this means that “firms cannot try to force users through a set of device-specific gates. Instead, they must understand how customers pursue their goals and adapt accordingly.”
Furthermore, as the range of connected devices grows, with new ways of interaction such as gestures, voice and eyes, travel companies will need to introduce new thinking into their digital marketing communications.
Google Glass, for example, comprises a small transparent display in a user’s field of vision connected to a camera, eye movement sensors, a touch-sensitive sidebar and a number of other sensors, including an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. The device will connect people to the online world more intensely and continuously than is ever possible with a smartphone alone.
Meanwhile, interactive watches will soon feature small screens, probably about the same size as that of a MP3 player, but it will be far more prominent for the wearer than a smartphone that lives inside a pocket or bag for much of its life. This will mean that a well-designed advert or email message will command immediate attention. With such a small screen, complex messages will need to be avoided, but simple, highly personalised calls to action, such as accepting a promotional offer, could be very effective.
One potential impact of the roll out of these very personal devices may be users’ desire to restrict the number of messages coming into their inboxes through the use of better filtering. Deliverability will become even more important for those who create the content of emails.
Despite this and the radically new experiences these devices will bring, the flexibility of responsive design and Live Email techniques will help to ensure the design process will not need to be overhauled.
Conclusion
In many respects, the travel industry is facing the same challenges as the retail and finance industries - battling against competitive prices and the economic downturn. Yet, travel brands have a real opportunity, perhaps more so than finance or retail, to provide an added-value service.
Grabbing this opportunity depends on creating more personalised and targeted communications. Customers need to see the value of using a specific travel provider, especially once they have placed their trust in them and booked a trip. This calls for all brands in the travel industry to increase investment in applications where they can optimise their campaigns across each channel - mobile, email and social, and ensure they are integrated effectively with other more traditional channels such as search and display.
New channels of communication such as social media and mobile can be profitable and thus invaluable when used effectively. Travel brands that don’t put the time and effort into developing personalised and engaging campaigns, using all the digital communications capabilities opening up to them, are missing a golden business building opportunity and more importantly, will inevitably lose customers to their competitors.
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