Started in February 2016, MrBilit has been one of the biggest upcoming Online Travel Aggregators (OTA) in the MENA Region. The travel company has made it possible to buy plane, train, and bus tickets online simultaneously, offering users the most complete scheduled and charter flight tickets to desired destinations. Moreover, if any new flights are established through airlines, they are added immediately to MrBilit’s application.

Comparing ticket prices, departure times, and train types, as well as selecting the best option to travel, is all seamlessly possible through MrBilit’s app. Users can buy bus tickets online from travel companies, instead of calling or visiting the office in person. Additionally, users can apply various filters based on price, time, airline, flight class, etc., to classify and compare search results and buy the most suitable airplane ticket.

Initially, the travel company only catered to booking affordable plane tickets online. Since then, train and bus ticket services have been added after heightened customer interest and requests.

Objectives

To scale up their business, MrBilit had a few objectives to complete:

• Having a marketing automation system
• Building a full-fledged marketing team that can use and handle the dashboard with ease

Challenges

Some of the challenges that MrBilit was trying to solve were:

• Increasing user retention
• Correctly targeting search abandoners
• Using multiple channels at the same time – as well as understanding the best channel for multiple segments
• Increase organic traffic on the website

Moreover, using the WebEngage platform to its maximum potential and forming a team that formulates and brainstorms better to use marketing automation to its first degree were roadblocks that MrBilit faced.

Download the case study to know how MrBilit used WebEngage’s journey designer, data analytics as well as SMS, web push, and push notifications to scale up their business.

The post MrBilit Witnesses A 19% Increase In Flight Bookings Using Search And Cart Abandonment Journeys appeared first on Webengage.

Wego is an award-winning meta-search engine and one of the largest online travel marketplaces that enables travelers to discover new destinations, compare packages, and book flights and hotel deals, and is focused on users living in the Middle East, North Africa & Asia Pacific. It also holds the #1 rank for travel bookings in Saudi Arabia.

On a mission to help people discover the actual value of travel, Wego has imagined and created some of the most well-loved products for travelers worldwide and is dually Headquartered in Singapore and Dubai, with offices in India, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Malaysia.

Wego harnesses powerful technology that simplifies the process of searching, comparing, and booking flights and hotels across hundreds of airlines, hotels, and online travel agency websites. Wego is backed by top-tier investors, including Tiger Global, Crescent Group, Square Peg Capital, MEVP, and the MBC Group.

Ross Veitch co-founded the travel metasearch site in 2005 with Craig Hewett to give Southeast Asia its first real-time, bookable tool. At Yahoo!, he recognized the desire for travelers to research their flight and accommodation options independently and from live inventory. Veitch joined Southeast Asia operations and kick-started various initiatives, including successful search, media, commerce, communications, mobile, and community platforms.

Veitch’s passion for travel and technology were combined as he became Chief Product Officer of Wego and assembled one of the strongest web development teams in APAC today. Consecutively today, Wego is used by millions of people every month, which is why the team works tirelessly to make their end users’ experience of planning their trips as seamless as possible. The ingrained idea of the human need to travel – “why we go?” – is one that the company has woven into the name of its organization — Wego.

Their USPs are:

• Embrace diversity

Wego is spread over 25 nationalities (out of about 200 employees)

• Love travel and technology

The company prides itself on being explorers and geeks

• They promote meritocracy

Advancement is based on achievement and attitude, not tenure or pedigree

• Use global benchmarks

Wego wants to be the world’s best at what they do, not just local champions.

Objectives that Wego wanted to acheive

• To give the best possible pricing for their end-users
• To give said end users a seamless experience, as well as engagement on the application and website

Challenges Wego faced:

• Improving engagement and conversions from one-time marketing communications
• Improving engagement on the website and communication by users
• Reducing drop-offs in users completing their flight search journey

Why did Wego pick WebEngage?

• Good response time from customer support
• Wanted a single dashboard and a single tool that aided with communication, data, and insights
• Ease of use of the dashboard and its features

Download the case study to know how Wego used send intelligently through journey designer, and the dashboard analytics and segmentation on the WebEngage platform to transform their communication.

The post Leading Travel Brand Wego Amasses Nearly 27K Daily Unique Conversion Through Push Notifications appeared first on Webengage.

With over 185k guests served, Thrillark is a managed marketplace that curates experiences for travelers. From tours, activities, and experiences in a city, Thrillark offers a niche segment to users that helps them purchase these experiences seamlessly with the least amount of effort.

Today, 25% of bookings for tours are made online, and this industry is not as digital as flights and hotels. This is why Thrillark’s vision is to bring the world’s best in-person experiences on a platform for everyone and book it most conveniently. Situated in the UAE, the platform is soon moving to countries like Istanbul, Marrakesh, Cairo, and a few others located within the MENA region.

Let us give you an instance

At the Burj khalifa, one waits in line for anywhere between 10-30 minutes to take the lift to the viewing deck. But Thrillark makes it happen in under 30 seconds. That is their USP. Giving skip-the-line experiences to customers in the most convenient way is what they offer.

Another instance

Say you google ‘city tours’ for a destination you want to visit, and you get a wide variety of results. All the listings show competitive prices, activities, events, features, and inclusions, which leaves you confused. So, as a customer, how do you choose? This is where Thrillark takes it to the next level, giving them an edge over their competitors. They curate experiences based on what the user is looking for – each more unique than the other.

As mentioned above, 25% of tours and activities are booked online, and 75% of them are booked offline. Most marketplaces follow the traditional method of securing these tours and activities – they get third-party vendors on board and let them curate a standard package for everyone, which makes the marketplace messy and chaotic. Furthermore, the retention window for a user is not long. Assume they take a trip for a week, and they will look at having 3-5 experiences in that time, which is the only time to be able to target the user for repeat purchases and transactions.

Thrillark doesn’t call itself a tourism business; they consider themselves a part of the entertainment industry since the experiences they sell to their end users are holistic and beyond just flights and hotels. They have over 35K users daily and have served over 185K guests worldwide. Thrillark is a comprehensive platform wherein people from both the arrival and the departing destination use the platform to book experiences.

Objectives

• Boosting the engagement rate
• Bringing organic traffic onto the platform, since earlier focus was only on paid channels
• Reducing the drop in transactions, as well as overall user drop-offs
• Re-targeting people who’ve purchased experiences before and engaging with them accordingly

Challenges

• Lack of email automation – the process was manual and tiresome
• Increasing engagement and conversion rates
• Lack of a data model based on such a niche industry
• Very little organic growth due to more focus on user acquisition than user retention

Solution

Needless to say, when COVID-19 hit, the travel industry bore the brunt of it. Businesses shut, there were losses galore, and people struggled to do the bare minimum, along with the significant loss of life.

Even in the case of Thrillark, there were obstacles to how the business functioned. Consequently, WebEngage devised a comprehensive, holistic plan to bring Thrillark’s business back to normalcy and take it to new heights. WebEngage gave a lot of flexibility to Thrillark in terms of how their business was managed and the different approaches that could be used. The company couldn’t base its functions on a traditional e-commerce model since the niche is different compared to flights and hotel dealerships, so making a comprehensive data model became a challenge that WebEngage helped solve with its easy integration.

To know more about the steps taken by WebEngage, download the Impact Story now.

Impact/Metrics

• 60% increase in user engagement through email campaigns since inception.
• 15% increase in repeat purchases of the travelers using personalized recommendations.
• 10% of Cart abandoners retained and completed booking an experience.

The post Thrillark Procures over a 60% Increase in User Engagement through Email Campaigns with WebEngage appeared first on Webengage.

Pickyourtrail is India’s biggest online D-I-Y holiday booking platform that empowers travelers to curate customized holidays. The company was co-founded by Hari Ganapathy and Srinath Shankar in 2014 with an aim to deliver a best-in-class personalized travel experience to travelers through their website and mobile app. 

Additionally, Pickyourtrail works in liaison with leading tourism boards from Australia, Singapore, Iceland, Japan, Dubai, New Zealand, along with 1200+ hospitality partners around the world. 

Adopting the right retention platform that meets Pickyourtrail’s expectations

To deliver exceptional trip booking experiences to its travelers, Pickyourtrail decided to adopt WebEngage’s Retention Operating System to: 

• Get a unified view of each traveler 
• Segment travelers based on the actions performed on Pickyourtrail’s website and app
• Engage with travelers in a personalized and automated manner through multichannel campaigns

Here’s a glimpse of the use cases that Pickyourtrail implements using WebEngage. If you want to get detailed insights into their success story, you must check out the detailed version.👇

Goals

• Provide seamless travel booking experiences
• Win back travelers who abandon their travel bookings
• Improve traveler retention 

Challenges

• Sending event-based communication to the travelers
• Massive tech dependency to deliver data-backed campaigns 

Solution

Using RFM analysis to micro-target users

After transferring all the traveler data from the Pickyourtrail platform to the WebEngage dashboard, the team at Pickyourtrail has created dynamic segments of the travelers to smoothen the engagement process. To do so, the team at Pickyourtrail leverages the RFM analysis to understand the travelers’ behavior and micro-target the travelers based on their travel preferences. 

Sending timely, personalized nudges to the travelers at scale

Upon detailed analysis, the team at Pickyourtrail realized that a majority of the travelers land on the “Deals” webpage specifically. Now to engage with these travelers the team at PYT has created a series of event-based journeys via which relevant segments of travelers are targeted with highly contextual communication through multiple channels like Email and SMS. The aim is to encourage these travelers to punch in their travel preferences and book their trip!

Results

With the help of RFM segmentation and automated traveler engagement workflows, the team at Pickyourtrail has been able to retain its travelers. And also save a considerable amount of manual effort usually required for campaign execution. Pickyourtrail witnesses some fantastic results.

The post Pickyourtrail, India’s biggest online D-I-Y holiday booking platform, leverages RFM analysis & witnesses 50% increase in its user engagement appeared first on Webengage.

Headout is an on-demand marketplace that helps travelers and locals discover & book the most incredible tours, activities, events & local experiences through its website or mobile app.

Founded in 2014 by Suren Sultania, Varun Khona, and Vikram Jit Singh, Headout’s mission is to help travelers and locals across the globe discover and book high-quality local experiences at the last minute at discounted prices.

Currently serving 50+ cities worldwide, Headout ties up with local service providers to deliver an unparalleled experience to more than 3 billion travelers.

Adopting the right marketing automation platform that meets Headout’s expectations

To provide best-in-class experiences to travelers spread across geographies, the team at Headout decided to adopt WebEngage’s marketing automation platform to:

• Get a unified view of each user
• Build campaigns with shorter execution and testing cycles
• Engage with global users in their preferred language

Here’s a glimpse of the use cases Headout solves using WebEngage. If you want to get detailed insights into Headout’s success story, you must check out the detailed version.👇

Goal

• Convert anonymous visitors into customers
• Maximize experience bookings
• Improve the post-purchase experience for better user retention

Challenges

• Obtaining user data from anonymous visitors
• Contextually reaching out to abandoners at scale
• Massive tech dependency to deliver data-backed campaigns

Solutions

• Timely and contextual communication to capture email leads

The Customer Success team (CSM) at WebEngage understood the goals and challenges thoroughly. They suggested team Headout leverages on-site surveys to capture email leads on the website. The aim is to grab users’ attention before they exit the blog page and encourage blog visitors to subscribe to the blog by sharing their email address.

To maximize the effectiveness of on-site surveys, the Headout team has created dynamic segments and configured custom targeting rules on the WebEngage dashboard to exclusively target the desktop users and successfully capture the email leads.

• Data-driven, localized user engagement at scale

To encourage abandoners to complete their purchase, the team Headout has created hyper-personalized email campaigns using the WebEngage Journey Designer. Headout sends contextual emails by mapping the right user attributes like language, product type, etc. and encourages abandoners to book an experience.

• Automated, timely, and personalized user engagement campaigns

To improve the post-purchase experience of the users, the Headout team has created automated workflows using WebEngage’s Journey Designer. The aim is to target users who have booked an experience on the platform and send personalized audio guides in their preferred language to help them explore new places and experiences with ease.

Result

Headout has been able to deliver unique and memorable travel experiences at scale with hyper-personalized user engagement. This has helped the team at Headout to maximize bookings on the platform and boost overall revenue.

The post Headout, an on-demand marketplace for tours, experiences, and activities, minimizes tech dependency, carries out 90% faster campaign implementation appeared first on Webengage.

So we go the extra mile to make sure that our customers can get started with our Marketing Automation dashboard in no time to achieve their desired goals through user engagement and retention initiatives.

Here’s a story of how Sastaticket, Pakistan’s largest OTA brand, was able to complete the integration process and go live with some crucial engagement campaigns within 5 weeks.

About Sastaticket

Sastaticket is Pakistan’s largest online travel agency. It is currently the only OTA in the region that aggregates all the domestic airlines.

Sastaticket’s mission is to democratize and make travel easier and more efficient for millions of travelers in Pakistan. It offers a full slate of travel products with the highest service standards. These include online reservation facilities for domestic and international flights, hotels, and holiday packages.

Today, Sastaticket has the largest inventory of domestic hotels. They have over 100,000 hotels and global properties listed on its app and website.

Adopting the right marketing automation platform

After trying a bunch of marketing automation platforms available in the market, Sastaticket was looking for a permanent solution that helps them solve the challenges centered around data unification, multi-channel communication, and increased travel bookings. Moreover, the team at Sastaticket wanted to associate with a platform that provides:

• Quick and hassle-free onboarding and product integration
• Dedicated customer support
• Continuous product and growth guidance

“We were looking to partner with someone who had extensive experience of working with other online travel agencies. Who would allow us to learn from those experiences and help us move at a very fast pace.” – Shaz Akram, Head of Online Marketing at Sastaticket.

Sastaticket discovered WebEngage through Orangefox, our partner in Pakistan, and decided to adopt the WebEngage Marketing Automation Dashboard.

If you want to get detailed insights into Sastaticket’s extraordinary onboarding experience, you must check out the detailed version. 👇

WebEngage in action

As soon as the onboarding phase started with Sastaticket, we deployed a dedicated team of onboarding specialists to aid the Sastaticket team throughout the integration phase and ensure a timed and personalized onboarding experience.

The Customer Success Manager at WebEngage caught up with the stakeholders at Sastaticket to get an in-depth understanding of the use cases & challenges. We mutually chalked up industry-relevant tracking plans and best practices along with realistic timelines for every deliverable.

Once the integration was completed, we helped the team at Sastaticket to go live with the primary use cases like increasing travel bookings on the website/app and accelerating the sign-up process among others.

The post Sastaticket, Pakistan’s largest online travel agency, completes onboarding and goes live within 5 weeks appeared first on Webengage.

In the last 20 years, a lot has transformed in the Indian travel industry. One major boon is the online travel aggregator (OTA) sector. Some of the major OTAs comprise Go-MMT, Trivago, Booking.com, Yatra, TravelTriangle amidst many others.

As per recent research, the overall Indian travel market is estimated to reach USD 48 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 11%. Another credible study reveals that the online travel market alone is expected to account for around 40%-50% of total transactions by 2020. 

Technological advances, consumer awareness, and the upliftment of the Indian middle-class seem to be the key driving forces of the above-mentioned advancements in the future. 

About TravelTriangle

In 2011, Prabhat Gupta, Sanchit Garg, and Sankalp Agarwal kickstarted TravelTriangle.com to make holidaying easy and convenient for the travel enthusiasts in the country. 

Today, TravelTriangle aids 97% of travelers with:  

• Exceptional end-to-end travel experience 
• A colossal network of 600+ verified local travel agents in 60+ countries
• Dedicated teams for constant guidance 

It envisions itself as being the biggest OTA marketplace in the country having over 200 destinations in its kitty. This means, there’s something in store for every traveler who comes to TravelTriangle!

Also Read: Best Practices in User Engagement for Online Marketplaces

Goals, Challenges & Solutions

TravelTriangle wanted a consolidated solution that would help them efficiently troubleshoot the challenges that centered around defined segmentation, centralized communication, and increased conversions. 

After sifting through multiple marketing automation solutions, TravelTriangle decided to join hands with WebEngage. WebEngage carefully paid heed to TravelTriangle’s concerns and came up with quick and customized solutions. 

Listed below are the top 3 challenges TravelTriangle faced and the solutions that WebEngage provided them with. 

Goal #1: Reduce drop-offs

Every business’s primary goal is to make sure its users convert on a large scale. TravelTriangle’s goal was not indifferent. It wanted all the travelers who landed on its website or mobile app to stay, discover packages that best suit their needs, and eventually book a trip. 

Challenge

Identifying what caused prospects to leave the web page or mobile app without booking a trip.

The reasons for dropping-off could be multiple – unpleasant user experience, irrelevant information or packages, unattractive holiday destinations, and so on. However, figuring out the exact reason for every user who drops-off was extremely challenging. Further, reaching out to these users immediately with relevant communication based on the identified reason and level of intent was a mammoth task for TravelTriangle. 

Solution

In order to reduce the drop-offs, WebEngage came up with a very logical and long-term solution – the lead scoring model. 

A typical lead scoring model is a technique where certain scores or points are allotted to users when they perform a particular action on your website or mobile app. These scores can be predetermined by the business. 

A lead scoring journey bridges the gap between your marketing and sales teams. It is strikingly one of the best ways to prioritize your leads the moment they land on your website or mobile app. 

WebEngage helped TravelTriangle to create highly detailed and effective lead scoring journeys for its users. 

TravelTriangle flags a maximum of 30 points as the conversion score for these journeys.

Lead scoring journey created by TravelTriangle on WebEngage dashboard

Here’s a snapshot of one of the lead scoring journeys created by TravelTriangle. In this journey: 

• Users who open TravelTriangle’s emails, click on push notifications, surf different destinations or packages score 2 points
• Users who click on the SMS and/or email sent by TravelTriangle score 3 points

The best part about this journey is, TravelTriangle captures only the high-intent users. How? With the help of pre-set triggers attested to particular points. 

So, if a user scrolls through 75% of the page (trigger) then, he scores 2 points. Whereas, if a user clicks on TravelTriangle’s email (trigger) then, he scores 3 points.

Hence, high lead score = high intent users. As per TravelTriangle’s protocol, once a user strikes > 15 points, they fall into the ‘high lead score user’ segment.

Once these segments are defined, TravelTriangle targets these segments via relevant cross-channel campaigns. 

Cross-channel journey created by TravelTriangle on WebEngage dashboard

Users receive relevant and hyper-personalized communication from TravelTriangle automatically triggered via SMS or push notifications. 

SMS

Push notification

Results

WebEngage’s lead scoring journey helped TravelTriangle to exponentially reduce drop-offs and

• Spike up 80% in Month-on-Month (MoM) contribution margin of the high intent users
• Reduce the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to just INR 400 as compared to the usual industry CAC of around INR 500 – 700. 

Goal #2: Revive lost users

A business can lose users at any point in time during the users’ exploration stage. Today, users have multiple options for planning their tours available on the internet. The competition is at an all-time high. TravelTriangle, with its unique offering, aimed at retrieving its lost users – those who might’ve deviated to other platforms, those who visited the website but never came back, and so on. 

Challenge 

Identifying specific user behavior and then sending action-based communication to the user.

If you sift through TravelTriangle’s website, you’ll come across 60+ attractive destinations. Now, to manually figure out which user is looking for which destination is a humongous task. Further, triggering personalized messages based on the user’s destination of interest is all the more cumbersome. 

Solution

As per research, only 10% of the users who either visit a website or mobile app transition into leads. 

To overcome the challenge of winning back lost users, TravelTriangle created page prod call journeys on the WebEngage dashboard. In TravelTriangle’s context, the page prod call journey works in the following manner: 

Page prod call journey created by TravelTriangle on WebEngage dashboard

1. A user who wants to travel to Mauritius visits TravelTriangle’s main website, blog or mobile app
2. He then clicks on TravelTriangle’s Mauritius package and lands on the designated page
3. He gets all the information he wants on the page and exits without booking a trip
4. At this moment, the page prod call journey gets activated for the user
5. The user receives hyper-personalized communication with all the details and exclusive offers specific to Mauritius. This communication is sent via SMS and/or push notifications depending on the channel reachability of the user 

First web push notification

Second web push notification

SMS

TravelTriangle built and implemented the page prod call journeys in the simplest way — adding the user’s most apt event attributes. Here’s a closer look at it: 

You can understand the A-Z of events and event attributes right here. 

Results

By implementing the page prod call journeys, TravelTriangle was able to: 

• Decrease the number of drop-offs on destination landing pages by 10%
• Reduce the remarketing costs by 30%

Goal #3: Retarget users who cancel their booking

There could be a number of reasons for the users to cancel their booked trip — change in plan, unfavorable weather, unprecedented emergency, and so on.

However, two inferences can be made here: 

1) the users are interested in booking a trip with TravelTriangle as they did book a trip previously and

2) these users are most likely to re-book a holiday package on TravelTriangle if they are persuaded immediately, keeping up with the momentum.  

Challenge 

As TravelTriangle has multiple segments of users with different travel requirements, creating and keeping a track of all these segments manually was a tedious task for the teams at TravelTriangle. 

Solution

Typically, a traveler goes through an intense decision-making process before booking a trip. But, in this case, the onus lies on TravelTriangle to get in touch with these users immediately and send out the most enticing communication at the right time using the right channel as these users are those who have already booked the trip. 

These are converted users. 

Converted users are those users who perform a desired action set by a marketer. Every business has a different conversion metric. For example, the conversion metric for an eCommerce would be ‘placing an order’ or for an EdTech, it would be ‘enroll for the course’. In TravelTriangle’s case, ‘book a trip’ is its conversion metric. 

The Customer Success Manager (CSM) at WebEngage studied the scenario and identified that the first and foremost need was to have clearly defined segments for relevantly communicating with these users based on the packages that they booked previously. 

Subsequently, TravelTravel started off by creating behavior-based segments of these users and built journeys on top of it. 

Journey created by TravelTriangle on WebEngage dashboard to retarget users who canceled their booking

As per the above journey created by TravelTriangle on the WebEngage dashboard;

1. The preferred destination is mapped for every user that enters the above segment.
2. TravelTriangle then sends a highly relevant and personalized SMS to the user based on the user’s historical data
3. Further, if the user opens the SMS or clicks on the link sent in the SMS or rebooks the trip, then the journey ends for the user
4. If the user doesn’t perform any action after receiving the SMS then, another SMS related to the destination is sent to the user

SMS

One of the highlights of this journey is that TravelTriangle figured that this particular segment of users preferred receiving messages on SMS. Hence, most of their campaigns for this segment are sent via SMS and receive an optimum response.

Results

By defining user segments and sending the right communication to the users at the right time, TravelTriangle was able to: 

• Increase the conversion ratio of users who canceled their booking by 10%
• Boost returning users ratio by 20%

Himanshu Verma

Marketing Automation Expert, TravelTriangle

Our ultimate goal is to make travel experiences extremely seamless for our users. TravelTriangle’s core lies in providing customization to the ‘T’ and this customization is not only limited to travel packages or travel experiences but it now extends to our communication as well. Thanks to team WebEngage! Their journey builder helps us to automate all the responses that need to be triggered at particular time intervals to particular user segments. Our favorite part has been implementing the lead scoring model using WebEngage. Tracking and targeting high intent users has never been so simple!

TravelTriangle’s Success Story In A Nutshell

Final Thoughts

With travel and tourism on the rise in the country, it is very important for OTAs like TravelTriangle to keep abreast with the changing traveler preferences and drive maximum trip bookings. WebEngage strives hard to help OTAs achieve all their goals through bespoke marketing automation solutions. 

TravelTriangle chose WebEngage to reach the right users, create targeted segments and relay relevant communication across multiple channels. 

 The hassle-free solutions enable TravelTriangle to track real-time performance and make pertinent decisions that lead to powerful user engagement and enhanced bookings.

TravelTriangle has managed to witness some amazing results by using WebEngage:

• Increase the conversion ratio by 10% from users who canceled their booking previously
• Boost the returning users ratio by 20%.
• Reduce remarketing costs by 30% 
• Increase its MoM contribution margin of high intent users by 80% through lead scoring model campaigns delivered via WebEngage
• Reduce the number of drop-offs on the destination pages by 10%

Overall, WebEngage has helped TravelTriangle to boost its conversions by a whopping 25%.

The bottom line? Focus on retaining users via multiple channels with minimal cost of acquisition and remarketing is key. 

WebEngage is privileged to be working closely with the OTA industry giants such as Yatra, TravelTriangle,  Go-MMT among others. WebEngage’s expertise in enhancing user engagement and simplifying retention marketing efforts has helped the majority of these OTAs to achieve their goal of reducing trip cancellations, increasing conversions, scaling down drop-offs, and delivering memorable user experiences.

iImage source:Dribbble.com

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The post TravelTriangle, India’s leading OTA, increases its returning users by 20% through behaviour-based targeting appeared first on Webengage.

Go-MMT is India’s leading online travel company with an extensive portfolio of 3 powerful consumer brands – MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, and redBus. It is a joint entity of MakeMyTrip and the Ibibo group. The brand serves as a one-stop-shop for flight, hotel, train, bus, and car bookings providing multiple choices to its users.

 
Hotels form the larger part of an OTA business in comparison to airline bookings, and OTAs are continually striving to increase that size. Considering the fact, MakeMyTrip and Goibibo decided to build a common extranet for the hotel partners. The extranet today is known as ‘InGo-MMT’ and powers Go-MMT ’s hotel partners to manage their inventory, pricing, promotions, and other hotel-specific content.

Vikalp Sahni

Co-Founder and CTO, Goibibo

We create a network effect by giving platforms to hoteliers and bus operators who can come and distribute their products into these millions of Indians, and we create experiences that are not only booking but also inspirational.

Hotel partners being core to the ecosystem, the team at InGo-MMT aimed at providing them a seamless experience through relevant engagement with the platform. And as a result, delivering a best-in-class experience to the end-users. Like any other OTA brand, the north star metric for InGo-MMT is hotel bookings.

To provide a seamless and consistent experience to the hotel partners, the team at InGo-MMT was looking out for a marketing automation platform with which they could:

• Go live faster without consuming much of their technology operations and manual bandwidth.
• Report and analyze growth and engagement metrics in a single place.
• Configure different rules based on the events happening in their backend system and build compelling user journeys on top of that.

The InGo-MMT team was clear with the requirements since the beginning and realized that WebEngage could fulfill these demands. As they were using WebEngage for the demand-side platform (Goibibo), Go-MMT decided to use it for the supply-side platform (InGo-MMT) as well.

Vikalp Sahni

Co-Founder and CTO, Goibibo

We started leveraging WebEngage for our demand-side platform (Goibibo), and then we actually saw a lot of value in it and ended up using it for our hotel partner platform as well.

And that’s how the WebEngage-InGo-MMT association kicked off. Our onboarding team was proactive enough to coordinate with the team at InGo-MMT. With various approaches being discussed, both the teams mutually decided to go with a full-fledged approach of using WebEngage along with the in-house engineering of InGo-MMT.

Amit Barnwal

Team Lead - Engineering, Goibibo

InGo-MMT was able to go live within 30 days with the support of WebEngage onboarding team.

After a smooth and quick onboarding process, InGo-MMT was ready to achieve its goals and implement some primary use cases while solving certain challenges that they had already been facing.

Goal #1: Provide seamless user experience to the hotel partners

The first step to providing a seamless experience to hotel partners is to understand their behavior and actions that they perform while interacting with InGo-MMT’s app or website. These actions could be anything like:

• Updating inventory
• Updating property listing content
• Replying to customer queries
• Applying promotions and offers on the listing
• Confirming a booking and so on.

Why was it important?

Challenge #1: Lack of a unified view of the hotel partners

When different systems were used to pull the user data to have a holistic picture, the results were rarely beneficial. InGo-MMT needed a system where they could collate all the data in one place and form a unified view of each hotel partner. To overcome this, we decided to start with the integration of InGoBox with WebEngage.

What is InGoBox?
InGoBox is an in-house mailbox exclusively developed by InGo-MMT to communicate with their hotel partners. It is available inside the InGo-MMT dashboard to provide easy and quick communication access to hotel partners.

Solution #1: Consolidation of data

Now to integrate InGoBox and other platforms that In-GoMMT was using with WebEngage, our team introduced a functionality called ‘Call an API’ on the WebEngage dashboard.

Call an API feature on the WebEngage dashboard

The API block establishes a connection between the backend system and the WebEngage dashboard.

It takes 3 simple steps to configure an API:

Step 1: Drag and drop the ‘Call an API’ block on the journey designer canvas.

Step 2: Click on it to build the API request. (here’s how it works)

Call an API feature implementation on the WebEngage dashboard

Step 3: Branch out the journey from the block to continue the trip for a hotel partner, based on the API call status. (here’s how it works)

Branching out an API block on the WebEngage dashboard

After successful integration, InGo-MMT was able to reflect all their user data and communication with the hotel partners at a single place. Hence, it enabled them to maintain a smooth and consistent communication flow, unlike earlier where the communication was just another email in the hotel partner’s inbox.

Result

InGo-MMT achieved the goal and was able to:

1. Form a unified view of each of their 5 lac+ hotel partners.
2. Configure 125 hotel partner (user) events on the WebEngage dashboard.

Goal #2: Increase user (hotel partner) engagement on the InGo-MMT app and website

InGo-MMT wanted to assist the hotel partners to help them update the price and listing content in a way that can result in an increased number of bookings. With relevant hotel partner (user) engagement, InGo-MMT wanted to improve the listings of the hotel partners who were getting fewer bookings or no bookings. They also wanted to keep track of metrics like Daily Active Users (DAUs), Weekly Active Users (WAUs), and Monthly Active Users (MAUs) of the platform. The only way to do it was to have multiple data points and a record of actions (events) performed by the hotel partners.

Challenge #2: Contextually reaching out to the hotel partners in real-time

Now if you know about the hotel industry, most hotel partners share a common behavior of listing their properties on multiple websites. They tend to follow this quick formula: increased number of websites = increased visibility + increased bookings. This is convincing enough for new potential income by advertising to different available demographics and markets.

Go-MMT being an experienced player in the industry, was familiar with this behavior of hotel partners and wanted to start targeting the hotel partners with the most relevant use case that is ‘Inventory’. They wanted to nudge and encourage the hotel partners to leverage the platform demand and add more inventory just in time for increased bookings.

Solution #2: Behaviour and action-based cross-channel communication

Behavioral data of hotel partners consists of the events and actions performed or not performed by the partners. For example, if a hotel partner has not performed the action (event) of ‘added a property’ during a given time frame, InGo-MMT can nudge that partner through reachable communication channels to add more inventory and get more bookings. InGo-MMT approached the user data (events and attributes) very differently than any other consumer-facing business. They did the SDK integration of their mobile app, and they also sent events through APIs from the backend system to WebEngage.

With a thoughtful approach and powerful combination, InGo-MMT was able to engage with the hotel partners through multiple communication channels like:

• Email
• SMS
• Web Push and
• Mobile Push

Coupled with WebEngage’s journey designer, each cross-channel journey can be designed using an If-this-happens-then-do-that logic.

InGo-MMT personalizes each hotel partner’s experience based on their inventory and communicates across channels by building these cross-channel journeys.

Cross-channel journey to communicate with the hotel partners

Email Campaign

Mobile Push Campaign

👉Pro Tip: Customize your push notifications differently for Android and iOS.

Such flexibility and personalized campaigns at scale enabled InGo-MMT to nudge and persuade the hotel partners to add more inventory and increase the number of bookings.

Result

The cross-channel journey helped InGo-MMT witness a 1.3X increase in Monthly Active Users (MAUs).

Goal #3: Retain the hotel partners (users)

Go-MMT being the largest OTA in the country works with a diverse set of hotel partners ranging from organized and branded hotels to homestays and alternative accommodations. For example, there can be a hotel partner located in India who owns a branded and organized hotel and is doing great business with InGo-MMT. Simultaneously, there can be another hotel partner located in a different geography and time zone who owns alternative accommodation and is in the process of building his/her business with InGo-MMT. The communication needs for these partners are totally different. To fulfill these needs, InGo-MMT had to send out different communication to different hotel partners at the right time.

Challenge #3: Building various segments and figuring out the right communication

Manually identifying and targeting various types of hotel partners was challenging and time-consuming.

This process would require massive time and effort from a marketer.

Solution #3: Dynamic Segmentation

To deliver contextual experiences to these different types of hotel partners, the customer success manager at WebEngage assisted the InGo-MMT team in creating customized segments based on a hotel partner’s key attributes which are:

• Country
• Type of accommodation

The segments are dynamic in the sense that WebEngage tracks user (hotel partner) actions in real-time. Users (hotel partners) get added or removed from the segments as and when their actions match the rules created for a particular segment or vice-versa.

The team created different segments based on the type of accommodation, acknowledging their behavior and varied needs and thereby engaged them with contextual messaging. InGo-MMT was able to target the international hotel partners with contextual messaging in their time zone.

Siyaram Gupta

Product Manager, Goibibo

We can simply create these segments using WebEngage. In the case of our international hotel partners, while creating a journey, we can configure that the communication should be triggered to a particular user in his specific time zone.

Result

With personalized communication, InGo-MMT witnessed around a 20% increase in Monthly Active Users (MAUs) for some of the international geographies.

The WebEngage Effect

With WebEngage, InGo-MMT got a complete understanding of how the lifecycle of its hotel partners looks like. Go-MMT could easily boost their hotel partner engagement through cross-channel communication – which increased the property listings leading to increased hotel bookings by the end-users. InGo-MMT was able to:

• Go live within 30 days
• Configure various in-house platforms seamlessly
• Execute personalized, cross-channel campaigns at scale
• Improve app and web engagement
• Increase MAUs by 1.3X
• Create seamless experiences for the hotel partners
• Boost MAUs by 20% for some of the international geographies

Summary

To stay ahead of the competition, providing exceptional user experiences to the hotel partners is of great importance to OTAs. WebEngage empowered Go-MMT to get a complete understanding of the hotel partners. As a result, the team was able to engage the hotel partners across channels and deliver a seamless experience.

Additionally, we are also working towards making WebEngage’s full-stack marketing automation platform highly useful for our clients. We recently added WhatsApp to our existing channels of user engagement viz. Email, SMS, Web Push, Mobile Push, In-app, and Web Overlays.

The Go-MMT team with the WebEngage team

iImage source:Dribbble.com

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The post Go-MMT, India’s leading OTA brand, boosts its hotel partner engagement by 20% using WebEngage appeared first on Webengage.

Wego, founded in 2005, is MENA’s largest online travel marketplace that enables travelers to discover new destinations, compare packages, and book flights and hotel deals. Wego harnesses powerful yet simple technology that automates the process of searching and comparing results from hundreds of airlines, hotels, and online travel websites. The company is headquartered in Dubai and Singapore with regional operations in Bangalore, Jakarta, and Cairo.

Here’s how Wego overcomes various user engagement hurdles and increases its conversion rate by 8X using WebEngage solutions for Travel & Hospitality.

Adopting the right retention platform that meets Wego’s expectations

With an objective to offer a seamless travel booking experience to millions of users, Wego decided to adopt WebEngage’s Retention Operating System to:

• Automate its user engagement initiatives
• Increase its conversion rate

Here’s a glimpse of some of the use cases implemented by Wego using WebEngage. If you want to get detailed insights into Wego’s success story, you must check out the detailed version.👇

Goals

• Engage global users with multilingual communication
• Improve user onboarding
• Accelerate first-time conversions

Challenges

• Getting a comprehensive view of all users
• Executing personalized omnichannel campaigns
• Contextually reaching out to users at scale

Solutions:

1. Multilingual communication using WebEngage’s personalization engine

The Customer Success Manager (CSM) at WebEngage suggested that the Marketing team at Wego utilize WebEngage’s personalization engine. Acting upon the suggestion, the team at Wego configured user attributes (like email ID, language, time zone and more) on the WebEngage dashboard. These attributes are then used to personalize the communication.

The team at Wego now communicates with its users in languages like Chinese, English, Arabic, and Indonesian. Such tailor-made, multilingual communication at scale enables them to increase their user engagement and boost conversions.

2. Event-based, personalized user onboarding using engagement journeys

When faced with the challenge of tracking its users’ actions on the app, the Marketing team at Wego decided to leverage the WebEngage Journey Designer and design event-based workflows. They focus on sending value-based communication to their users across channels like Mobile Push and In-app based on their interactions with the app.

Wego guides its users to specific screens within the app and improves their onboarding experience.

3. Hyper-personalized communication at the right time, on the right channel

To accelerate first-time conversions, the team at Wego adopts a hyper-personalized engagement approach by sending dynamic push notifications. Furthermore, the team uses rich push notifications with a strong call-to-action.

If users feel inspired enough to book their vacation, they have to click on the notification and complete their booking by going straight to the booking page.

Results

The team at Wego has been able to automate its user engagement initiatives, increase its conversion rate and retain its users. They continue to deliver exceptional travel booking experiences at scale to drive business growth.

The WebEngage Effect

The post How Wego, MENA’s largest online travel marketplace, witnesses 8X boost in conversions appeared first on Webengage.

Yatra.com is a NASDAQ listed company (YTRA) headquartered in India. It is India’s second-largest OTA founded in 2006 by Dhruv Shringi, Manish Amin, and Sabina Chopra. The company has tie-ups with 70K hotels in India and nearly 800K hotels across the globe.

The Objective

Hotels form the larger part of an OTA business in comparison to airline bookings and OTAs are constantly striving to increase that size.

However, the hotel booking business also suffers from the abandonment problem. It is common for users to show intent for booking a hotel but not complete the transaction. This report from 2016 by Skift pointed out that OTA visitors “abandon $1.78 trillion in abandoned shopping carts”.

So minimizing abandonment was a big opportunity for Yatra to boost their bottom line and they chose WebEngage to accomplish that.

Mrinal Singhal who leads Customer lifecycle management at Yatra worked with WebEngage to address this problem. It’s obvious that not all users who search for a hotel on Yatra, intend to purchase. But our hypothesis is that the one who does have a slight inclination to purchase but yet abandon due to some avoidable reason can be convinced with a contextual engagement. And the figure tells that the number of such users is massive.

The WebEngage Effect

Yatra built a customer journey workflow that was aimed to nudge the users who have reached the ‘review page’, i.e. just one stop away from completing the transaction.

Reaching the review page was taken as a strong intent for purchase and these users were then contextually engaged to convert them into a customer.

Here is the snapshot of the journey:

There are other benefits that we discuss in results but let’s just remember for now that this journey helped Yatra improve gross bookings by 3.2%.

Below, we are discussing the key highlights of the journey. It would show light on the approach that Yatra took in addressing their abandonment problem.

• The journey nudged users to transact after every 48 hours as long as he didn’t purchase. We limited the maximum number of communication to 4 to ensure that we don’t nudge the user to the point of annoying him.
• If the user has already purchased, any sort of subsequent communication pertaining to it is a SPAM. And we know what James Bond said, “Never SPAM Never again”. So to ensure that after every message this journey verified whether the user has purchased or not and if he has the journey is stopped for him.
• The journey nudged users via web push which as I said is the most non-obtrusive communication medium. With the rising sensitivity among users (think GDPR) towards promotions, it is important that you reserve email for mission-critical communications.
• Suppose the user finalizes a hotel, confirms the number of rooms, and reaches the review page too. But at the end moment changes his mind and closes that page to look for other hotels. We shouldn’t be running any communication for such users, right?. (remember what James bond said) To ensure that this journey has exit triggers.

As soon as the user does an action listed in the exit triggers, he is exited from the journey and thereby not sent any messaging.

• Every block contains the number of users who are in that stage giving Yatra a cursory view of the journey performance.

The Result

• Gross bookings increased by 3.2%
• Automated personalized retargeting
• Seamless mobile engagement with non-app users

The journey by virtue of personalized retargeting increased the gross bookings by 3.2%.

Well, that’s the quantifiable result of this journey.

Beyond that, the journey ensured personalized communication. According to Amadeus, 86% of travelers value personalized offerings. So, Yatra is clearly building strong leverage in the hypercompetitive OTA market.

Another significant achievement was the seamless engagement via web push notifications. Amidst the high uninstall rate of mobile apps, brands lose a critical link that keeps them connected to users at all times. Web push fills that void. It compensates for mobile push notifications, the access to which you lose when a user uninstalls the app. This journey displayed how to efficiently use web push as an engagement channel.

Your Business Has The Potential To Minimize Abandonment

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The post How Yatra, the second-largest OTA in India, uses Journeys to increase its gross hotel bookings by 3.2% appeared first on Webengage.