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40% increase in email revenue for Travelodge through data-driven Marketing Automation

The Challenge

Travelodge needed a clear view of their customer combined with a deeper understanding of the customer journey to make sure they were maximising both customer experience and revenue opportunities available at each stage of the customer journey.

Travelodge wanted to focus on increasing their customer lifetime value whilst enriching the customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

The Solution

Travelodge worked with RedEye to complete in-depth journey mapping, delivering actionable insights to improve revenue across all customer touchpoints. This knowledge was combined with RedEye’s data driven marketing automation which is central to Travelodge’s customer experience initiatives.

One area identified for enhancement was a gap in guest communications between booking and arriving at the hotel. For Travelodge the period between booking and arrival is the perfect opportunity to enhance the pre-stay experience. To remedy this RedEye and Travelodge developed a truly personalised pre-stay campaign that combines information from the customer’s booking along with the hotel and location itself.

The campaign targets specific guests with offers related to their personal interests and the number of guests staying, preparing guests with information about their stay, even including suggestions on what to pack along with real time weather updates.

In this vein, over the last 18 months Travelodge have developed an extensive suite of personalised multi-channel campaigns, speaking to customers at every point on their journey, driving customer engagement and retention.

The Results

By utilising multiple channels to talk to customers at varying points on their customer journey with the brand, these new initiatives helped to deliver a 40% YOY uplift in email revenue. As a result, the value of an opted in email address has increased by 9% in 2018 versus 2017. Increased engagement also led to an 86% uplift in website visits from email during 2018, largely due to a 94% increase in unique click through rate as personalisation became a key factor across both newsletters and automated triggers. All of these factors meant that the contribution of overall revenue from the email channel increased year on year by 31%.

Looking at the pre-stay campaign alone, as an indicator of the overall success of the Marketing Automation strategy, this highly personalised campaign drove exceptional engagement. Unique open rates reached 76.88% with unique click rates of up to 34.78%. The campaign delivers 370% more revenue per email sent versus standard weekly newsletters.

The exponential growth of Travelodge’s CRM programme in the past couple of years has been credited to the sophisticated technology of RedEye’s Contour platform coupled with the skill, creativity and experience of their team. The pre-stay email is one of many testaments to that and keeps us on track to offering all of our customers a super personalised end-to-end customer journey. The impressive traditional KPI’s aside, it has been great to see the large volume of positive customer feedback. Just little bits of key information - weather, parking and maps, delivered at the right time, added significant value to the customer’s experience and help reinforce our brand commitment to being the UK’s favourite hotel for value. Incremental uplift to the business has been forecast at over £1m based on a 10% retained control group.

Senior eCRM Manager

Travelodge

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