Insights from the customer data of the leading travel and holiday package marketplace reveals deeper insights about the changing Indian travel preferences
Mumbai, September 16, 2017: Netcore Solutions, India’s largest marketing automation solutions provider, helped Hello Travel (India’s leading travel and holiday marketplace) boost its customer engagement by 115%, and reduced cost of acquisition by 30% by automating its customer marketing process.
Netcore’s marketing automation experts along with Hello Travel built a logical, systematic and automated workflow which curated hyper-personalized, real-time packages based on activity data of potential travellers.
The automation solution also leveraged Frequency Capping Model which enabled Hello Travel to exclusively send the latest and most relevant recommendation to the user despite the customer browsing through multiple holiday packages.
Explaining how marketing automation helped the company attain the leadership position in the market, Gaurav Gupta, Co-founder and CMO, HelloTravel, said, “Today, the Indian traveller is more impatient, has higher expectations, is technology savvy, and tuned to receive hyper-personalised attention from brands. Automating our customer engagement workflow using Netcore’s intuitive platform resulted in real-time hyper personalisation of recommended packages which were sent to potential customers within 30 minutes of their visit/search on HelloTravel’s website.”
This is in stark contrast to the previous practice where customers received recommendations 4-5 days after submitting a request/interest for holiday packages.
“Since the recommended packages were shared with travellers within most crucial turnaround time period for converting the lead, we witnessed a 115 per cent rise in click rates and 25 per cent increase in open rates which drove the cost of customer acquisition down by 30 per cent,” he added.
Kalpit Jain, CEO, Netcore Solutions said, “India is a fast changing economy that is also witnessing ‘parallelism’ in terms of consumer behaviour. Consumers today have multiple personalities depending on the time, place and platform they interact with a brand. The attention span and turnaround time are also shorter than ever before. Therefore, real-time and relevant engagement with these in-the-moment consumers has become epochal.
Marketing automation solution commissioned by HelloTravel captures the most relevant data points, efficiently and succinctly processes it to curate relevant holiday packages, and provides these to the customers within 30 minutes to ensure better customer conversion rate. In the era of ever-increasing consumer attrition, this marketing automation solution helped HelloTravel increase its RoI, reduce man-hours spent on lead nurturing, and reduce customer acquisition costs phenomenally.”
The New Indian Traveller
Diving deeper into the customer preference data collected using Netcore’s smart platform, HelloTravel also revealed several key trends that highlight the changing Indian travellers’ preferences.
With increased penetration of smartphones and availability of cheaper data subscriptions, travellers are nowadays researching more on mobile than on desktop for family vacations, luxury travel, and couples travel or honeymoon. HelloTravel found that the growing number of discerning travellers in India though have switched to social media for researching on holiday packages, email remains the most effective and preferred channel for conversions. In FY2016-17, HelloTravel doubled the volume of inquiries — and experienced a 5X growth in the last three years — via social media.
The data insights also highlighted that Indian travellers are emerging out of their bi-annual vacation cycle, which was largely skewed to suit the period of summer and winter vacations in the country. Data showed that on an average India’s leisure travellers take two-three vacations a year and they put a lot of thought into planning these trips. There has been 20 per cent jump in vacations/year in last year, and a major shift has come for weekend getaways. As much as 20 per cent travelers today go on a vacation every alternate month. However, there has been eight per cent drop in average nights spent per trip last year and 20 per cent increase in trips a traveller takes per year – pointing to the trend of more weekend getaways that is growing at a 5x year-on-year rate.
There is also a spike in the volume of outbound travellers. In the last three years, Hello Travel has seen 100 per cent year-on-year growth in inquiries of outbound travelers. Indian leisure traveller follows a conventional path when it comes to landing on foreign land. 90 per cent of outbound travel happens to only 20 countries. With respect to the locations, inquiries have tripled for countries such as Thailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bhutan; and around 150 per cent growth in inquiries for Europe.
Capturing more such insights from the internal study, Hello Travel and Netcore Solutions also published an info graphic titled, ‘The New Indian Traveller’. The info graphic can be downloaded by visiting: https://tr.im/new-indian-traveller
Corporate Comm India(CCI Newswire)
