Industry overview

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.

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. 

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: 

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. 

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.

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