Haven Personalizes Multiple Customer Journeys With Managed Endpoints

Story Behind the Brand

As one of Britain’s leading family holiday companies, Haven owns and operates 40+ award-winning family holiday parks throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. Haven offers a full program of activities and entertainment alongside being located next to some of Britain’s most beautiful beaches and brightest resorts.

increase in hero image click-through rate using Managed Endpoints

hours

the time it takes Haven to create a Managed Endpoint compared to 2 weeks with previous marketing technology

Challenge

For a holiday business like Haven, it is essential to understand customer needs and exactly what the customer wants when they begin their journey. Understanding and adapting to the different types of customer journeys is crucial for providing exceptional service and creating a path to purchase online at Haven.com.

Haven provides activities and entertainment for customers simply coming for the weekend or those who may be looking to purchase a holiday home. These are two very different customer intents that feature very different journeys to purchase.

In total, Haven is actively marketing holidays, caravans, food/beverage, activities, and also supports customer journeys for:

Holidaymakers, looking for a weekend getaway by the coast
Owners, customers who own a Caravan at a Haven Holiday Park
Caravan prospects, customers who are interested in caravan ownership

Haven needed a holistic view of customers to fully understand what they wanted from the brand. This would allow Haven to serve customers the information they needed in real time to push them towards either a weekend getaway or a new holiday home.

Solution

To accelerate digital transformation and bring all of its CRM journeys and channels together, Haven adopted Bloomreach Engagement. This allowed the company to truly understand all of its different customer lifecycles and the opportunities it has to upsell customers.

To achieve its vision of true omnichannel personalization with a superior customer experience, Haven deployed Engagement’s Managed Endpoints API. Managed Endpoints (also known as server-side rendering or server-side personalization) offers customers like Haven the flexibility to leverage their customer data within Engagement to personalize any customer touchpoint. It can do this while not sacrificing fast load times, page performance, or security.

For Haven, it wanted to personalize the hero image on the home page of Haven.com to best match which type of customer was browsing by using previous search results and/or purchases to determine which image to showcase. For example, if a customer had previously searched for “holiday with dogs” a hero image that featured pet-friendly holidays would be shown.

The personalizing of the hero image with collected customer data would make customers feel as if Haven understood where they were on the journey and would help them pick back up seamlessly right where they had left off previously.

“The key thing for me was that this only took about 3-4 hours to put together,” said Alex Leslie, Engineering Team Lead for Haven. “If I was to do that myself in the technologies we’d previously used, you’re talking about two weeks minimum to create that same endpoint. That is a huge win with Managed Endpoints — how easy they are to put together. You can use the power of Bloomreach aggregates and segmentation to do it all.”

Bloomreach developed the Managed Endpoints feature so that customers like Haven can create an API to return a personalized response in a format defined by the business to truly personalize the customer experience on any application or channel. Thus, the benefits of this feature include flexibility as well as enhanced security, and higher speed to run advanced use cases.

Customers respond best when their experiences are uniquely personalized and tailored for them specifically. This level of personalization at scale can have a significant impact on average order value, purchase frequency, and customer loyalty.

While pre-built channels/templates, scheduled exports, and rigid APIs can be limiting, Bloomreach developed the Managed Endpoints API to offer true personalization for commerce-driving teams. And with the power of Loomi, our AI for e-commerce, personalization can truly be limitless.

“The API responsiveness was the key for us with Managed Endpoints,” said John. “Being able to surface that rich and clean customer data in real time is a killer feature.”

When you change your CRM system, you have to rethink everything. We had to rethink all of our data and start fresh. That was a catalyst to getting much cleaner data. Bloomreach Engagement has a really good API interface. That allowed us to integrate our historic data and our real-time events very easily.

John Hegarty

Head of Engineering, Haven

Results

As you might imagine after personalizing the shopping experience, Haven’s results with the Managed Endpoints API were overwhelmingly positive.

After A/B testing the Managed Endpoints variant with a non-personalized variant, Haven saw a 77% uplift in click-through rate from the hero image to start the booking journey with the image shown to the customer by the Managed Endpoints API.

And while the Managed Endpoints API did save the Haven team time (in the form of software engineering personnel power), it also saved the team money on infrastructure.

“We aren’t incurring the cost of hosting that service,” Alex said. “With our latest Managed Endpoint, the people who have actually implemented it aren’t developers or software engineers. You don’t actually need that software engineering skill set to be able to develop this.”