On The Beach Boosts Conversions With Customized Price Drop Campaigns Using Bloomreach Engagement

Story Behind the Brand

On The Beach is one of the UK’s leading online holiday package companies. Specializing in flight- and hotel-inclusive packages, the brand provides a search interface that acts as an online travel agent for its users, helping them create the perfect holiday package with flexible and competitive pricing on flights, hotels, and transfers.

587

conversion rate from price drop email campaign vs. project average

477

click-through rate from price drop email campaign vs. project average

362

uplift in RPV from price drop email campaign test

Challenge

With travel packages that combine a seemingly endless amount of hotels, flights, and windows of time, personalized marketing was a real challenge for On The Beach. A user could customize their own travel package to meet their unique needs, but crafting campaigns that spoke to those needs required a thorough understanding of both the customer and the potential travel options that would appeal to them

All these variants of each possible travel package created a knot of data points that On The Beach’s previous marketing solution couldn’t translate into targeted campaigns. Because of this, On The Beach traditionally relied on generalized marketing campaigns, only showcasing the most popular holidays and trending packages.

However, these efforts couldn’t span the entire customer journey and they couldn’t be refined to speak directly to a customer’s preferences.

Solution

On The Beach knew that targeted, data-driven marketing was the key to forging long-lasting relationships with its customers, which is why the company chose Bloomreach Engagement as its marketing solution.

With all its data and channels working together in our comprehensive platform, On The Beach could make every data point count, crafting personalized campaigns that reach its users with the right message at the right time.

The company’s successful price drop email campaign is a perfect example of this — seeing the need to reengage undecided buyers, On The Beach built a triggered email flow in Bloomreach Engagement that alerts users to price changes on travel packages they previously viewed, inviting them back to make a purchase.

Using the price drop campaign from Bloomreach’s Plug & Play use case library as a framework, On The Beach customized the email flow to meet its unique business needs, harnessing the power of Loomi, our AI for ecommerce, to tackle its multiple variants challenge.

The customized campaign hinges on hotel pricing as a trigger event — when a customer views a particular holiday package, the hotel attached to the package gets logged in their individual customer profile, along with the cheapest price for that hotel’s stay in a seven-day window.

Loomi then acts like a watchdog for each individual user’s potential hotel stay, monitoring the hotel’s pricing on a daily basis. If there’s a new low price in the seven-day window of their desired stay, an email campaign is automatically sent to alert the user of the cheaper options now available for the travel package they viewed. It invites them to click through, view the updated offerings, and make a purchase.

With Bloomreach, we can really understand the customer journey from start to finish. There’s no guesswork that goes into our campaigns — we can make data-driven decisions about what we are sending and how we are sending it to our customers.

Olivia Shanu-Wilson

Bloomreach Ambassador and CRM Lifecycle Specialist, On The Beach

Results

Once the price drop campaign was ready to launch, On The Beach set up a 50/50 control group split to test its performance.

The initial results were a huge success — in just three days, the campaign yielded a 180% uplift in conversion, a 95% uplift in click-through rates, and a staggering 362% uplift in revenue per visitor.

With such incredible results, On The Beach adopted the campaign for its wider audience. The price drop emails have since produced conversion rates that are 587% above average and click-through rates that are 477% above average.

Now, the company is building on this success and scaling its efforts using Bloomreach Engagement. And with plans to adopt more marketing channels, create more targeted campaigns, and leverage all the AI-powered features that Bloomreach has to offer, On The Beach is committed to personalizing all its touchpoints in the customer journey and offering an outstanding experience for its audience.