Data-driven Customer Engagement and Acquisition

Data-driven Customer Engagement and Acquisition

When it comes to converting prospective travel customers to paying ones, the data you hold on – or can find out about – them is the most crucial resource at your disposal. Data enables you to gain and leverage insights that not only make the most of marketing campaigns and improve the customer experience, but also helps you find more individuals with similar interests and behaviours.

Why is data so crucial?

Data can help you:
•    Understand whether a customer or prospect is a looker or booker (i.e. are they new to you or a repeat customer?)
•    Determine who they are using third party data on demographics, lifestyle, behaviours and more – to help identify products most relevant to them
•    Target and acquire new customers using data for contact across multiple channels

The more data touch points at your disposal, the better you can personalise your communications and reach an individual across multiple channels, but the challenge is how to get someone to provide this information about themselves. The use of third party datasets helps you enhance the customer view and enrich the first party data you already hold.

How to leverage third party data

Most organisations typically want to make customer register simple, so they often only ask for a minimal amount of information, such as an email address and a name.

However, this provides little useful intelligence to help guide an individual through the options presented by your brand. But an email address feeding a standard welcome program can unlock a wealth of third party intelligence to help with personalisation – elevating the brand experience, which in turn commands a higher premium and results in a more loyal customer.

De-duplication

As a brand, you need to be able to understand whether, from the email address that an individual enters into your website, they are a ‘looker’ (prospect) or someone who has booked before (a ‘booker’). But with many different data touch points to contend with, e.g. an individual may have used different email addresses over the years, how do you bring this all together?  

Data linkage tools have millions of datapoints to create a single view of an individual, with records of all historical touch points. Once linked to a single record, a brand can quicky tell whether this person is already in their marketing program, and thus how to message them moving forwards. Enhancing customer data, be it existing or a prospect, helps you gain increased insight into your audiences.

Enhancing first party data with third party intelligence

Once you have linked the data from the point of email registration, you can link the email address to a further wealth of intelligence via a trusted data provider. Understanding the person behind the email address means you can service them with the appropriate holiday messaging, including the right add-ons, saving them time and making them feel more affiliated with your brand.

Relevant variables for the travel sector include: family composition; income; actual age; environmental preferences; preferred location (types of holidays); children (and their ages); annual travel insurance; location proximity; hobbies and interests; and newspapers and reading. For example, some have used variables like the presence of pets to help promote dog-friendly stays at the start of a customer journey.

The importance of the right add-ons

While some organisations use third party data to determine add-ons, it’s typically an off the shelf geo-demographic tool at postcode level, which helps brands to understand the nuances of who has more disposable income, who has children, and so on.

Knowing about the actual people who are looking at your holidays, flights, villas, car hire or even interested in your country is much more powerful: this is intelligence-led – rather than data-led – marketing.

Prospects and leveraging the appropriate channels

Linking current customers, based on what you know now, to similar-looking prospects can enable you to acquire the right customers via the right channels. Customer data used correctly will drive customers to do – e.g. buy or book – more. But the customer experience at all stages is crucial, and personalisation is key to commanding a higher premium and increasing loyalty.

Direct mail might not feel like your first choice for a marketing channel – but with nearly 10 million travel mailings between January and the end of February 2025, direct mail should not be overlooked. The key is to ensure the most relevant people receive communications, and relevance may be based around affordability or interest – insight only data can give you.

Think digitally

Your web analytics can also tell you a lot about your customers: what channels they are using to visit your site; what devices they are using; what referring URLs they are coming from. You can then leverage your first party data in multiple ways across multiple digital channels:

1.    Load your existing audiences into different digital channels and let the in-platform algorithms go to work and find look-a-like audiences. The downside is that you can’t be sure if the same users are seeing your brand across different walled gardens. 
2.    From the customer profiling you've done, you can use in-platform selections to refine your target audience such as age, affluence, and location. 
3.    You can select specific audiences using data platforms which are within your digital marketing ecosystem to further refine audience selections.
4.    You can work with trusted data partners that first identify an addressable audience to target and then deploy that audience across multiple digital channels.    

Employing a multi-channel approach

People are engaging with media in more ways than ever before, whether that’s streaming content on connected TVs or scrolling through social feeds. To be front-of-mind, you need to meet the audience wherever they are, across multiple touchpoints.

There are plenty of digital channels to choose from, but you don’t have to select them all at once. Consider testing a dual approach, ideally with channels that give you the greatest chance of tracking performance as accurately as possible.

Likewise, traditional channels, like direct mail, still have a very valid place, particularly within the travel sector. Statistics from JICMAIL, show that, while often seen as an expensive channel, if the message and imagery are right, the mail may be put on the fridge or kept on a table, thus ensuring greater longevity than an email or social media post.

Consider your creative

Your visual messaging must cut through the noise – according to Nielsen, 47% of campaign performance comes down to ad creative. Effective creative ensures your message doesn’t just reach your audience, it resonates with them, so think about consistency, unified messaging and a coherent visual style; a clear, compelling value proposition; a deep understanding of what drives your audience to act; and a clear call to action.

And of course, anything you do must also be optimised for mobile. According to Navan, more than 70% of travel sector website traffic comes from mobile devices, although desktop still accounts for around 50% of bookings.

Bringing it all together

You will need to break down silos and bring different stakeholders together. Lean on your agency, data partners, and staff to collaborate. Strategically, it makes sense to start relatively small: there’s no need to take big risks. Instead try it for a one-off campaign or perhaps test a specific region. Try testing across two channels rather than four or five all at once.

You should also be creative in managing costs. Reassign existing budget, look at reducing PPC brand terms spend, or reduce your re-targeting budget to free up capital. Run campaign hygiene: up to 30% of paid site traffic could be coming from bots. By reviewing referring URLs, you can block bot clicks which reduces ad wastage. Plan collaboratively and give yourself plenty of time to get it right.  

Measurement is key

Web analytics is a good place to start but, as you know, each platform will tell its own story, potentially all claiming the same booking. Incrementality testing is a good way to understand the uplift a campaign has generated.

With the reduction in cookies and opaque platform measurement, more companies are moving to econometric models to show the true impact of different channels. However, this takes time and investment. So, wherever possible, work with partners that provide sound measurement methodologies, who can ideally match back to addressable audiences.

Becoming data-driven and intelligence-led

When all the above is employed correctly, the results can be impressive. Enriching your data with third party information, and then channelling that intelligence to power acquisition campaigns is a sound strategy. A successful multi-channel marketing campaign will not only reach prospective holiday makers wherever they are, using the most relevant channels, but also improves the effectiveness and performance of your campaigns, especially if you ensure that you measure effectively and don’t waste budget.

By ensuring strategy, data, creative, and channel are working in harmony, your multi-channel marketing campaigns can deliver their full potential: maximising reach, optimising engagement, and driving real results.

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