Leveraging Personalization at Scale to Boost ROI

Introduction

In the competitive travel landscape, personalization and strategically timed marketing touchpoints are crucial for creating tailored experiences that drive engagement and conversion. When Air Canada Vacations came to MERGE, they were looking for an Adobe partner to help execute data-driven personalized emails to drive both brand loyalty and customer retention.

 

To capture the opportunity, MERGE architected an approach to take complex data about vacation package bookings and build workflows to automate timely, personalized messages related to upcoming trips and deals.

Challenge

Previously, a customer would book their vacation and receive a confirmation email, along with their invoice. The next time the customer would hear from Air Canada Vacations is when they land at their destination. 

Air Canada Vacations wanted to make this process more memorable and exciting for the customer, creating anticipation and providing useful information regarding their upcoming vacation – the current process was dry and failed to create an engaging customer  experience. 

Another area of opportunity was to improve the customer experience once they arrive at their destination. Arriving at the destination airport could be a stressful experience for some customers – whether the customer was unclear of next steps, couldn’t locate their transfer, or needed to get in touch with customer service, there was an opportunity to deliver a more cohesive and enjoyable experience. 

Positive customer experiences foster loyalty and engagement with brands. That’s why Air Canada Vacations also wanted to execute a post-travel email series to inspire the customer to book their next vacation. 

Air Canada Vacations partnered with MERGE to leverage a post-booking and post-travel email series to elevate the customer  experience and promote customer retention.  

Outcome

MERGE leveraged custom velocity scripting to deliver an automated post-booking email series in Marketo.

Once a customer booked a vacation, a custom object record was then synced to Marketo. The custom object contained all relevant information about the customer's trip, such as travel dates, first name, destination, and hotel information. The information within the custom object was used to start an email series, which was split into two groups: pre and post travel. 

The pre-travel series consisted of travel countdown emails sent at eight weeks, one week, and 72 hours. These emails contained useful information, such as curated activities and packing lists and on-site destination specific information. 

Within the post-travel series, Air Canada Vacations deployed two sets of emails. The first email focused on cross-selling, providing suggestions for destinations similar in nature to the first trip as well as a promotion code. The second email contained a promotion code sent a year after the first vacation, also known as the “travel anniversary.” 

Results

Air Canada Vacations was able to benefit from a faster time to market  by partnering with MERGE. 

"We feel like Marketo is working for us – rather than us fitting into it." Véronique Hébert Dumont, Director, Consumer Growth & Engagement at Air Canada Vacations.