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Guide for Travel & Transportation: The future of personalisation

Aug 29, 2024

Personalisation is at the core of successful modern marketing. And in an era where travellers demand accurate, timely, and personalised communications to support their trips, it is essential for any travel and transportation brand. 

However, personalisation doesn’t only benefit the end customer. With 86% of travellers preferring tailored offers, providing personalised communications has the ability to increase the engagement and booking rate of campaigns sent to a travel and transportation audience.

In this guide, we explore the current state and future trends in personalisation within the travel and transportation industry. Highlighting how brands can leverage data and technology to enhance customer experiences, drive revenue, and foster loyalty.

The benefits of personalisation for the Travel & Transportation industry

Personalisation within marketing is a big deal no matter what the industry. However, it brings some specific benefits for travel and transportation brands, including (but not limited to) the following:

1. Improved customer experience

Personalisation allows businesses within the travel and transportation industry to provide relevant, tailored marketing experiences based on their individual preferences. This makes for a better overall customer experience, as everything from promotions to notifications is specific to each individual. Providing the right information, to the right person, at the right time. 

2. More revenue

Through personalised promotions, offers, and services, brands in this industry can encourage customers to book and spend more. This is thanks to personalised communications being highly targeted based on individual preferences and behaviour. Emails will no longer become white noise, instead, customers’ valuable attention will be spent on content that is more likely to convert.

3. Loyal customers

In the travel and transportation industry, there’s a lot of noise and a lot of competition, meaning keeping customers happy and loyal can be difficult. By showing that they understand customers’ unique needs through personalised campaigns, travel and transportation brands can stand out in the crowd, stick in customers’ minds, and produce more loyal customers.

4. Better use of data

The key to personalisation is gathering, managing, and analysing data. This data can then be used to learn even more about an audience, gaining insights into their demographics, preferences, behaviour, and overall trends. This information can be further utilised to inform strategic marketing and data-led decision-making.

The current state of personalisation for Travel & Transportation brands

The travel and transportation industry can access a variety of points to collect data and utilise it for personalised experiences. With this in mind, the industry already boasts solid foundations when it comes to personalised campaigns.

However, with data and personalisation technology moving at a rapid pace, there is room for improvement.

Here are some of the common types of personalised campaigns that we currently see from travel and transportation brands.

Personalised updates

Travel and transportation brands will often make use of basic personalisation and segmentation within their updates and communications. These are usually tailored to the customer’s activity or preferences, such as booking reminders or flight status updates. This level of personalisation may not be sophisticated but is essential for notifications and updates on specific bookings.

Tailored promotions

Businesses in this industry are currently using segmentation to offer simple personalisation within promotions and sales. This approach is far better than the outdated ‘batch and blast’ strategy, instead ensuring that promotions are relevant to the recipient’s demographics or behaviour. However, as they are usually based on segmentations, the level of personalisation is limited.

Loyalty programs

It’s commonplace for travel and transportation brands to offer loyalty programs and updates based on individual traveller’s habits. For instance, travellers who book frequently with a brand may receive VIP discounts or rewards such as free upgrades, or loyalty points for booking specific types of travel.

Customer service

When customers make a travel booking, they want to feel reassured. Notably, punctual timing, transparent pricing, and top-notch support are all important factors for travellers.

Travel and transportation brands address these priorities by using customer data to provide tailored customer service. For instance, personalised information, FAQs, or reactive assistance based on specific flight or hotel room bookings to ensure communications are relevant.

Future personalisation predictions for Travel & Transportation brands

As mentioned, the travel and transportation industry has solid foundations when it comes to personalisation.

But there’s lots more to explore and experiment with.

Here are some of our favourite ways that we predict the industry will boost its personalisation efforts to offer a truly unique and memorable experience.

Hyper-personalised and contextual campaigns 

We predict that future campaigns within the travel and transportation industry will utilise data alongside context to personalise communications based on real-time factors, such as current location, time of day, weather, and device.

For example, these campaigns could include highly personalised travel itineraries which are adjusted dynamically based on the latest weather forecasts or flight timings. Or, dynamically changing the content of transport costs and availability based on the time and location in which an email is opened.

Interactive email content

Email marketing is evolving to incorporate more interactive elements, which allow recipients to personalise their experience directly within the email.

For instance, interactive surveys can gather travel preferences and display the best options for each individual. Booking widgets allow customers to choose dates and locations to display the best travel or destination options. And even interactive maps can showcase the best routes based on location and timings.

These interactive elements take a highly personalised experience one step further, offering a truly unique campaign per person.

Multi-modal travel personalisation

It’s not uncommon for travellers to use multiple modes of transport when making a trip. To make their lives easier, travel and transportation bands can combine these different types of transport into a singular marketing experience.

These campaigns can offer seamless information to help travellers transition between flights, trains, car rentals, and even bikes. The best travel combinations to help them reach their destination can be suggested, as well as taking into account real-time data such as personal preferences, traffic conditions, weather, and timings.

Augmented Reality (AR) experiences

AR is big news within marketing, and the travel and transportation industry is perfectly set up to explore this technology.

AR allows travellers to create their own personalised pre-travel experience, virtually exploring travel options and destinations before their booking. The options are vast depending on what the brand offers, for instance, exploring a cruise ship before a holiday or choosing a seat on an aircraft before booking a flight. 

5 innovative campaigns for the Travel & Transportation industry

Hopefully, by now, you’ve been inspired by what we predict is in store for the travel and transportation industry. To get you started, here are some of our favourite personalisation campaign examples.

Discover a new transport or destination

Transportation and destination campaigns are standard for travel and transportation brands, but they can be elevated with the use of data and personalisation.

For instance, if a customer has been regularly browsing a specific landing page, a personalised email or in-app notification can be triggered to promote similar travel or destination options which are likely to be of interest. These communications can be further personalised with the specific dates and pricing that each individual has been searching for.

This type of personalised automation can be used in a variety of scenarios. As well as more general promotions, they can be triggered for abandoned browse or booking notifications, re-engagement campaigns, and relevant up-sell and cross-sell promotions.

Predictive travel updates

With the use of marketing automation and real-time data, travel and transportation brands can generate predictive and personalised updates based on recipients’ behaviour and preferences, alongside external factors such as travel delays or weather updates.

With the use of dynamic content, these updates can be populated with information specific to each individual. Ensuring the most accurate and up-to-date communications.

And updates don’t have to be boring, they can come in the form of dynamic itineraries, feature real-time countdown timers, and incorporate personalised imagery.

Promote travel partnerships

Travel and transportation brands have the opportunity to partner with related businesses or sister brands to offer their customers the benefit of both services.

This can be particularly useful for combining accommodation with travel options, and supporting customers in all aspects of their journey from A to Z. Brands can automate cross-sell emails post-booking to promote additional travel partnership options, such as taxi or car bookings, or overnight hotel stays for flight transfers.

This is the perfect way to cross-sell services, broaden the brand’s audience, and also support customers throughout their trip.

Surprise loyal customers

Loyalty programs are a fantastic way to reward VIP customers. But instead of offering regular loyalty points or discounts, brands can offer a surprise to loyal customers to grab their attention and keep them engaged.

This could include discounts or freebies from sister companies, partnering with complementary travel brands, or utilising data to provide an offer that is highly specific to each individual’s browsing and booking behaviour.

Milestone celebrations

We’re big fans of a ‘Happy Birthday’ email campaign, but these celebrations don’t have to be restricted to date of birth.

Travel and transportation brands can celebrate a range of travel-related milestones, such as the anniversary of their first booking, visiting a specific number of countries, or reaching sustainability goals using green travel options.

How Travel & Transportation brands can prepare for the future

When it comes to marketing technology and advancements in personalisation, futureproofing is essential. By doing so, brands in the travel and transportation industry won’t be left behind when the latest advancements are implemented by competitors, or demanded by customers.

Invest in data collection and management

The first step in any personalisation journey is to collect and manage top-quality data.

Without it, personalisation is simply not impossible.

With this in mind, travel and transportation brands need to broaden the range of data they collect, incorporating customer preferences, behavioural data, historical travel patterns, and geolocation. All of which will form the foundations of excellent personalisation campaigns.

In addition, a dedicated data platform will help businesses in this industry to centralise, analyse, and utilise their data through multiple sources. This platform should be able to integrate data from multiple locations, such as websites, CRM, finance systems, and mobile applications for a more well-rounded customer view.

Leverage marketing automation and AI

In addition to a data management platform, quality marketing automation and AI solutions are essential for analysing data, utilising it for personalisation, and triggering relevant communications and campaigns at scale.

With these solutions, personalisation can be automated through a variety of channels, such as email, SMS, and in-app. Ensuring a consistent flow of communications where travellers engage the most.

Furthermore, as your personalisation sophistication grows, any good marketing automation solution can grow with you. Enabling your brand to expand your audience and experiment with sophisticated personalisation tactics

Implement scalable personalisation

With the use of the right technology, personalised campaigns can be easily scalable, and able to grow with your business and customer base.

There are a couple of strategies that you can implement to improve your scalable personalisation. 

Firstly, the use of hyper-segmentation enables brands to move beyond basic segmentation to create niche groups for even more targeted campaigns. These segments should be dynamic, adjusting in real-time as new data becomes available.

Secondly, the creation of dynamic content and the use of dynamic content blocks enables travel and transportation brands to easily customise content for different customer segments, or individual recipients, without needing extensive technical skills.

Build partnerships with experts

Marketing technology moves at a rapid pace, so to keep up it’s a wise idea to build partnerships with experts. Experts in marketing, personalisation, and of course travel and transportation.

When looking for any technology linked to personalisation, such as a data management platform or marketing automation, we recommend choosing a solution which offers expert support and guidance. Look for dedicated account management, support teams, and free resources, and ensure you are making good use of them.

Next steps

As the travel and transportation industry continues to evolve, it’s clear that personalisation will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping customer experiences and brand success. 

By investing in advanced data management, marketing automation, and scalable personalisation strategies, brands can meet and exceed customer expectations whilst staying ahead of the competition.

If this sounds of interest, then at Deployteq we can help.

We boast an industry-leading marketing automation platform alongside a team of experts who are keen to help you on your journey to personalisation success.

Get in touch to find out more.

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