TRV Improved conversion rate and market share for a major online travel agency

New competitors and reduction of airline commissions make our client’s e-marketplace business model obsolete. They had few tools, processes, talent and analytics to support the strategy to become a leading online retailer.

Axtria team embarked on a practical, analytical journey to understand drivers of customer profitability and calibrate levers to forecast and influence business performance. We created a clear roadmap to facilitate gradual transformation with tangible benefits.

The client was pragmatic and iterative in its journey, beginning with a basic understanding of customers and evolving to data-driven product design. The ‘journey’ spanned 3 years and included people, process, tools, scores of models, and technology enhancements across five key dimensions:

• Customer Behavior
• Purchasing Behavior
• Supply / Merchandising
• Marketing Models
• Store Brands

We started with under-utilized data and began projects by making a series of quick hits:

• Pilot projects helped us quickly determine whether a problem was solvable
• Invested in scaling the effective solutions as needed
• Some models never needed to be progressed beyond spreadsheets, while other models were scaled up to automate data feeds, develop GUIs and ongoing support
• Optimal decisions were implemented through investments in rules engines

Additionally, system improvements reduced latency by 30%, which increased Conversion Rate by 11%. Actionable customer insight led to sharpened focus on acquiring the right customers, improving the merchandising and offers. We developed automated triggers:  price tracking generated automated emails to relevant price sensitive travelers (e.g., route, leisure, shopped previously).

Trigger-based marketing, such as GD2B, generated incremental value of $6.9 million on 39 million automated emails.