Cognesia for Travel:
Creating sales for the travel market

Cognesia for Travel is a new online service that enables web or mobile travel sites to identify prospects, drive up marketing conversion rates and identify opportunities. Our travel service delivers ten clear ways to improve online sales:

(1) Refocusing on the 98% who didn’t buy

Inevitably, many travel businesses have extensive marketing, sales and booking data. While this data is valuable, by nature, it tends to validate what has actually been achieved, rather than what could  have been achieved. The focus is purely on the 2% that convert, but what of those who did not?

Cognesia for Travel builds a detailed profile of every visitor to a travel site, whether they make a booking or not. As a visitor finds a site, searches for and selects products, and engages with the commerce process, a wealth of valuable data can be tapped.

Our travel service allows this data to be gathered and put to work, enabling travel businesses to refocus their marketing and sales efforts where there is a much greater potential for an increased return. Our existing travel clients call this… ‘commerce-sense’.

(2) Identifying prospective customers who are ‘in the market’

The online travel market is competitive, and buyers are able to shop around... often with a heavy focus on price over other value propositions. Due to the easy accessibility of choice, decisions can be made quickly, and the length of time a prospect is 'in the market' is shorter than ever.

By identifying ‘prospective’ customers that are “in the market” for a flight, holiday or related travel service, we provide the means for travel companies to rapidly react to these opportunities. In particular, our travel clients can react quickly to a site visit (an expression of interest) and, by using data on the activities of each individual visitor, drive targeted marketing communications that aim to secure the booking. This is proven to boost conversion rates considerably.

(3) Improving “Look to Book”

While understanding sales is vital, it tells only half the story. What if visitors were finding and viewing particular holidays, resorts or travel products, but not converting?

Cognesia for Retail allows travel businesses to determine “Look to Book” ratios for all of the products, services and promotions on their site. By comparing ‘product views’ with actual ‘bookings’, it is possible to spot poor performers, and react in various ways.

Firstly, corrective action can be very effective. It may be necessary to refresh promotions and packages. Alternatively, employing alternative descriptions and messaging can also have a serious impact. By utilising multi-variate analysis, Cognesia determines which permutations perform best.

But that’s not all. Cognesia for Retail can also build a matrix of product searches, views and purchases, which can be used to identify and drive cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

(4) Reducing dropouts in the commerce funnel

Any online purchase can at times, be a difficult experience. The travel market is no exception, indeed, booking a holiday is generally recognised as one of the most complicated online purchases. Invariably, the would-be purchaser must navigate a multi stage funnel and provide considerable information throughout the process.

How successful is your e-commerce process? Could conversions be higher if it could be made to work better? Are there problems effecting performance?

Cognesia for Travel focuses on the simple things that can be influenced. For example, where do prospective customers drop out of the funnel? How well does the site perform in different browsers? Do delivery charges or other add-ons prevent the sale? Perhaps, particular promotions/offers create clicks but do not convert?

With this information, changes can be made to radically improve the performance of each stage, for example: reworking a complicated booking form, tailoring pricing and other add-ons, or increasing payment options. All of these are clear, actionable areas where performance can be improved.

(5) Reacting to dropped shopping baskets

For a purchase to take place, a visitor will have made a journey through a number of web pages from entering the site through to the sales completion page. However, it is almost inevitable that along this journey there will be a number of visitors who drop their shopping baskets and do not complete their transactions - ‘drop-outs’.

Cognesia for Travel enables businesses to identify the visitors that have dropped their basket at each stage, and apply different scenarios to determine “why”.  This information can then automatically trigger specific marketing responses, such as special offers, incentives and product alternatives.

(6) Identifying opportunities and managing travel catalogues

In a fast moving marketplace your catalogue can quickly be out of touch with demand. Has summer come early? Has demand changed? Has a country or resort gone out of fashion?

Cognesia for Travel allows businesses to react to changes in demand using real time “site search” data that is gathered automatically for every visitor. Search data is particularly powerful as it can reveal visitor “intent”. Spotting new demands and trends in travel is an essential step in managing a range of holidays or travel products.

This data can also be applied to search based marketing activities – is search driving the right visitors? Can PPC keyword terms be improved or bid rates optimised?


 

“	Cognesia for Travel enables web or mobile travel sites to identify prospects, drive up marketing conversion rates and identify opportunities.	”
	Cognesia Ltd

(7) Improving search, promotions, product categorisation and features

Typically, visitors to a travel site find what they want through one of four means: catalogues, on-site search, themed promotions or featured packages. Often, the relative performance of each approach, and whether they are successfully leading to travel services and products being found and selected,  are unclear to the business.

In particular, for multi-product travel businesses, the effectiveness of the search facility is pivotal to the success of a site.  Are the best holidays, resorts or flights being returned? Do the searches lead to being selected? What search terms follow an initial search?

Cognesia for Travel can determine how well these methods are working, how the visitor reacts to them and how they could be improved.

(8) Optimising Marketing Conversion

The harsh reality is that if 98% of visitors are not converting, they are likely to be costing a business money. With PPC bid rates increasing, email click through declining and other “paid for” marketing campaigns becoming increasingly competitive, it is necessary to be clearer than ever on which campaigns are performing or not .

Of course, Advertising, Affiliate, Email and PPC systems all provide conversion data. But this data is fragmented – focussing purely on extolling the benefits of the activities that system supports and this leads to double counting.  This is not a single view, nor is it a view that necessarily distinguishes real success.

Indeed, to really understand performance, a commerce orientated view is required. Cognesia for Travel enables clients to relate all searches, products and purchases to any marketing activity.

Why is this useful? Well, these elements all work together. If a particular marketing campaign leads to visitors with a particular interest, perhaps the landing pages should reflect this? If a particular promotion leads to a higher drop out once delivery charges are introduced, does the promotion need amending? While actual click throughs may be sparse, perhaps Social Media is a key success factor. Perhaps the new range of holidays was responsible for that increase in sales, rather than those keyword changes?

(9) Integrating web browsing data into CRM and other systems at the click of a button

Most travel businesses struggle to put web channel data to work in their existing systems. Often, the data cannot be tied together simply due to the lack of a common ‘key’, or because systems have not been designed to communicate.

Cognesia for Travel has an open API that allows data to be shared with other applications. In turn, these applications can understand the data because it contains a common, shared contact ID… a contact being an identifiable person with an identifiable history. Hence, from the ground up, Cognesia has been designed to share its data with other marketing, search, commerce and CRM systems to deliver personalised marketing, content and promotions.

Because Cognesia for Travel has the unique ability to store data of every aspect of a site visit, there are many possible applications.  For example, Cognesia for Travel can identify visitors who have searched for a resort or holiday that is not available. These visitors can often be ‘retargeted’ in the future. Similarly, if a number of visitors are searching for a package that is not available, could it be put together soon? If a travel product has been viewed, but not purchased, perhaps a follow up is all that is required?

By combining web behaviour data with loyalty schemes, CRM and sales data, it is possible to drive targeted promotions and marketing campaigns, such as emails, to individuals based on their behaviour, interests and preferences.

(10) Avoiding lost sales from technical screw ups

The reality is that while online travel companies naturally focus on sales and marketing opportunities, it is often technical issues that have a more significant bearing on performance. Technical issues on a web site can lead to incomplete transactions, with consumers leaving the site frustrated.

A common cause of lost sales is browser incompatibility, with at least four mainstream browsers (and many versions of each) in common use. Does every web browser fully support the payment systems on the ‘check-out’ page? Similarly, mobile internet use is on the rise, and often, sites that work well on the web, simply do not work properly on the stripped back browsers on a mobile phone.

Cognesia for Travel can quickly identify if, and where, there is a technical problem with a particular browser, platform or process, providing the appropriate business, marketing and technical data required to resolve the issue.