Blue Sea Holidays improves the customer experience for holidaymakers from destination to departure with Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance

Engaging early-stage holiday researchers and boosting bookings

Beginning the search for the perfect family holiday can be exciting and stressful. Whether choosing short or long haul, a sandy beach, city break, luxury hotel or cruise, the first step is choosing the destination.

As an online travel company, Blue Sea Holidays has a lot of visitors at the very early stages of researching their holiday. Its helpful destination pages offer a lot of information, as Marketing Executive at Blue Sea Holidays, Andy Clark, explains: “These pages are extremely popular, as well as being the landing point for much of our SEO traffic. They contain top tips about places to visit, the weather, language and currency, even the price of a pint.” Clark continues: “Typically the people looking at these pages are not ready to book a holiday, but we wanted to find a way to engage with them and encourage them to return and book when the time is right.”

Harnessing personalization and AI to enhance customer engagement and revenue

Blue Sea Holidays has a long and successful relationship with Dotdigital. Today, the company is trusted to optimize and automate how it engages with customers via email, and the dynamic content visitors see when browsing the website. The challenge of increasing the number of people returning after viewing a destination page was given to the Dotdigital Professional Services team. They immediately recognized the opportunity to use the Fresh Relevance personalization platform to extend its already successful cart and browse abandonment email program.

Taking advantage of Fresh Relevance’s powerful AI-driven capabilities, a friendly email was crafted using Dotdigital’s email builder. As Clark comments: “The Fresh Relevance AI personalizes each email with specific recommendations based on the destination page that was visited, while Dotdigital ensures seamless delivery and visually appealing design. The email also integrates useful information including ‘People like you browse’ and ‘People like you buy’.”

Clark explains: “This was a quick and simple campaign to introduce, the return on investment for the amount of work we have needed to do has been fantastic and we are very happy with the results.” Within the first four months of implementing the campaign, Blue Sea Holidays recorded an impressive 37% open rate and 32% clickthrough rate, on par with its existing cart and browse abandonment initiatives.

Blue Sea Holidays wants to be there for holidaymakers at every stage of their journey, from deciding the destination to their departure, so the company has also worked with the Dotdigital team to conceive and implement a pre-departure email program. This three-step program sees personalized pre-departure emails sent to customers 28 days, 14 days and three days before departure.

These emails have proven invaluable to many customers, as they contain important information about their holiday, as well as reminders of things that they may still need, such as car hire, travel insurance, and airport parking etc. “These emails are first and foremost about providing the customer with great experience, but they are also a source of secondary revenue.”

Continuous optimization and innovating customer experience in online travel

Inspired by the opportunities to add more creative content to customer emails and constantly improve the online experience, Blue Sea Holidays has regular strategy meetings with Dotdigital. The team has recently set up an A/B test to measure and improve engagement with its Top 20 Offers email. It is also looking at ways to optimize conversions from specific webpages through the use of Social Proof, as well as augmenting pre-departure emails further but automatically including the latest weather forecast.

Clark concludes: “Using the Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance platform we are aiming to set the benchmark for customer experience within the online travel sector. We are always creating the next campaign together and it is helping us stand out in a crowded market, when holidaymakers are looking for a company they can trust with their family holiday.”