How momondo Increased Conversions By More than 60%

With travel and hospitality businesses—startups and established players, alike—offering a veritable all-you-can-eat continental breakfast of options for travelers, there are more choices than ever when it comes to booking transportation and accommodations. It isn’t easy to cut through the noise and get users to convert, and even if your brand is able to successfully nudge a user to buy plane tickets, there’s a chance you may be leaving money on the table.

To reach your long-term business goals, your brand needs smart, sustainable ways to encourage customers to make purchases, buy travel add-ons, and carry out other key conversions. What does that look like? Well, let’s learn from momondo, a global travel brand that used thoughtful personalization to make their outreach more appealing and effective.

Using personalization and dynamic content to drive higher conversions

For momondo, growing their brand meant finding ways to encourage customers to take fuller advantage of the services they offer. In particular, the company was looking for effective ways to increase revenue by encouraging customers who purchase stand-alone plane tickets to add hotel bookings through its search offerings to complete their travel plans.

By assessing all the tools and capabilities at its disposal and testing each to optimize its overall strategy, momondo was able to increase push notification open rates on iOS and Android by 100% and 291%, respectively, while also improving conversion rates by 64% and 73% on iOS and Android, respectively. That’s a big deal. Here’s how they made it happen:

1. Personalization

At its best, personalization is about improving the user experience. When assessing how it could be more useful and relevant for its customers, momondo found it could make things better for its global audience by taking language preferences, local currency, and airport search history into consideration. By customizing their outreach to fit the people they were looking to engage, momondo was able to support a more relevant, more valuable messaging experience.

2. Deep linking

If navigating from your push notifications to the world inside your company’s mobile app makes customers feel like they’re traveling through customs without Global Entry, then you’re doing it wrong. Deep linking is the fast pass. It guides your users from your succinct, attention-grabbing push notifications to your in-depth mobile experience, nonstop without any turbulence. Momondo realized deep linking was the key to removing barriers for its customers to get to the personalized hotel recommendations waiting for them within the app.

3. Exception events

Customers want to feel understood by the companies they engage with. And there’s nothing that undermines that feeling quicker than being prompted to do something you’ve already done. That’s what exception events are for—to avoid sending a message that’s no longer needed. In momondo’s case, the company realized that sending personalized hotel recommendations would only be relevant and valuable if the recipients still needed to book a hotel. So the company used exception events to automatically cancel outreach when users go on to look for hotels between booking their flight and the time when follow-up messages would have been sent.

4. Intelligent selection

With manual A/B testing, you likely have to set up the test configuration and start sending the winning campaign variant to recipients. With intelligent selection, the tool automatically tweaks the percentage of users that receive each campaign alternative based on which one is performing better (the winner will be sent to a higher percentage of users) based on a statistical algorithm that accounts for random chance. Momondo leveraged this functionality to test and send its winning messaging.

5. Connected content

Taking advantage of dynamic content—which makes it possible for publicly available (or in-house) APIs to pull in relevant, continuously-updated content such as localized weather, news, and other information—can make the travel booking experience better and more up-to-date. Momondo leveraged this real-time marketing tool to re-engage customers who used the company’s flight searching capabilities but hadn’t tried out the hotel booking services. Because Appboy’s Connected Content tool adds in relevant outside information the instant the message is sent, momondo could be sure that the hotel data that was being included in their outreach was up-to-date and relevant to the people receiving it. Connected Content also made it possible for momondo to automatically cancel messages when no hotels were available in the location where a customer had booked a flight, preventing unhelpful messages.

What marketers can learn from momondo

When you’re looking to encourage your customers to take action, whether that action is making a purchase or opening your app, making sure that the messages you’re sending them are customized for each recipient is a smart first step. But momondo didn’t stop there—instead, they took advantage of a wide range of marketing optimization tools making sure that their customer messaging was as impactful as possible, allowing them to see significant boosts in both open and conversion rates.

Want to learn more? Try digging deeper into the approaches they used:

• Push notifications
• Personalization
• Deep linking
• Exception events
• Intelligent Selection
• Dynamic Content