Secret Escapes is the UK's biggest members-only travel website, with all its hotels and spas hand-picked by its travel experts. Operating in 14 countries worldwide and with over 62 million members, it offers luxury 4 and 5-star travel deals at low prices.
In a time of increasing pressure on travel marketing budgets, Secret Escapes wanted to ensure its current investment was making a difference and delivering sales. But isolating onsite conversions and the incremental value derived from its display advertising was proving difficult.
The premium members-only online travel agent was also wrestling with how to reactivate lapsed customers to deliver additional sales. With the loss of traditional signals and identifiers following the pandemic, finding and recognising past buyers online on their different devices had become challenging.
A proof of concept was set up over four months to address both issues. Epsilon began by matching Secret Escapes’ customer data against its CORE ID graph. By doing so, Epsilon revealed deeper insights into Secret Escape’s customers from the thousands of additional data points on CORE ID. This included key demographic information influencing travel decisions, including gender, age, income, and marital status. It also identified the number of touchpoints available for each customer to understand how to engage with them.
From these enhanced profiles, a display campaign driven by dynamic ads was developed to create more relevant, personalised, and resonating messages built around an individual’s interests across their purchase journey.
Epsilon was also able to find and reconnect Secret Escapes with a proportion of its lapsed customers. This included identifying the cost per reactivated customer, allowing Secret Escapes to concentrate activity around those individuals offering the best return on its activity.
With incremental revenue generated being the primary indicator of success, the campaign significantly overachieved the forecasted ROAS of 2:1 by 150%. This gave Secret Escapes the validation and confidence that its marketing activity positively impacted revenue.
Critical to this was helping enhance the value and saliency of Secret Escapes’ creative messaging, an area many travel brands often struggle with. While the test finished in September, results proved so strong that Secret Escapes has extended this activity in an ongoing capacity. This continues to perform well, and ongoing messaging analysis is helping further refine the approach to be even more effective.
Secret Escapes is also working with Epsilon to expand opportunities. These include widening reach by testing different audiences to gauge how receptive they are to Secret Escapes' offer and using learnings and insights to plan to launch into new markets.