Recover the abandoned bookings through SaleCycle (hospitality focus)

Editor's Notes

1. Hi, I’m Charles Chan of CLEARgo. What I’m going to talk about is how you can increase eCommerce sales by recovering abandoned bookings through SaleCycle.
2. A brief introduction about myself and the company.I’m Charles Chan, the founder and managing director of CLEARgo. We are an eCommerce agency in Hong Kong and China. Broadly speaking, we help our clients to plan, build and grow their eCommerce business.We are a Magento Solution Partner, so we focus very much on the Magento Solutions.Our clients include brands such as Proactiv, Jebsen, Sino United Press, and pure eCommerce business such as Cartridges Direct.
3. For any eCommerce site, conversion rate determines the site’s success. Without a reasonable conversion rate, the effort in driving traffic would be wasted. For a typical conversion funnel, customers would select the location, dates, rooms & rates, packages, and then completing the order at checkout. Unfortunately, for hospitality industry, the average abandonment rate at the checkout stage is quite high at 78%, and for some individual hotel, that can go up to even 91%.
4. The 78% in abandonment rate, means that, for every 100 reservations completed, there are 455 checkout attempts made, and 355 of them abandoned.If we can recover even just 1% of those 355 abandoned, this means that we could get 103.5 reservations, which is a 3.5% increase.And if we could get a few % recovered, then there would be a rather significant increase in sales.
5. So why people abandon the checkout. For most eCommerce in general, delivery is the biggest issue. But this is not applicable for travel booking.So for most people, it is simply that they are not ready to buy yet, or they got a better deal somewhere else.Apart from those choosing an alternative deal right away, most of them just need an extra push to make up their mind.
6. How can we recover the abandoned cart? Right now there are two main methods to do so. One is to run a retarget campaign for customers who have visited your site without making a purchase. Nowadays you do see a banner ads following you after your recent visit to the site. Another is to send a follow up email. For example, after the customers going through the room selection process and checkout. If the checkout doesn’t complete in a certain period of amount, we would declare this as an abandonment. And then we would send a follow up email, with messages that urge for completing the order, and also the cart information.
7. Take the Millennium Hotels case as example, we would send the email 60 minutes after abandonment. Actually, we only send out email to around 8% of the abandonment, because we can send email only if we know the user’s email address, mostly through login or they have filled in the email address during the checkout process. The email we sent including an urgency message, and the customer service info. The open rate of the email is 60%, and click thru rate is 45%. Overall, through SaleCycle, we have a 3-5% uplift depending on different hotels, and overall 3.5% uplift. Also, the AOV of the recovered carts have a 15% increase compared to the overall average as well.
8. As part of the tool, we have a dashboard that shows all the key metrics, so that you can look at overall how it is performing, and how different email templates and messages work, etc.
9. We can also perform A/B split testing to see what works better, such as testing different subject lines, messages, or cross promotional offers. We can send out different email to different customer segments. For example, the email for more expensive rooms can be different, or we simply send out email in different languages. Apart from the first email after abandonment, we can also schedule other emails, say 1 day or 3 day after the abandonment. And we can also provide other cross selling recommendations.
10. These are some of the SaleCycle clients in the travel sector.Airlines in implementation (live in the coming 1 - 5 weeks)QatarScoot (part of Singapore Air)NorwegianArabian AirAnother hotel to mention would be Travelodge - a 3 - 4 star hotel group in the UK, but significant volumes. We are also working with a number of boutique hotel companies which mainly specialise in villa's.