Luxury Escapes: Personalisation, martech’s seduction and advertising to different cultures

Paige Murphy
By Paige Murphy | 25 November 2019
 

Australian online travel company Luxury Escapes is using martech to help it expand globally.

At only eight years old, the privately-owned Melbourne company has opened offices in India, Singapore and most recently San Francisco.

Luxury Escapes chief customer officer Jason Shugg says as the company has matured, so has the tech stack it is using.

“As they grew up, it was almost like getting little bits of the tech stack incrementally as the need came about,” Shugg told AdNews at Dreamforce 2019.

“What they found was that there were all sorts of different tech that spoke to each other but didn't really, and so we got to a critical mass where the business became big enough to warrant looking at it properly.”

The company ended up consolidating what Shugg says was a “fragmented” tech stack and now works predominantly with Salesforce.

As a small business though, Luxury Escapes has been working in-house to implement its martech to allow the company to move quicker.

“We haven't used any implementation partners. We've done it all ourself,” he says.

“We're very lean. We've got a team of six people in the tech people that do it. A couple of developers and then effectively some project leads.”

Over the course of the eight years, Shugg says the company has been open to trying new technology but are careful not to get too “seduced” by having the latest thing if it isn’t right for them.

“We're trying to stay focused on delivering what we've got at the moment and implementing incredibly well before we add things on top of that,” he says.

“It's a hard thing to do because you get seduced by automated email. We will trial that but we will trial it at a period of time when we've got some other things up and running.”

Getting personal
Personalisation was a hot topic at Dreamforce this year and has been in the marketing industry for quite some time.

Shugg says Luxury Escapes takes on a different approach to the buzzword.

“We speak around connection and relevance much more,” he says.

“For us what we're trying to do is try to connect with the greater number of people that we possibly can, not just in Australia but in the world, that are interested in the form of travel that we provide, and then have as many relevant experiences as we possibly can.”

The business has begun to roll out home page personalisation for customers, where each page is customised depending on a person’s behaviours and what their interests may be.

Shugg says before scaling these new features like this though, Luxury Escapes runs controlled group tests.

For the home page personalisation, a large control group was used and there was a 20% uplift in revenue as a result.

Moving more into the omni-channel space, Shugg says the company is connecting with customers at multiple touchpoints now too.

“One of the things we get is we get a lot of people hit the website and we know they're members or they're subscribers. So, they look at deal and they leave,” he says.

“What we've done now is we've automated a process called 'abandon cart'. So, when a customer looks at a deal - maybe a deal to Thailand - and then they click off, we automatically connect with them an hour later and offer them to talk to a sales consultant.”

The customer will receive a personalised email with the option to speak to someone over phone or email if they wish to find out more.

Despite being an online business, Shugg says almost 13% of Luxury Escapes customers still prefer to call to book their holidays.

It recently brought its 24/7 international call centres back to Australian shores to streamline the customer service process.

“What we've been able to do is stitch together for when a customer calls, we've got the history and so we know and so we can have a relevant conversation straight away,” he says.

“Equally, there's some questions that they probably don't need to talk to a human, we're helping them through technology to get to those, but if they do want to talk to a human, it's a really easy interaction to do that straight away.”

Marketing to different cultures
Luxury Escapes sells in 29 countries around the world but as it has expanded, the way it markets has had to adapt to different regions.

“The challenge for us is as a small, Australian company that's privately owned is how do we get the awareness levels up in a market like the US which is challenging, so we're looking at partnerships,” Shugg says.

“We advertise obviously to the market but that's the real goal for us, is how do we increase the awareness and understanding of the brand.”

Since entering the US and Asia, it has had to make small changes to the language and even some of the imagery it is using to connect with customers from those countries.

Shugg says that certain images or holiday destinations appeal to Indians and Singaporeans differently to what might appeal to an American or Australian.

“Our tagline in Australia is 'the world's best holidays'. In the US, they don't have holidays; they have vacations. So, our tagline now needs to be adapted for this,” he says.

“We've started with the words, then we're on the image journey at the moment. If we want to localise, you have to localise.”

As it continues to expand, he says the next biggest challenge is to prove to people the holidays Luxury Escapes offers aren’t too good to be true.

“Our biggest challenge is people think it's too good to be true and that's what we're working on a lot, particularly in Australia,” he says.

“Once someone uses us, they tend to use us a lot and our NPS (Net Promoter Score) score is through the roof so we know that it works, but it's just trying to showcase that it's not click bait. It's real.”

AdNews attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.

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