As Indonesia’s leading online travel agency, Pegipegi makes travel more accessible for its users by offering up the best deals for accommodation, transportation, and beyond. Additionally, their platform is built to inspire users to make the most of every adventure with helpful references and insights. From tips to make every dollar count on your adventure to best practices for returning to post-pandemic travel, the popular online travel agency (OTA) proves everyone can have unforgettable experiences abroad, no matter their budget.

In order to better serve their users, Pegipegi has embraced a customer engagement strategy based on personalization. With a spirit of experimentation, their nimble CRM team knows that constant innovation is critical to understanding their users and exceeding expectations—especially during the instability of the last few years.

While the pandemic necessitated a shift in operations for OTAs worldwide, the travel industry has seen a strong comeback as of late, with consumer demand approaching pre-pandemic levels. For Pegipegi, this has offered an exciting window of opportunity to engage their users in a more personally relevant and cohesive way.

Pegipegi’s Conversion-Driving Customer Engagement Strategy

Before Braze, the Pegipegi CRM team was constrained by the manual work their former solutions required. The three-person team was limited in their ability to accurately measure their users’ behaviors and preferences, and lacked the holistic view of users needed to deliver meaningful, personalized messages. They knew they needed to fix this, and set out to find a new solution. Initially, they were drawn to the credibility of the Braze platform, which is used by leading brands worldwide to engage users at speed and scale. They ultimately chose Braze because it could integrate seamlessly with their app, and offered hands-on customer support to help with technical inquiries and ensure the most rapid time-to-value possible to hit their KPIs.

Once Braze was implemented, the team set out to create more effective customer journeys. As the team believes setting clear KPIs is key to success, they began with three goals in mind:

• Better understand customer behavior before, during, and after the purchase journey.

• Define the most effective channel by measuring channel performance (i.e. click-through and open rates).

• Identify the content users were most attracted to (for example, if the resonant creative was related to a promotion or personalized content).

Luckily, with Braze, they were able to start achieving their goals, and quickly stood up three hero campaigns to hone in on their growth targets.

How Pegipegi Created 3 Campaigns That Optimize Engagement With Braze Catalogs

Everyone wants to feel like a travel insider, and Pegipegi delivers a customer engagement experience that achieves that. The three-person team started with a working hypothesis that personalized recommendations could increase traffic and transactions. Using Braze, they created projections for their first three campaigns.

The team set two goals: Increase user traffic in the Pegipegi app and increase transactions. They chose to focus on an active customer segment—users who had made previous transactions and recently searched for a hotel in the app. By concentrating their efforts on activating users that had already demonstrated interest in Pegipegi’s accommodation products, they’d have a higher likelihood of getting users to complete their booking.

The team isolated two measurements to track campaign performance. The first was campaign performance via open rate, click-through rate, and CTOR. The second was business-related metrics: Traffic and transactions. These measurements gave them a broader perspective on success for both campaign execution and overall business impact.

Next, they crafted three hyper-personalized campaigns leveraging Braze Catalogs, a tool that allows you to personalize your customer campaigns using your brand's own catalog of data related to your goods, products, content, or services. They sent emails to a test audience that used Catalogs to personalize content; the control group received emails without Catalog-powered personalization. They also used custom attributes, via Braze Liquid personalization, and custom events, which help track high-value actions, to dynamically pull in information to make each email feel bespoke to the individual.

Campaign #1: Hotel Recommendation for 5 Cities: This abandoned purchase campaign recommends hotels the user has searched for.

• Users first receive a push notification 1 hour and one day following their search. The message reminds them to check out.

• A subsequent email is sent containing hotel recommendations based on the city where the hotel they searched for is located. This email includes relevant information like the hotel’s name, photo, booking rate, and city.
  

Campaign #2: 2022 Year-End Review: This email campaign recaps each user’s travel activities for the year.

• Users first receive an email summarizing the greatest hits from their travels that year.

• A second email is triggered to send as a follow-up that recommends more hotels based on their previous bookings and search behavior.

Campaign #3: “Waktunya Pegipegi” Campaign: A promotional campaign that reminds users to take advantage of a Flight Flash Sale for even sweeter booking deals.

• Users first receive a promotional email campaign prompting them to check out the Flight Flash Sale.

• In a follow-up email, users receive a nudge to complete their user journey with hotel recommendations tied to their past search behavior.

To evaluate the performance of each campaign, they measured the number of users that opened and clicked messages which led to traffic within the Pegipegi app. They also measured purchases and transactions based on conversions from that traffic.

Catalogs proved to be valuable for Pegipegi, whose use case could serve as inspiration for other OTAs. While usually implemented in eCommerce, Pegipegi’s exhaustive tests prove it can also be used to give users a collection of recommendations that take the customer experience to the next level.

Pegipegi’s Results: More engagement, more transactions

Pegipegi’s email experimentation illustrates that building personalization into your marketing is critical to unlocking growth. At a time when many competing OTAs were chomping at the bit to help their users resume their travel plans, Pegipegi cut through the noise with emails that spoke directly to individual users. By keeping their business goals front and center while building their multivariate tests, they increased traffic, engagement, and purchases within their app.

Ultimately, Campaign #1’s hotel recommendation email featuring Catalogs saw a 63% increase in the average click-through rate compared to the control email without it. Meanwhile, Campaign #2’s year-end wrap email saw a 25% higher CTOR when Catalogs was leveraged. Last but not least, emails in Campaign #3 that leveraged Catalogs experienced and 23% lift in click-through rates and a 107% increase in CTOR. When they examined the impact of these campaigns on overall business growth, Pegipegi experienced a 12% increase in both app traffic and transactions. Even more impressive? They achieved this within four months of signing their Braze contract.

What’s next for Pegipegi’s customer engagement journey? When it comes to testing, their users’ response to personalization is the green light they were looking for to continue innovating, and they look forward to seeing what possibilities their partnership with Braze unlocks next. As the team works to drive higher app traffic and conversion rates using Catalogs, they plan to continue exploring additional Braze features to improve their marketing efforts.

Key Takeaways

1. Speaking to the individual is critical. For today’s users, personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have but a must-have. Look for a built-for-purpose solution that can weave in the most up-to-date customer information, like their location, profile, or recent purchase history.

2. Best-in-class customer engagement is always possible, no matter the size of your team. Whether you’re part of a multinational marketing outfit or a mighty CRM team of two, having the right platform at your fingertips makes it possible to deliver the premium, hyper-personalized customer journeys that you need to take your marketing to the next level.