KILROY travels - Online cross sales

KILROY travels doubled its cross sales with help from email dialogue

The challenge
Sales of plane tickets and other products have been falling in the travel industry, and in response, the industry has been busy trying to compensate by reducing expenses. The problem for KILROY Travels was that their telemarketers no longer had time to promote hotels and travel insurance, i.e. cross-selling of bonus products with larger profit potential wasn’t being conducted. Subsequently, KILROY Travels needed a solution in which the customer going online and buying plane tickets would also be made aware of hotel and travel insurance products.

The strategy
We decided to transfer KILROY Travel’s existing “Let us help you, we have the practical experience you need…” philosophy to the Internet in order to increase customer purchases. At the same time, we challenged the customer to sign up for KILROY Travel’s newsletter in order to prepare for future sales. We used the existing communication channel, email, in a three-tiered solution:

• Invitation to the customer to involve KILROY Travels in the planning of the upcoming trip, with the purpose of making the trip even better
• If the customer was interested in the proposal, he/she was challenged to answer some questions in an online survey about his/her travel plans and the trip’s purpose
• The customer would receive an individual, visually personalized response with recommendations dependent on the actual answers in the survey. If the traveler were to go on a beach holiday for example, that theme would be used in the email’s design. By clicking on a link from the email, the customer could directly find out about a relevant hotel, travel insurance or a “Before departure” checklist, if he/she had indicated a need for it. The email had a high individualization rate, i.e. 10 receivers received 9 different versions on average

Results
Campaign period 1 – travel destinations limited to Europe

• Actual response percentage after reminder was 51.5% in contrast to a goal of 20%
• 77% took action based on the email
  
  * Clicks on email links to kilroy.dk/hotel & insurance was 33%
• 44% chose to take action via telephone instead
• Hotel and insurance sales throughout the campaign period rose from index 100 to index 161, in contrast to a campaign goal of index 110

Campaign period 2 – travel destinations throughout the world

• Actual response percentage after sending of reminder was 48.4% in contrast to a goal of 20%
• 70% took action based on the email
• Clicks on email links to kilroy.dk/hotel & insurance was 26%
• 44% chose to take action via telephone instead
• Hotel and insurance sales throughout the campaign period rose from index 100 to index 201 in contrast to a campaign goal of index 110

In this period, KILROY Travels experienced an actual doubling of their total online hotel sales (estimated by measuring number of reservations of a special campaign offer that was revealed in the email), regardless of target group population.