The Business
lastminute.com is a leading European online travel company that acts as a “Virtual Tour Operator,” specializing in creating and selling Dynamic Holiday Packages. This means it uses its technology to build personalized trips, combining flights, hotels, and services in real-time, to make the modern holiday simple, flexible, and tailored. The brand’s goal is to be a holistic “Travel Companion” for the entire journey, not just a booking website. The lastminute.com portfolio of brands provides travelers with dynamic holiday packages in 50 markets, managing bookings in 24 languages.
The Challenge
lastminute.com relies on a small CRM team to deliver engagement across 20 countries and 25 languages. They also manage several major brands as well as smaller sub-brands.
The brand had several team members who were tied up with managing their weekly newsletters, putting relevant and timely content pieces into place. “The newsletters were difficult to automate because the topics change from week to week,” said Jens Krahl, Head of CRM & Marketing Technology.
lastminute.com wanted to free up those resources to begin working on more revenue-driving opportunities, but for that they needed a solution that could unify their data and power data-driven automations.
The Solution
The partnership between lastminute.com and SAP Engagement Cloud is a perfect match — two tech brands that share an affinity and passion for delivering personalized experiences.
They run up to 470 campaigns per day (depending on the day of the week), using relational data. SAP Engagement Cloud is connected to an external data source that aggregates their data, such as past purchases, email engagement, and onsite activity. The data is fed to Engagement Cloud, which uses it to create and send emails and digital ads. The content is designed to be relevant to different audience segments and is customized for region, language, and more. lastminute.com uses insights from past purchases, email engagement, and on-site activity to create more personalized messaging.
"One of the main reasons we switched to SAP Engagement Cloud was so that we could automate a large number of campaigns. We have a very small CRM team, and previously we had 6 people tied up working on a single campaign for 7 countries. Now it takes only 1 person to manage that campaign for 27 countries, and our people can work on additional programs and customer engagement, which brings in more revenue."
Sending weekly newsletters to drive ongoing engagement
The brand’s target audience books an average of three holidays every year, so it’s essential for lastminute.com to stay engaged and top of mind, which is why lastminute.com sends out a weekly newsletter. However, the newsletter needs new content each week, and it needs to go out to numerous countries and in localized languages.
Prior to working with SAP Engagement Cloud, lastminute.com had six people dedicated to working on the newsletters each week. Now with templates in place, the newsletters are managed by a single person, who uses the relational data and Engagement Cloud automations to create and launch the emails. The individuals who no longer work on the newsletter were freed up and have created all the other campaigns that now exist, including campaigns for families, budget holidays, flash sales, and especially the pre-travel campaign, which drives additional revenue per booking.
Automating the pre-travel campaign
With time and resources freed up from the newsletter, lastminute.com was able to automate a pre-travel campaign. This campaign is designed to engage customers during the time between when they booked and when they depart, upselling them and providing opportunities to enhance their trip, whether with upgraded accommodations, luggage, tickets to museums, concerts, or other essentials.
The messages in the campaign are personalized with specific activity suggestions based on the traveler’s destination.
The frequency of pre-travel messages also depends on the time between booking and the start of the trip:
- If there’s a longer time between the booking date and travel start date, the brand sends more communications with cross-selling recommendations.
- If there’s less time, lastminute.com sends fewer emails, and they’re focused on the most relevant information, like seat reservations.
The Impact
By using the relational data and automations in SAP Engagement Cloud for all our testing and scheduling, lastminute.com is able to save an extraordinary amount of time and reassign resources to other marketing efforts that generate real revenue for the brand.
With a team of only seven marketers, lastminute.com was able to more than double the number of campaigns year over year, going from around 200 to 470+ campaigns.
The newsletters are still an essential part of ongoing awareness and top-of-mind strategy for lastminute.com. However, now that the other automated campaigns are running, these new campaigns bring in approximately 70% of the CRM channel’s bookings, becoming a critical revenue-driver for the channel. The new campaigns make only up to 30% of the total sending volume, creating a significant impact at high efficiency.
“Developing our engagement strategy has been a continuous process. We didn't start everything at once. We worked closely with SAP Engagement Cloud to build everything up over time, and today we’ve reached a place where our personalization and campaigns have become much more sophisticated. And using the insights into our data and engagement, we’re still continuously optimizing.”