Case Study
India’s Premium Travel Platform ixigo Achieved an Open Rate of 54% using CleverTap’s Email Campaigns
54%Increase in Email Open Rate
3%Increase in Email CTR
The ixigo Story
Launched in 2007, ixigo is India’s go-to travel platform. They help more than 8 million customers with information tailored to help them book the perfect trip. Cabs, trains, flights, and hotel bookings? It’s all systems go with ixigo!
With 14 million monthly active users across all their apps and 500,000 transactions every month, ixigo expects to touch $500 million annualised gross merchandise value through them by next year.
Recently, Indian Railways’ ticketing arm, Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), partnered with ixigo to exclusively power hotel bookings for the IRCTC users. Through this, ixigo’s wide range of accommodation offerings from domestic and international hotel partners will be available on IRCTC’s web and mobile platforms.
Challenges
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Onboarding Experience -
User
Engagement -
Personalization at Scale
Convincing new users to stay loyal isn’t easy. In a sea of travel apps, it’s very easy for an app to lose users to a competitor. The biggest challenge they faced was the activity of users immediately after download. User activity decreased and ixigo was looking for a way to provide a great onboarding experience to new users and retain them long term.
With the technology available, they also wanted to see how elaborate design and personalization would impact the conversion on their emails and push notifications.
One of the other challenges was repeat transactions by first-time users. There was a significant drop in that particular metric. To get a first-time buyer to transact again had a lot to do with their initial experience while booking and after. Because all the above was happening online, emails became the starting point for all conversation and for converting users.
Solution
ixigo leveraged CleverTap’s Clever Campaigns (“Welcome new users”) to reach out to users who had just signed up. They built these campaigns with dynamic and captivating visuals, which left a lasting impression on customers. They used A/B testing to see which format worked best for their audience.
Once users were coming back to the app, the second challenge was to figure what they were doing in the app. Smart marketers follow the user’s steps and then define where to engage them. ixigo did this by using Flows, which allowed them to track what users do before or after a particular event. In their case, the events they carefully mapped were after logging in, before app uninstall, after booking a flight, etc.
With a clearer understanding of the user journey, the next important step was to look into the drop-off from each touchpoint. ixigo used Funnels to see the drop offs from one stage to another. They fixed these friction points through personalized email campaigns that made the user interact more often on their app.
Email Templates
ixigo used CleverTap’s email templates, which saved them a lot of time and analysis. They could now just select a template, fill in the relevant content, and be ready to send it to users at the right time.
Flows
Flows allows them to track what most users were doing before or after a particular event. It became essential for ixigo to know what users were doing post app launch.
Funnels
ixigo used Funnels to look at each step in the customer journey – from the app being launched to finally booking a journey. They were able to point out which step was creating friction and fix that.
