Luxury Escapes Chatbot
Challenge
Luxury Escapes continues to pave the way in providing the best deals for luxury travel destinations. With humble beginnings in Melbourne, Australia, they now service 29 countries around the globe. More than 2 million users visit their travel site each month to learn, explore and book holidays in some of the best destinations in the world such as Bali, Thailand, Singapore, and more! Luxury Escapes’ deals are regularly updated and subscribed users are notified via email and additionally re-targeted through Facebook Ads. These tactics brought in small open and engagement rates so the brand started looking for a less cluttered channel to reach its customers. They wanted to provide personalized notifications, suited to their audience's travel experience, notifying them of the latest and the greatest deals. Furthermore, they wanted to have an engaging experience for users to find their best deals rather than the current cumbersome experience of searching and endless scrolling on their website. Their Goal Increasing online sales and provide personalized updates to the user about new deals, from offering a more conversational experience that still drives sales and conversions Increasing user engagement To further increase user engagement, Master of Code launched two additional chatbot features. The first launch was for a random vacation selector called Roll the Dice. The chatbot would suggest a random destination and vacation package to the user. We built Facebook ads that drove traffic directly to the vacation selector. 'Roll the Dice' was played more than 16,800 times during the initial campaign. The second feature we created was an Augmented Reality (AR) filter. The AR filter was sent to the users as a retargeted message.
Solution
Enhancing the shopping experience Master of Code designed, built and launched the Luxury Escapes Messenger Chatbot in February 2019. It allowed users to search deals based on their preferences, book luxurious trips around the world and offered a fun 'Roll the Dice' game. Luxury Escapes, in partnership with Master of Code, rolled out a paid social campaign in line with the launch to offer customers a simpler way to search and book and also aimed to boost sales. With just 5-6 interactions within the chatbot, the bot was able to predict a user's ideal travel preferences and later retarget them with current and upcoming luxury deals. Retargeting the users Shortly after the launch of the campaign, Master of Code reviewed the data to analyze users' behavior and experience patterns. From this analysis, we trained the bot to retarget engaged users with new deals that aligned with their interested destinations. Technologies We Leveraged • Luxury Escapes Deals API • Google’s API for Location detection • Integration with Live Chat Inc. • Custom Event Tracking for Reporting • Automatic retargeting messages to the user to bring them back to the chatbot • Salesforce integration to create tickets when Live Chat agents were unavailable Our Solutions • Live Chat integration using Live Chat Inc. • Live Chat Inc.’s Facebook Messenger application was not on par with the Facebook API causing us to program a middleware that controlled the inflow and outflow of messages between the chatbot, live chat, and Messenger. It gave us control over the handover protocol, thereby, using different operations like creating a chat, ending chat, etc. at will. Personalized retargeting messages The key to personalized retargeting messages was to track user behavior inside the chatbot. So we developed an algorithm that would track every movement of the user inside the bot, the deals they look at and how deep in the flow the users go to. Once we had all the data, we would sort user preferences using different metrics and would retarget the user with a personalized deal that they were most likely to buy.
Results
In just 3 months since launch, the chatbot generated more than $300,000 of sales revenue from engaging with less than 6,000 users. A comparative study was done to review the open rate of Luxury Escapes promotional emails vs. the Messenger chatbot. While their emails averaged an open rate of 14%, Messenger exceeded expectations and garnered a reply rate of 89% of total retargeted users. • 3x Higher conversion rate than their website • $ 300K+ Revenue generated in the first 90 days • 89% Reply rate for the retargeting messages Master of Code created a conversational solution that Luxury Escapes used to create paid campaigns to drive users to access exclusive deals on the chatbot. Their first social campaign ran for 14 weeks in February 2019, which also included a retargeting strategy using Broadcast Messages. As a result, the chatbot generated more than $300K in its first 3 months of the campaign. 52.63 % User Engagement Small engagement features go a long way in increasing brand authority. Roll The Dice, a random vacation selector, garnered so much excitement that it was used more than 16,800 times with the average user using it around 3 times per visit. Ads promoting users to “Roll the Dice” also had a high conversion rate of 52.63%. 3x Higher Conversion Rate One of the main use cases for the chatbot is to allow users to find personalized deals faster. We trained the bot to understand inputs such as, 'show deals to Bali', or ‘show me beach holidays’ and relevant deals for users to view and add to their cart. The chatbot’s conversation rate was 3x higher than the website’s, soaring to a rate of 12%. This meant every 9th user who used the chatbot to find the deal ended up making a purchase. • 7400+ Number of times the users were retargeted back into the bot • 4070+ Deals viewed • 6200+ Users engaged with the bot in 3 months since launch • 89% Reply rate to retargeting messages • $ 300K+ Revenue generated in the first 90 days • 16.8K+ Number of times Roll the dice was played
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