To capture consumers’ attention, brands need to focus their attention on crafting unique user experiences to deliver 1:1 personalization based on data.

One of the most important focal points to convert visitors into customers and build customer loyalty is 1:1 personalization. More and more customers feel less motivated to complete a transaction when they’re online shopping if their experience is impersonal. Let’s take a look at some data from Forbes:

• 80% of consumers are more likely to complete an online purchase with brands that offer personalized customer experiences.
• 72% of consumers explain that they only interact with personalized messaging.
• 66% of consumers share that coming across content that isn’t personalized would deter them from purchasing.

Customers want personalization. Think about when you walk into a physical store and an employee really listens to your needs, helps you find exactly what you’re looking for, or goes above and beyond your expectations to help you. That is exactly what customers want in the digital marketplace.

A unique, digital one-to-one personalization experience strategy gives companies the potential to customize messages, offers, and other experiences to each website visitor based on data collected about each user.

Digital one-to-one personalization starts with concrete data. Are you leveraging data to better serve and convert your visitors?

To help you answer “yes” to this question, we’ll take a deeper look at:

• What is 1:1 personalization?
• What data helps you know your customers better?
• How to find data?
• How to leverage the data you find 
• What messages should you personalize?
• Examples of one-to-one personalization

What is one-to-one personalization in marketing?

Delivering a unique (or one-to-one) experience to each online consumer is a technique known as one-to-one personalization in marketing.

By mastering the technique of 1:1 personalization, brands can deliver an exceptional level of customer service by providing personalized messages, product recommendations, offers, and specialized content at the right time based on the user’s needs and expectations.

This type of unique user experience is only made possible thanks to the availability of extensive customer data. If you don’t get to know your customers based on their interactions with your brand and user behavior, you’re missing an opportunity to meet your customers’ expectations.

One goal of personalization is to create a “wow” effect. This means you should be making the customer think, “wow, they really know me.” The more information that a company knows about a certain customer, the more personalized the user experience will be.

Without extensive, personalized data, one-to-one personalization isn’t achievable.

What data to collect to improve your customer experience with personalization?

On a wider scale, it’s important to understand the location of your customer, their demographic information (age, gender, education level), purchasing habits, and website browsing information. However, in the hypercompetitive world of personalization, this surface-level data is not enough.

Brands need to move beyond knowing who the customer is and understand how the customer behaves.

Knowing that your customer is a recent college graduate who lives in New York City and spends a lot of time making Pinterest boards will not be enough information to create a strong buyer persona to achieve a unique and pleasant user experience.

Enhancing your customer’s profile will require you to collect relevant data about how your customer interacts with your brand on all channels, what motivates them to purchase, and what makes them tick on top of knowing who they are.

More specifically, robust personalized data will help you better understand:

• Location and demographics
• Interests and hobbies
• Shopping and purchasing habits
• Device and channel frequency
• Where and how they prefer to shop and purchase
• Satisfaction level
• Likes and dislikes

All of this information will allow you to create a sophisticated customer profile. Understanding their motivations, preferences, and expectations helps you characterize users into intricate market segmentations to give them the best possible experience imaginable.

Ideally, the customer will have a positive experience and feel unique based on the information derived from the robust data collection.

How do you find user data?

Extensive data can be found and refined by cross-indexing information stored on separate databases.

For example, you can harvest personalized data from a customer’s interactions with your business by analyzing and storing comments on social media sites, ratings on review sites, mobile app usage vs. desktop usage, customer service interactions, download requests, and more.

How to leverage one-to-one personalization with personalized data

As you can see, personalization cannot exist without data. To achieve one-to-one personalization on your digital channels, your brand must have the ability to transform the collected data into action.

After monitoring and gathering rich data on your customer’s interactions, history, and behavior on your site, it’s time to convert this personalized data into a refined customer buyer persona to serve your customers better.

By segmenting your profiles, you will be able to better understand your customer’s preferences and pain points, which will help you craft these personalized messages and display them at the right time.

How to personalize interactions with customers:

Once you have substantial personalized data collected about your visitors, you can determine the best way to interact with them. There is a fine line between being helpful by displaying personalized messages and being invasive.

The difference in these two feelings will depend on the amount of prior engagement that the customer has with you. For example, a customer who is subscribed to every newsletter has a company discount card and frequently completes transactions on your website will expect you to know their preferences fairly well, like a regular coming into a coffee shop. On the other hand, a first-time visitor will not expect you to know much about them, but they will expect to be welcomed.

The best way to understand how to serve your customers is by asking yourself how you would want to be interacted with at their level of engagement with your brand. What would make you feel welcomed and what would make you feel overwhelmed or uneasy?

What messages should you personalize?

The possibilities for personalized messages can stretch as far as your mind (or your software capabilities) will allow.

Think about personalization in a broad sense. Let’s say a company wants to put its logo onto personalized gifts for its employees. The company’s logo can be put onto t-shirts, pens, stickers, coffee mugs, phone cases, backpacks, sunglasses, golf balls, holiday baskets– the possibilities are nearly endless. The same goes for personalized messages for your own customers.

In marketing communication, some of the most common outlets for 1:1 personalization are:

• Product recommendations
• Emails (subject lines and content)
• Intro and exit banners
• Pop-up messages
• Conversational marketing (chat boxes)
• Offers and discounts
• Language
• Landing pages
• Pricing
• Greetings

To attract and retain your customer’s attention in a market filled with saturated messages, your brand should focus on personalization as much as possible and in as many channels as you can.

What platform to use for one-to-one personalization in marketing?

The journey to a seamless one-to-one personalization, or one-to-one marketing, experience for your customers starts with sophisticated and intuitive software to help transform your ideas into reality.

AB Tasty is the complete platform for experimentation and personalization equipped with the tools you need to create a richer digital experience for your customers — fast. With embedded AI and automation, this platform can help you achieve omnichannel personalization and revolutionize your brand and product experiences.

What is omnichannel personalization?

In marketing, employing one-to-one personalization across multiple channels, platforms, and touchpoints is commonly referred to as omnichannel personalization.

Customers crave personalization wherever they are – on a mobile device, desktop, social media platform, mobile app, or email. When customers receive a personalized experience, they expect this standard of communication across all channels or platforms that they are interacting with.

Achieving omnichannel personalization requires a seamless flow of customer data from one platform or channel to the next. By gathering information on user preferences, behavior, and interests from all virtual touchpoints, your customer’s profile strengthens.

By receiving this consistent level of personalization across all channels, consumers will be inclined to purchase more and to purchase again from the same brand that made them feel seen and heard.

What are the advantages of omnichannel personalization?

1. Higher conversion rates
2. Increased average order value (AOV)
3. Reduced cart abandonment
4. Improved brand value and customer loyalty
5. Higher customer lifetime value
6. Delivering messages at the right time and place

8 Examples of 1-1 Personalization strategies from retail brands

1. ASOS’s Social Connection

Online retailer ASOS prides itself on offering both new and existing customers a range of personalized discounts and deals, which vary depending on if:

• It’s a new customer 
• It’s a returning customer that’s demonstrated a particular interest (e.g. shoes)
• A regular customer (who could then be offered premium next-day delivery, for example)

But how does ASOS get this information? One method they might use is encouraging customers to log in to the site using social media platforms, which would allow ASOS to access further details such as age, gender, and location—which can then be used to tailor even more personalized messages.

Why it works: The ability to use a social platform for account creation makes the process simple for shoppers, while giving ASOS more insight into what deals or promotions would be of the most interest to them.

2. Nordstrom Remembers Your Size

Nordstrom gave its online shopping cart a simple yet effective personal touch: remembering returning customers’ clothing sizes. This may not seem like a massive approach to deliver a personal experience, but it creates a more seamless checkout for the user and brings them one step closer to the purchase. It’s a rather clever move from Nordstrom that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Why it works: Remembering the customers’ preferred size (based on previous purchases) instantly shows the brand’s attentiveness while making checkout even more simple.

3. Clarins personalization and gamification

Before the booming holiday season, Clarins, a multinational cosmetics company, saw an 89% increase in their conversion rate and a 145% increase in the add-to-basket metric by implementing 1:1 personalization and gamification with AB Tasty.

On Single’s Day, a few weeks before Black Friday, Clarins saw a perfect opportunity to experiment and learn culture by implementing a “Wheel of Fortune” concept in certain countries. The gamification gifts were personalized according to each country’s local culture. Any visitor arriving at their website would play the digital game, spin the wheel, and receive a gift automatically in their inbox. This ease of automatic implementation was a great user experience, especially for mobile visitors.

Read the full story here: How Clarins Uses AB Tasty for Personalization and Retention

4. Amazon’s ‘Recommended For You’ Approach

Amazon is no stranger to personalization marketing. In fact, it could be argued they were the first major e-commerce retailer to really put personalization into action. The company has become known for its product recommendation emails and personalized homepages for logged-in customers. Using their own algorithm, A9, Amazon goes above and beyond to first understand customers’ buying habits and then deliver an experience that’s been deliberately designed for relevance. 

Why it works: Customers feel valued and understood by the retailer when seeing emails and recommended “picks” that are tailored to their interests. Consistency also plays a part in Amazon’s approach, as they continue to deliver an even more granular personalized approach for customers.

5. Nike and Their Customized Approach

Nike always goes the extra mile to personalize the shopping experience, as we’ve seen with their SNKRs app that allows premium (loyalty, Nike+ shoppers) access to a large catalog of products that they can then customize. It’s the perfect way to cement customer loyalty by offering them the unique opportunity to tailor items to their exact liking.

Why it works: By giving customers a certain degree of autonomy with design, Nike is giving customers the freedom to express their individuality, even while the company continues to produce the same style of shoe around the world. Despite being a huge brand, Nike has created a great loyalty program that engages customers and stokes their excitement about buying Nike products.

6. Net-A-Porter’s Personalized Touch

Luxury online retailer Net-A-Porter has adopted the ‘recommended for you’ approach but with a unique twist to appeal to its high-end customers who want a more premium service when they shop. The company gives away freebie products to customers based on previous purchases, adding a personal touch to an otherwise standard online shopping experience. This is not unlike Amazon’s recommended emails, except Net-A-Porter customers receive a physical product — and who doesn’t like a gift!

Why it works: These gifts show the appreciation Net-A-Porter has for its customers and help to bring the luxury shopping experience online.

7. Coca-Cola’s Name Campaign

In 2011, Coca-Cola launched its Share a Coke campaign in Australia, printing thousands of names on their diet and original soft drinks. This simple yet effective campaign made sales skyrocket, supporting the notion that consumers engage with brands that address them by their first name (albeit in a rather broad sense!) Personalized bottles became all the rage, with people trying to find their own names along with those of their friends and family members. The campaign was globally recognized and started the ball rolling for other brands such as Marmite, which also saw great success with a naming campaign.

Why it works: Is it the simple notion of vanity that makes these name campaigns so popular? Consumers love to see their own names on popular products, making them almost ‘gimmicky’ with a collectible edge that makes people feel special!

8. Target’s Guest ID

The US retail giant Target decided to up its personalized campaign game by assigning each customer a guest identification number on their first interaction with the brand. Target then used the data to obtain customer details like buying behavior and even job history! Target used personalized data to understand the consumer habits of its customers and to create a view of their individual lifestyles. Target focused particularly on customers who also had a baby registry with them and even used their marketing data to make ‘pregnancy predictability scores’ for customers who were browsing particular items!

Why it works: Arguably, delivering a personalized experience for every customer visiting a physical store is a tough job for any retailer. By assigning a ‘guest ID’, Target was able to understand buying behaviors and patterns from their customers in-store and use the information to make suggestions on products they may be interested in.

Everyone wins with one-to-one personalization

The data you collect equally benefits your brand and your customers. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you save them time by providing them with informed recommendations, personalized messages, and unique experiences to solve their pain points.

Without proper data collection or genuine segmentation, it’s nearly impossible to provide users with a 1:1 personalized experience. Loyal customers want to feel like their brand really knows them and what they’re looking for. Achieve one-to-one personalized experiences by correctly analyzing and leveraging personalized data. If you’re looking to serve your customers, increase sales, and build brand loyalty at the same time, you’ve found your blueprint with personalization.

The post What is One-to-One Personalization in Marketing? (With 8 Examples) appeared first on abtasty.

On The Beach is a UK travel company specializing in beach holidays. Known for their vibrant and dynamic brand image, they provide hassle-free and affordable beach holiday experiences. 

They strive to appeal to a wide range of travelers, offering a wide selection of destinations, accommodations, and activities.

Often highlighting the excitement and joy of beach vacations, their website showcases the company’s commitment to creating unforgettable holiday experiences. By promoting transparency, flexibility, and excellent customer service, On The Beach has established itself as a trusted and sought-after brand in the UK travel industry.

Fine Tuning the Customer Journey

As On The Beach caters to a wide range of customers, it’s important to ensure that their website provides a personalized experience according to each customer’s needs.

Customers start the journey of looking for their perfect holiday, they may often visit a website multiple times before making a final decision and reaching the final stage of purchase.

This means they have new or returning customers coming to their website. The company should be able to show it understands its customers by providing personalized and targeted messaging along the different stages of the customer/purchasing journey.

This is where testing and experimentation become vital as On The Beach finds the right messaging with the highest positive impact on its different user segments. The Conversion Rate Optimization Manager, Alex McClean, explained,

“We’re trying to look at how we can take our different customer types and give them a better, improved journey”.

An example is when they used different badges to recommend holidays to individual segments coming into their site. With the help of AB Tasty, they discovered that new users preferred a recommendation marked “Bestsellers” and that returning users reacted better to “Our pick”, as they already had trust in the brand.

Testing these various types of messages allowed them to determine the right messaging for each user group, ultimately leading to increased bookings.

The Roll-Out of AB Tasty Across the Company

On The Beach understood the advantage of being able to test and learn after seeing the impact that A/B testing has on their business. In this way, after trying simple tests, based on content and product placement, they started to increase the number of tests they did a month while bringing in other team members. 

By sharing test results, learnings, and best practices, On The Beach ensured that all departments, including marketing, product development, and customer support, had access to the latest information. This cross-team collaboration enabled the company to make data-driven decisions, implement successful optimizations, and continuously enhance the overall user experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and business growth. A real experimentation culture was fostered.

Key Support from AB Tasty

One of the great advantages for On The Beach, as their testing program expands, is being able to learn at speed, as well as the support they receive from AB Tasty’s teams. 

With a responsive and knowledgeable support staff, AB Tasty assists On The Beach in setting up tests, interpreting results, and implementing optimizations. They offer timely and personalized assistance, guiding the company through the testing process and offering expert advice on best practices.

Alex explains,

“For us, the real reason that we chose AB Tasty, and what differentiated AB Tasty from the competitors was the level of service that we were offered. We have complete access to developers, really attentive CSMs, It’s really beneficial to keep things moving where we don’t need to go to our development team”

The support from AB Tasty means that On The Beach can leverage and grow at speed. The learnings that are achieved through testing mean they can improve their site experience and conversions, re-iterate, and grow to provide a customer experience that speaks to their audience.

The post On The Beach Tests the Water with Personalization appeared first on abtasty.

CHALLENGE

As we moved past the Covid pandemic, hospitality brands have been hungry to gain back lost revenue. It is key for brands to level up their customer experience (CX) to withstand intense competition.

TEST IDEA

For this experiment, the team was interested in uplifting overall bookings from couples and families. They theorized that creating a linked end-to-end experience for this audience group would uplift revenue, and AB Tasty was the perfect tool to support their personalization goals.

Two audience profiles were created from multiple data sources in a customer data platform and shared with the front-end marketing tools. These audiences were Families and Couples.

Using this audience data, a personalized digital experience was powered. Website visitors were directed to custom landing pages, which featured banners and offers tailored for their segment.

RESULTS

The results were impressive. The team saw a 35.3% uplift in visitor-to-book and a 32.1% increase in search-to-select.

Couples and families who saw a personalized experience were 21% and 31% more likely to revisit the site respectively, compared to the control group.

Clicks on the homepage hero banner and navigation usage dropped significantly, proving that personalization enabled users to convert without extra website navigation.

The post Pan Pacific Hotels Group Uplifts Revenue with Audience Segmentation appeared first on abtasty.

In this e-book, we share seven experiments from seven brands that have successfully improved their website to either get more online bookings or account creations.

Challenge

For businesses in the travel and hospitality space, converting visitors is riddled with challenges — now more than ever. Which photo of your hotel rooms is going to entice someone to book? How can you simplify and guide users to exactly what they’re looking for? Is your booking CTA loud and clear?

As a travel or hospitality business, your website is your greatest asset. That’s why it’s essential to continuously optimize your homepage, making sure you’re leveraging experimentation practices to lock in more transactions.

What you’ll learn

High-performing experiments from our clients like Best Western, SuperShuttle and OUI.sncf.

How personalization can help you win more conversions.

Tips and tricks to adapt for buses, airlines, hotels, vacation rentals, and tourism packages.

The post 7 Website Optimization Ideas for Travel & Hospitality Industries appeared first on abtasty.

As a Conversion Rate Optimization Manager at OUI.sncf, her day-to-day consists of thinking up ways to make customer experiences smoother and conversions higher. It’s a job she loves, but it’s not without its challenges. Today’s consumers are fickle and their expectations are exacting; one poor experience on an app or website can create a long-lasting negative feeling, potentially spiralling into poor brand perception, a drop off to a competitor, or bad word of mouth.

“More likely than not, when a customer faces a problem during his/her visit, it creates a bad memory, which may mean the customer doesn’t return. Creating an exceptional, personalized, and fluid customer experience gives a sentiment of recognition to the customer, which will incite him/her to complete a transaction and potentially come back. If we work on creating the most seamless and personalized customer journey, over time, this recognition will transform into loyalty and create stickiness, inciting the customer to come back and therefore form a virtuous relationship with us.”

 – Hélène Doré, Conversion Rate Optimization Manager at OUI.sncf

The conversion rate optimization team, along with the product feature teams, at OUI.sncf has plenty of ideas for how to avoid these scenarios and create truly exceptional customer experiences. The question is: which ideas should they implement? Which should they scale? And how can they be sure an idea won’t backfire? 

A/B Testing: The way of data, not debates

What Hélène and her manager Sunny Song, Lead CRO, needed was the ability to run data-driven experiments in order to know which of their ideas will perform best (to optimize the customer experience), and to mitigate risk in case the idea goes south. AB Tasty was able to provide this capability!

“When we have a goal to achieve and we have several possible propositions to achieve the same goal, AB Tasty helps us by allowing us to test these propositions. We can then make the best decision by determining which proposition has the greatest impact,” explains Sunny.

One great example is OUI.sncf’s ‘Exploration Assistant’. 

Think of the ‘Exploration Assistant’ as an AI-powered travel agent. Based on an in-house algorithm, the Assistant is displayed to visitors with a high enough ‘interest score’, and suggests a trip itinerary for the visitor.  The idea sounds great on paper, but would the Exploration Assistant actually make a business impact on bookings?

Using AB Tasty to run a statistically rigorous A/B test, the team determined that conversion rates did significantly increase for those visitors that engaged with the Assistant.  

“This test showed extremely positive results: +61% for web responsive and +33% for desktop impact on the conversion rate,” explains Sunny. This particular experiment was important for more than its impact on these KPIs: “This test was a milestone project for Oui.sncf because it was a very technically complex A/B test and was the first test that incorporated AI algorithms. But the work doesn’t stop here. It’s really essential for the teams to continuously iterate on this version of the algorithm, to test and tweak it for better and better results, so that we’re always proposing the most efficient itinerary to our customers. This is how algorithms evolve, and it goes hand in hand with a continuous optimization strategy.”

In other words: targeted, data-driven testing helps validate strategic decisions at key moments, confirming high-level strategy choices and setting future roadmaps.

“Thanks to the Exploration Assistant A/B test and its very impactful results, we will now industrialize this test. This test was very strategic because it was the first which included AI, which plays a key role in OUI.sncf’s strategy.” 

– Sunny Song, Lead CRO at OUI.sncf

Another advantage to attaching numbered results to testing ideas? Avoiding circular, time-sapping discussions about whose idea to run with. “By implementing A/B tests and providing concrete results and data to prove the effectiveness of certain ideas, we were able to eliminate the “endless” debates we could have where each person has his own opinion on topics,” concludes Sunny.

For example, low click-through rate data indicated to the team that unfolding travel details on the ticket information page on their app could increase clicks to a key CTA.

This idea could have led to hours of endless debate around the respective value of each of these blocks.

Instead, the team used Flagship (AB Tasty’s server-side platform) to run an A/B test on the app. This allowed them to quickly validate the winning variation – which happened to be the version B, where the details of the first trip were automatically unfolded. This led to a 2.49% increase in the click-through rate to the CTA “Choose this trip”, as well as 0.28% more arrivals to the basket page.

Flagship: The platform behind the magic

“Our strategy is to offer the most fluid and seamless user experience possible to our clients, the vast majority of whom browse and book on our OUI.sncf mobile app, which has become extremely popular.” 

– Ingrid Peiniau Head of Customer Experience at OUI.sncf

Customer experience has become increasingly mobile-first. Alongside buying their groceries, clothing and movie tickets on their smartphones, consumers expect to be able to search, book, or reschedule travel via a user-friendly app. This is especially true for OUI.sncf, where a majority of visits are generated via their mobile app.

This meant that it made sense for OUI.sncf to turn to AB Tasty’s server-side solution, Flagship, for their optimization efforts. It’s the platform they used for tests run on their mobile app, versus their website.

Not only does Flagship enable the kind of experiments OUI.sncf was running on their mobile app, it also allows product teams to release new features with virtually no risk. Why? Teams are able to not only rollout a new feature progressively – that is, not exposing all of their user base at once – but they can also easily rollback that feature if they notice a dip in KPIs.  

Benoit Bouffart, Chief Tech & Product Officer at e.Voyageurs SNCF., explains:

“We’re particularly interested in Flagship’s progressive rollout capabilities. We want to be done with publication planning dependencies. Progressive rollout lets us stop or fully rollout a test as soon as it reaches statistical significance without having to wait for a new publication of the app. If the chosen KPIs worsen, we can avoid prolonging a sub-optimal experience. On the other hand, if the test is positive, all of our clients can start feeling the benefits immediately.”

From increasing conversion rates on their mobile app to validating high-level strategy and reducing the risk inherent in feature rollouts, Flagship has become a strategic partner for OUI.sncf.

The post OUI.sncf Relies on AB Tasty for Risk-Free Innovation appeared first on abtasty.

Instagram particularly can be especially advantageous for businesses. Currently, over 25 million companies use Instagram, and about 200 million people visit at least one company page every day. 

Not only does Instagram have less competition, but it also maintains some of the highest audience engagement of any platform. 

Brands are more likely to succeed when more people know about them, so cultivating an online following is essential. Not only will it attract new customers through word of mouth, but it will also build brand loyalty.

For travel brands, a photo-centric platform like Instagram may be the best thing ever to happen. It’s the perfect way to capitalize on visual connections that inspire and motivate people to explore new places. 

With so many people using Instagram to explore interests and find inspiration, there’s a lot of opportunities for travel brands to connect with more followers. 

Here’s how to get more Instagram followers for your travel brand.

Use Hashtags to Attract New Followers

Just like retail brands, travel businesses can also use hashtags to reach new users and get more Instagram followers.  

Hashtags make it easier for users to search and explore, so using the right keywords is crucial.

Websites like IconoSquare make it easier to find hashtags that will help get your company noticed in search results. 

By making an Iconosquare account and connecting your company’s Instagram account, you can search the hashtag you want to use and check its relevance and popularity against other posts while suggesting other terms. 

Use a spreadsheet to keep search results organized and easy to track later on. 

Travel brands can begin by making a unique hashtag for their business included in every post. 

The next step is creating a marketing campaign with a hashtag that entices people to participate and engage with your brand. Promoting a special offer and inviting followers to use the hashtag in relevant photos and videos is one way to get your brand’s hashtag noticed.

An example of an effective Instagram campaign is the #CruiseLikeANorweign from Norwegian Cruise Line. Currently, it has 37,758, all of which advertise this company and boosts its visibility across Instagram.

Know When and What to Post

Even if your company masters the hashtag, your brand may not appear in searches because of post timing. 

When trying to get more Instagram followers, an important step is finding social media monitoring tools that help you review post history and see what worked and what didn’t.

Sites like IconoSquare have tools to break down how well older posts have done for engaging users. There, you can also optimize the best times to post down to the time of day.

Make a monthly posting calendar that includes the day, time, and week for each post. It will help keep you from publishing duplicate or similar content and track engagement for each type of post.

Scheduling posts in advance is a great way to keep your profile relevant. It makes it more likely to appear in searches, and lets followers regularly know what you can offer them. 

Also, make sure to keep the content high-quality. Followers want to see things that are new and interesting, so try to create entertaining posts.

Consider learning about storytelling as a tool for digital marketing. Doing so will help you make content that doesn’t just appeal to your Instagram followers–it resonates with them. 

This type of high-quality content will get users to pay attention and eventually follow your profile.

Additionally, there are many free analytics tools for businesses, both from Instagram and other websites. 

Target the Right Demographic

Many travel brands have the luxury of appealing to a broad audience. Not only do many people rely on travel companies when planning trips, but the desire to travel is something that appeals to many users.

However, forming an effective social media strategy to gain more Instagram followers still needs to appeal to the right audience. 

Your brand might get a lot of online engagement with young adults, but they might not be the ones buying your products. 

Using analytics resources is helpful for travel brands to find which users are more likely to purchase products as well as engage with posts and hashtags.

Once you identify the target audience, it will be easier to curate content that incentivizes them to look into your offers. 48% of consumers expect brands to know them, but with the right outreach strategy, it will be easy to meet that order.

Make sure to link to your company’s website whenever possible to funnel users to your page. 

Follow Other Brands

If your company is still in the beginning stages and hasn’t yet gained much brand awareness, mass following is one way to pull in more Instagram followers.

While this method isn’t for everyone, it is one way to get the ball rolling and start building that follower count. 

Instead of blindly following other accounts, use it to your advantage by studying how other travel brands interact with their followers and what posts create the most buzz.

Taking note of travel trends and following popular influencers will help your brand stay relevant.

It’s a good idea to follow smaller accounts, as they are more likely to check their notifications and follow back. Comment and connect with their posts to boost your visibility.

As you start to gain a fair number of followers, it will boost your company’s credibility and encourage others to follow as well.

It also doesn’t hurt to ask for more followers occasionally. Just like YouTube content creators request viewers to subscribe to their channel, travel brands can invite users to follow them, so they don’t miss out on new products, offers, and more.

Use Geotags

Like hashtags, geotags highlight any Stories, photos, or videos you post by including your location. 

Geotags can be particularly beneficial for travel companies because it strengthens the visual connection that users see between the brand and the country, city, or venue they could discover with your business.

Also, using geotags allows you to contribute to that location’s Story and elevate your brand to other users.  

Don’t be Afraid to Self-Promote

Hashtags and geotags are two ways to make it easy for people to discover your company on Instagram. 

If you are also using other platforms, use those to raise awareness about your Instagram profile. Share a link while providing an incentive for users to click it, such as a unique offer code.

Take it to the next step by adding a link to your account in newsletters, on the company webpage, or in your email signature. 

In the same vein, Instagram for company profiles has the option for sponsored advertisements that are useful for promoting your travel brand and getting more Instagram followers.

Photo, video, carousel ads, and Stories are all effective formats for advertising and building brand visibility.

Consider reaching out to influential users who can alert their followers to your brand. Begin by making a list of accounts that are relevant to travel and following them.

Look for a large following and an email address in the profile description. These are a good indication that the influencer is willing to do sponsored posts or give your brand a shoutout.

Even paid promotions are likely to be positively received by followers if the post appears more natural and genuine. 

45% of people say they are more likely to unfollow brands that talk too much about their products, but striking the right balance with engaging content will help keep their interest.

Conclusion

Photos are one of the best ways to get people excited about traveling, and Instagram is perfect for connecting users to travel companies looking to expand awareness about their brand.

There are many ways to get more Instagram followers for your travel brand.

Using the right hashtags will help your brand stay relevant and connected to the latest trends. It will also help your profile appear in more search results.

Posting at the right time will ensure that when you publish a video, photo, or Story, people will see it. No matter how much content a profile produces, posting at the wrong time means no one will see the content.

Using analytics tools to find your target demographic will help you learn which content is more relevant to users and what leads to the highest engagement with your brand.  

Following other travel brands, as well as popular influencers, will help you stay in the know when it comes to what’s trending.

Geotags, like hashtags, are beneficial because they help companies become more discoverable. They are an excellent way to stay relevant and boost engagement with existing followers.

The post How to Get More Instagram Followers for your Travel Brand appeared first on abtasty.

Travel website Weekendesk has a simple mission: help hard-working weekend warriors easily find the best deals for their trips. They were also one of the first early adopters of our feature management platform for product teams. Their tech and product teams got a sneak peek of the tool, and got to play around before the official release. Here’s what they thought:

To start off – what got you interested in AB Tasty?

Generally speaking, what are the advantages of using a feature management and product experimentation platform?

Julien Martin, VP of Engineering: A/B testing is essential for any business. But in our case, I was very particular about the kind of tools I wanted to use. With our new front-end application, I decided to block any ‘classic’ (client-side) A/B testing solution – I didn’t want a layer of JavaScript/CSS tag on there, to ensure maximum performance.

We thought about this quite a bit, and after trying our own (pretty limited) in-house system, AB Tasty told us about their Feature Experimentation and Roll Outs functionality. It was the solution to all of our issues – no added JS/CSS layer, and no development outside our repository, which will let us maintain the same high level of quality and performance in any situation.

Alexandre Duarte and Alessandro Pintaudi, Co-Heads of Product: The platform lets us be more autonomous and also mitigates risk thanks to progressive rollouts. We can test new features on specific segments of our user base, and also better integrate user feedback in real-time, set up kill switches, and especially, run experiments.

What were your first impressions of the platform? 

Maxime Biloé, Lead Front-End Developer, and Sonia Alliche, Front-End Developer: We think the interface was really clear, everything is very logical and easy to understand, even with the variety of options available in the platform. We were pleasantly surprised at how easy and quick it was to set up a test, from the interface itself to the integration with our application.

Alexandre and Alessandro: The dashboard is easy to use, especially since there are pre-defined use cases – this is a real time-saver. The interface is also very intuitive and easy to get started with the first time around. This is true in terms of configuring the tests, retrieving data and analyzing the reports. Finally, the support we received from AB Tasty allowed us to deploy the tool very quickly, and to launch our first tests in only a few days.

What challenges were you able to tackle thanks to our platform?

Julien: We started with a really simple test, just to get used to the platform. From a technical perspective, the idea was to put the performance of the tool to the test. Just one extra https request to create a better user experience and better processes – this is just perfect.

Alexandre and Alessandro: We want to be quicker and more efficient in our releases, without increasing any risks associated with putting new features live. The platform lets us do this thanks to the different functionalities available in the platform (progressive rollout, A/B testing, feature flagging…), as well as advanced experimentation to optimize our product.

After playing around with the tool, the major takeaway for us is that we need to systematize and speed up how we deploy A/B tests, so that we can better understand the issues our user base faces, and find solutions – all with less risk.

What are the next steps for Weekendesk and AB Tasty?

Julien: We’re going to integrate a new payment service provider (PSP) in our application. The platform lets us deploy a progressive rollout, so we can avoid any messy roll-backs and confirm our theories.  We’re organized into squads, who will be working on continuous optimization on a variety of subjects, and therefore running a lot of tests at once.

Alexandre and Alessandro: We’re going to run a series of A/B test campaigns at the same time during the last stages of the purchase funnel. One of our goals here is to simplify the decision to buy something, but also to uncover the factors that lead up to it.

The post Smooth Sailing With AB Tasty: An Interview With Weekendesk appeared first on abtasty.

Challenge

For hotel brands like Best Western® Hotels & Resorts, customer loyalty is paramount; they aim to create a long-lasting relationship with each client. One of the ways to foster this kind of engagement is through an online membership community. For example, as a Best Western Rewards® member, customers can log in and benefit from discounts and other perks, like free stays, complimentary breakfasts, and upgrades.

The digital team at Best Western® France was looking for a way to encourage visitors to become members, use their accounts, and especially to take advantage of one of their discounts applicable to visits of two nights or longer. They decided the best way to do this would be to run a website personalization campaign using AB Tasty.

Personalization Campaign Idea

The team had an elegant idea: an internet user would be more likely to join the Best Western Rewards® program if they were shown offers directly relevant to their search query. For this, the team simply needed to create appropriate audience segments in AB Tasty using data from their data layer. Since their main goal was to encourage visitors to use or create their membership account, they opted for the following scenarios:

— Upsell scenario: Trigger a pop-in to visitors who were logged in to their membership accounts and looking for a one-night stay, with an incentive to prolong their visit
— Encourage Best Western Rewards® account creation: Trigger a pop-in to visitors who were not logged in to a membership account and looking for at least a two-night stay, with a special promotional offer available only with a Rewards Account
— Upsell and account creation: Trigger a pop-in to visitors who were not logged in to a membership account and looking for a one-night stay, with an incentive to create an account and prolong their stay

This way, the digital team could show discounts only to visitors who were eligible for them, making the browsing experience more relevant, and encouraging non-members to sign up. By promoting incentives and reduced rates for longer visits, they also aimed to increase revenue. In other words: they pushed the right message to the right website visitor at the right time.

Results

The results showed that this kind of personalized messaging can have big effects on engagement. The most successful scenario turned out to be the second one, with around 12% more Best Western Rewards® program sign-ups originating from this campaign. Unsurprisingly, it was easier to convince visitors to sign up for a free account to receive an incentive than to add an extra night’s stay! In addition, the team was able to say that they created a smoother, more relevant customer experience, by only showing promotional messages relevant to each visitor.

Takeaway Tip

Take advantage of your visitor data to create relevant, personalized messages. Not only will you create a more pleasant browsing experience, you’ll increase the number of ways you can increase engagement, transactions, and revenue, all the while optimizing an existing client scenario.

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