High-speed international rail service, Eurostar, wanted to deliver more relevant experiences to individual website visitors with the aim of upping conversions. Travel is a highly competitive business and Eurostar has long known that customer experience is becoming one of the key differentiators among brands.
With support from technology and platform provider Monetate, Eurostar had three main objectives: improve the digital customer experience and conversion rate; reduce calls to the customer contact centre; and increase the number of registrations on the site.
Starting initially with optimisation improvements, Eurostar wanted to address feedback that new visitors are unaware of Eurostar’s USPs. An A/B test that included USPs on the homepage resulted in a 6.2% increase in new visitor conversion rates and a 3.7% increase in overall conversion rates.
Following this, Eurostar created targeted messaging for registered users to increase the number of registrations on site to help improve their customer insights. This resulted in a 96% increase in registrations.
Eurostar then identified some further opportunities for personalisation, after recognising usability issues and low engagement with the homepage carousel, Eurostar decided to change the carousel to a grid in order to encourage interaction and showcase more content. This resulted in a 15% increase in interaction and paved the way for personalisation in the future.
As a follow-up, Eurostar personalised destination content to match previous searches – for example visitors who had previously searched for travel to Paris, were automatically shown information about Paris upon their next visit. This resulted in a further 18% increase in engagement, reduced bounce rates and provided a much more personalised experience for customers.
Perrine Allain, General Manager of eCommerce at Eurostar, explains: “Our customers are no longer just expecting us to engage and satisfy them, they now want us to inspire them too. One size fits all does not work anymore. Customers are expecting us to use the data we collect to enhance their experience in real time and that’s where personalisation comes into play.
Moving forward, we’ll use the data insights that Monetate gives us, to find opportunity segments and explore ways of shaping content around our customers. Using these insights, we plan to employ ‘always-on’ personalisation to deliver contextually relevant, personalised experiences to our customers.
Mike Harris, VP EMEA at Monetate, adds: “Eurostar is a shining example of how a company can very quickly deploy the Monetate platform and experience instant results. Eurostar’s forward-thinking approach has allowed it to stay ahead of the curve, when it comes to customer experience and interaction, and we’re pleased to see that by embracing personalisation it has helped to digitally transform the online experience for its customers.”