Secret Escapes, founded in 2011, is a leading, members-only travel site that operates in 14 global markets. By partnering with suppliers, tour operators, and accommodations in 150 countries, they negotiate exclusive deals at hand-picked hotels and for holidays to support customers traveling in the UK, Europe, and beyond. 

Whether someone books a family getaway, honeymoon, or anniversary trip, Secret Escapes regularly negotiates and shares relevant deals to make your next trip exciting, enjoyable, stress-free, and affordable.

Business Expansion Puts Pressure on Communications Platform

With over a decade of supporting a variety of travelers’ requests, Secret Escapes recognizes and understands the nuances of marketing to different customers and geographies. According to Eurostat, average EU tourism expenditure varies—83% is travel inside Europe (and 43% within someone’s country of residence), while 17% is to other countries and continents (e.g., Asia and Africa). 

To support various needs, destination choices, and customer locations, Secret Escapes first personalized their advertising, creating more relevant ads for each market to maximize return on investment and marketing results. This happened with the wildly-popular “Whispering Lady” advertisement, which rolled out to 14 markets, with one billion impressions, and a 1.8X total return on investment (ROI). 

Applying personalization to all customer communication, including emails, became a higher priority as Secret Escapes scaled globally, faced unexpected industry pressures—like the pandemic—and memberships evolved. Unfortunately, before using Iterable, Secret Escapes was unable to track which deals and the order they were shared with users in their emails. This hampered personal targeting for more than 62 million customers and how the CRM team leveraged data to inform artificial intelligence. 

Another challenge from lack of data integrations involved ‘Search Emails’—one of the company’s most lucrative campaigns. Sometimes the deals a user saw online after a search weren’t the same ones they received in email. And Secret Escapes was limited to only showing discounts based on the destination searched vs. factoring in other crucial data such as trip type or date parameters.

Secret Escapes needed a comprehensive communication solution that optimizes timely member data to personalize engagement, supports cross-channel messaging, and creates stronger customer connections. Iterable was selected, with migration occurring in December 2021, and has steadily helped improve customers’ confidence in Secret Escapes meeting their unique travel needs.

Personalized Member Deals with Data Feeds

Iterable’s in-built data feeds have played a powerful role in helping Secret Escapes personalize customer communications—especially their emails. The CRM team uses data feeds to create a smart ‘send log’ solution—inclusive of all deals shared with members and all marketing campaigns—which now tracks impressions data to influence AI-driven engagement and targeted messaging. This approach involves three steps:

1. They use a ‘parent snippet’ that matches relevant holiday deals with a user’s recent search event data. 
2. They send that list to an internal server, which captures and stores the data, then returns it to Iterable in array format. 
3. Using a second snippet, they examine each deal in the returned array, and output the data to future email campaigns so each communication is personalized to a member’s different vacation needs and desires. 

With help from their tech and data team partners, the CRM team also uses Iterable data feeds to send full search queries to the same API used by the company website. The queries return near-real time search results that complement a member’s online search and reflect their destination, trip type, and date criteria. Now, CRM produces and distributes dynamic, timely ‘Search Emails’ with a 45% open rate and 8.3% click-through rate, and they foster better connections with current customers that builds long-term brand value, including member loyalty and a growing user base.

Learn more about this data-driven communications approach and how Secret Escapes benefits in this Loom video.

Centralized Communications Management Helps Secret Escapes Adapt to Market Demands

Along with enhanced customer targeting and engagement, centralized communications management with Iterable, plus alignment of CRM operations by function, has improved the speed at which Secret Escapes reacts to market and customers demands. This proved valuable when the pandemic hit (and in its aftermath), and travel nearly stopped.

“There’s nothing like a global pandemic to give a travel business some time to think.” Jen Lang, Chief Customer Officer at Secret Escapes conveyed during Activate. After taking time to strategically restructure and to choose partners like Iterable that support global scale, they are poised to successfully navigate a new industry and customer landscape as people return to travel.