Booking.com – Subscription

Background

The entire Email Marketing (EMK) journey starts when users subscribe.

I started this project after learning that we hadn’t spent a well-deserved effort in improving the subscribing and getting welcomed experience for our users. This missing piece, however, could be much more important than we thought since it was the entry point that triggered everything EMK happened after. Do we need more organic subscriptions? How do we treat different subscriber personas effectively? What is the potential of the Welcome Email that we have been low-prioritizing? How do we improve from here? My project aims at studying and proposing answers to these questions.

My role: Owner

Company: Booking.com

Subscribers Study

I started the project by investigating how users subscribe to our mailing list and who they are.

4 Subscribing Journeys

I met with several key stakeholders in Email Marketing to get data resources of our current subscription situation. Thanks to Google Analytics, I was able to identify 4 main subscribing journeys and their proportion within the total subscription number we receive each week. To my astonishment, 97.13% of our subscriptions currently come from the auto opt-in box when users finish the booking, which I called “Set-up Subscriptions” as most users have no clear intent to do what they sign up for. This means that only 3% of the subscriptions we are receiving are organic.

4 Subscriber Personas

Based on the subsciption journeys, I identified the subscriber personas – their interests, concerns, and action points. I called them: The Booker, The Surfer, The Deals Seeker, The Learner. My hypothesis was that each of them deserved a personalised onboarding treatment.

Types of Subscription

I then divided different personas into 2 major types of subscriptions: Set-up and Organic, and measured each type’s population and impact. I obtained the metrics we had from Tableau and compared that with those from the published general marketing reports (© investp 2019). From there, I found a room of potential improvement we could aim at and formed my hypothesis:

When users proactively subscribe (organic subscription), they expect a follow-up action and are highly easy to be converted.

If we increase the number of organic subscriptions (which is currently having a high potential to grow) and improve the performance of our Welcome Email, we can get more bookings.

Welcome Email

My hypothesis emphasises 2 action points that need to be taken: 1) Improve the Welcome Email and 2) Get more organic supscriptions. I started with the Welcome Email

Analysis

I analysed the current Welcome Email and found 3 main takeaways:

We are sending the same Welcome Email to different types of subscribers, regardless they subscribe before or after booking.
We only talk about deals and do not take the opportunity to guide subscribers onboard.
The copy and look & feel need to be refreshed.

Then I compared the current Welcome Email metrics (open rate, click rate, ROI, etc.) with the average metrics from published marketing reports. I found that our Welcome Email is theoretically underperforming.

Brainstorm

I conducted a brainstorming session between different stakeholders to discuss potential content for the Welcome Email. We identified 2 Welcome Email variants:

Trip-enrichment Welcome Email (for The Booker, who subscribes after booking)
Pre-book Welcome Email (for the rest of the personas, who subscribe before booking)

Design

Based on all collected data, I built a content map of the new Welcome Email that consists of 3 groups of content:

Baseline content – should exist on both variants
Variable content – chosen based on each variant
Incentive content – occasionally available

I designed 3 Welcome Email mockups including:

Pre-book Welcome Email (for users who subscribe before booking)
Pre-book Welcome Email + Exclusive Incentive (for users who subscribe before booking)
Trip-enrichment Welcome Email (for users who subscribe after booking)

Current Status

Collaborations

Along the way, several stakeholders helped me with useful insights to developed this project. I presented this project to key stakeholders across Email Marketing and received significantly positive encouragement.

Impact

One of the objectives for Email Marketing in 2020 is improving the Subscription onboarding journey. My project is one of the foundations for the team to base on and develop.