As part of our Mastering Mobile Marketing video series, we’ll be sharing a few tips and tricks on how to improve the performance of your travel app. We’ll be looking at overcoming seasonality issues, the need for sharing strategies, and one method of increasing your re-booking rate.
Seasonality
Seasonality is widely known to affect travel apps and their performance at different points of the year – but what can we do about it?
To answer this question, we must take it back to the user. We know that summer holidays and term breaks strongly influence the dates of family getaways, but what about other types of user? We might find that young professionals, for example, are more likely to go away outside of these busy periods.
Being aware of varying trends in seasonality by demographic can help to inform your app acquisition strategy.
You can allocate your media spend to different channels at different points of the year, depending on the level of appeal to each demographic segment. Doing this will ensure you are always targeting the most opportune demographics at the relevant point in time, which will increase your ROI and minimise the effects of seasonality on your business.
Sharing strategy
Encouraging users to share app content with friends is an essential strategy for all types of apps, as users tend to trust recommendations from their friends, and so acquisitions of this type can be really valuable. However, the need for this is increased with travel apps due to the inherent shareability of the content. Providing the ability to plan a holiday collaboratively, or at least share different options, means both a better experience for the user, and easy acquisitions for your app.
The more you reduce the friction users experience when trying to plan a holiday for multiple people, the more likely you are to create a chain of referrals as different groups of users travel with their friends and family.
It really is essential to implement that sharing strategy as soon as possible!
Increase re-booking rate
What some travel apps forget, is that while securing a booking may be your conversion goal, it doesn’t mean that the user experience is over at this point.
A successful travel app is useful to the user in the run up to the trip, and during.
For example, you could send a push notification the day before the flight to remind them of the time they’ll be flying. Or, you could direct users to guides which will give them inspiration on how to spend their holiday. And if you wanted to get really fancy, you could use APIs to inform your push notification content by pulling in external information. For example, you could notify the user of the upcoming weather, or of any interesting events going on in the region they’re visiting. Taking care of your user post-booking is what will really drive those re-bookings up.
It’s these types of strategies that really add value to the user and cement your app as their preferred travel partner. A
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