The New Travel Consumer: Segmentation for Personalization

This is the third of five articles co-written by Sandra Thomas-Comenole and Frank Belzer on the "New Travel Consumer". The articles in this series delve into the concept of how COVID-19 and the quarantine impacted the travel consumer mindset, preferences and expectations, as well as offer ways that travel professionals can meet these new expectations.

Personalization, curation and marketing to an audience of one has been the trajectory of marketing departments for several years prior to COVID. Yet, with the advent of quarantine and increased isolation in 2020, more consumers have adopted the technologies that use these personalization practices.

We all have experienced an increase in our comfort levels with services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. These interfaces remember who we are and adjust what they share with us based on the information we share, our search history and our previous buying patterns. They can even make algorithm-based recommendations based on this information. Perhaps this prompts us to ask this question: how well do we know and remember our customers, especially when they are talking to us live or dealing with our website?

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The consumer has a right to expect that they will be remembered (like they are with Amazon) and smart recommendations will be made, and the advice will reflect our preferences as they do on Netflix. After all, consumers are receiving this level of personalization from these other services that are perhaps not as targeted as travel, as they are broadly used by millions of customers every day. If the standard around personalization and tailoring to the consumers’ needs has changed the mind of the customer who receives these relatively inexpensive and widely distributed services, what does that mean for those of us providing more expensive and specialized travel services?

The new travel consumer expects to have their needs and wants met without having to hear irrelevant marketing messaging. They not only want their products to be curated specifically to their preferences but also their marketing – meaning this is the time that you want to ultra-segment your marketing list. Sure, you are already segmenting your marketing list in terms of demographics, geographics and even self-selected attributes. Let’s take it a step further to segment on behavior as well. Here are a few ways to segment based on behavior:

1. Start at the Lead Gen Stage

Target your advertisements to specific types of travel, such as beach vacation, amusement parks, multi-generational, weddings and honeymoons. Use the responses from these specific marketing efforts to naturally segment your list and deliver the pertinent content.

2. Surveys and Quizzes

You will want to create engaging content such as quizzes and surveys to segment based on their responses. For example, a quiz entitled, “Which destination is next on your bucket list?” could ask questions about countries and destinations that they are interested in, level of service, activities that they want to participate in, etc. The responses to each question can naturally segment your marketing list into categories based on level of service, activities and destinations. With this information, you can send highly relevant information to your marketing list.

3. Content Engagement

Retarget your marketing list based on content engagement. For example, send out an email to a targeted list on active travel. Active travel can mean something different to everyone: types of activities, destinations, level of activity. Therefore, you will want to include links to a variety of types of activities such as cycling, hiking and boating. Then send them additional content based on what content they interacted with.

4. Retarget Your Customers Across Platforms and Channels

If customers engage with cycling content in an email, send them a physical brochure. If they put an item in their cart, use Facebook pixel to retarget them with an ad on Facebook.

The new travel consumer has grown used to being remembered and having product suggestions and marketing messages curated to their preferences. There are many ways that marketing professionals and travel executives can offer a high level of personalization both in product offering and targeted marketing. In our next article, we explore the new travel consumers’ mindset on customer service.