Secret Escapes Transforms its Customer Data Strategy and Unlocks AI-Driven Marketing with Snowplow
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Background
The Secret Escapes Group is one of the world's leading online travel and experiences companies. It comprises a range of travel brands operating across Europe and is delivering on its vision of inspiring the world to escape in style. Founded in London back in 2011, the company negotiates exclusive rates for luxury hotels and holidays around the world.
Secret Escapes believes that the process of booking a holiday should not just be exciting, but enjoyable too. Most importantly, the experience should be stress-free. This belief led the company’s founders to create a website where members have access to the best hand-picked hotels and holidays, all at an exclusive price. It is this unique approach that has driven Secret Escapes’ rapid growth, with the company becoming a major player in the luxury global travel market.
With the company's rapid growth, richer and more reliable data was needed to maintain its competitive edge and continue to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
This led Secret Escapes on a journey to revolutionize its customer data infrastructure. The journey started through the adoption of Snowplow for app tracking, a decision that would eventually lead to a complete transformation of the company’s data ecosystem.
Challenges
Secret Escapes identified some shortages in its customer data that impacted its marketing and decision-making. At first, the company used MongoDB for web tracking. While this tool offered basic information like product views by date and ID, it did not provide deeper insights into customer or user behavior.
Robin Patel, the Head of Data & Analytics Engineering, pointed out these limitations:
“We couldn't combine our in-house tracking data with other types of information, like who made the request, what did they do, where did they come from, had they been on the site before, or if they were a member.”
ROBIN PATEL | HEAD OF DATA & ANALYTICS, SECRET ESCAPES
This deficiency created significant hurdles for marketing attribution and optimization.
The team also utilized Google Analytics, but faced issues with ad blockers and cookie deprecation, which limited its effectiveness. Consequently, the marketing team was looking for a straightforward and dependable solution for tracking customer behavior on the Secret Escapes app.
“Google analytics data was fragmented when looking for insights on our different tech platforms. It became a cumbersome and laborious process to obtain simple metrics.”
ROBIN PATEL | HEAD OF DATA & ANALYTICS, SECRET ESCAPES
Moreover, Secret Escapes was unable to gain a single, complete view of its customers (customer 360) and measure the impact of its marketing campaigns and activities, particularly across the company’s mobile app. Richard Warriner, Digital Analytics Manager at Secret Escapes, shared this challenge. He emphasized that app development is diverse, and there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. This complexity made it difficult to develop a data strategy that is crucial for personalized marketing and informed decision-making on product development.
These challenges led Secret Escapes to explore new solutions to enhance its data strategy and ultimately improve its marketing efforts.
Solution
Secret Escapes’ Journey to Snowplow
To overcome its challenges, Secret Escapes took the first step by using Snowplow’s customer data infrastructure (CDI) capabilities for app tracking. The data team later broadened their approach to include server-side tracking. This shift allowed the company to gain a trusted holistic understanding of customer behavior across all its digital platforms.
The journey began with a successful trial demonstrating Snowplow's efficient app-tracking capabilities. Robin Patel highlights its positive influence:
“Snowplow immediately changed the way we think about tracking in our day-to-day. The marketing team started to proactively ask about tracking for new features, way up front in the process. This behavioral change proved the value of Snowplow from the outset.”
ROBIN PATEL | HEAD OF DATA & ANALYTICS, SECRET ESCAPES
Seamless Integration: Building a Data Powerhouse
With Snowplow’s value proven, Secret Escapes decided to enhance its data stack by adding Snowplow, alongside Snowflake for data warehousing and Tableau for reporting. Additionally, the company seamlessly integrated Snowplow with its customer engagement platform, Iterable.
Enrichment: Transforming Raw Data into Gold
The Secret Escapes data team has made extensive use of Snowplow’s enrichment features, including:
- User agent enrichment for app identification;
- Geo-location enrichment to identify user locations;
- Device enrichment for better understanding of user technology;
- Bot enrichment to filter out non-human traffic.
Realizing Data’s Full Potential
Richard Warriner emphasized the flexibility and power of Snowplow:
“The versatility [of Snowplow] allows us to take the raw data, model it, transform it, expand it, enrich it, and come out the other end with a data set that's flexible for all of our product teams.... It's highly targeted information. But through that enriching process, data stitching, identities, we can massage it into something that is very easily communicable to all of our feature developers and product managers.”
RICHARD WARRINER | DIGITAL ANALYTICS MANAGER, SECRET ESCAPES
Results
Enhanced Data Reliability and Trust
The implementation of Snowplow dramatically improved data reliability at Secret Escapes. Robin Patel shares:
“We've found a lot of reliability and trustworthiness in the metrics that are supported by Snowplow data. The accuracy of our product page views has increased by 5%.”
ROBIN PATEL | HEAD OF DATA & ANALYTICS, SECRET ESCAPES
This newfound confidence in their data allowed the team to make more informed decisions and phase out less reliable systems like Google Analytics.
Comprehensive Customer Journey Understanding
Snowplow enabled Secret Escapes to gain a holistic view of customer journeys across multiple sessions over time. Through identity stitching, the data team can now attribute user behavior, whether logged in or not, creating a more complete picture of individual interactions with their platform. This allows them to attribute a further 15% of logged out traffic to an individual.
Unlocking AI-Driven Use Cases
Propensity Scoring
Secret Escapes uses Snowplow to create a comprehensive customer view (customer 360) in its data platform. This view feeds data science models with AI-ready behavioral data. The models then enhance customer journeys and experiences on the website. This, in turn, improves the customer booking experience.
Personalization & Recommendations
Secret Escapes uses Snowplow's data to create a detailed customer view for AI-driven marketing. The company’s data science team uses Snowplow data to identify valuable customers based on their website behavior. The team then feeds these insights into their CRM platform to personalize outreach through emails and push notifications.
Marketing Attribution & Optimization
Secret Escapes also used Snowplow to move from a last-click marketing attribution model, pathing the way to better marketing insights. Previously, it relied on limited Google Analytics and MongoDB data, tracking only page views by user and product ID.
Now, with Snowplow, the company can trace full customer journeys across sessions, and use identity stitching to bridge gaps in data. It also employs multiple different attribution models. This approach reveals which marketing channels and tactics boost bookings and page traffic. These insights then help the marketing team refine campaigns to optimize business results.
Operational Improvements
The implementation of Snowplow led to several operational benefits:
- Common Language: Snowplow facilitated better communication between teams. As Richard Warriner noted, "Snowplow has allowed the business to use a common language between myself, the developers, and product managers."
- Faster Feature Development: Snowplow enabled quicker development cycles by providing the data needed to explore and enhance customer experience features.
- Cost Savings: Secret Escapes was able to migrate off the paid version of Google Analytics, resulting in direct cost savings.
- Increased Agility: Snowplow's flexibility allowed Secret Escapes to adapt quickly to changing business needs and technical architectures.
Data Science Enablement
Snowplow's rich data collection greatly supported Secret Escapes' data science work. The availability of rich data enabled the development of more specific and powerful models, which was crucial for reaching out to subsidiaries with limited data access.
Richard Warriner summed up the transformative impact of Snowplow:
“Each part of the business builds its own ecosystem around Snowplow to fit their own needs.... the way that we've done it here at Secret Escapes, is highly organized and well structured and serves to fulfill the needs of the data pipeline downstream.”
RICHARD WARRINER | DIGITAL ANALYTICS MANAGER, SECRET ESCAPES
These instances demonstrate Snowplow's significance in Secret Escapes' approach. It aids in making informed choices, enhancing marketing strategies, and providing customized experiences.
Looking Forward
As Secret Escapes continues to evolve its data strategy, Snowplow remains central to its future plans. The company is focused on:
- Enhancing User Experience: Using Snowplow data to reduce booking friction and improve customer satisfaction.
- Advancing Self-Service Analytics: Empowering users across the organization with data literacy and self-service capabilities.
- Accelerating Data Product Deployment: Rapidly delivering data-driven insights to all business areas.
- Evolving Data Infrastructure: Seamlessly transitioning to a microservice architecture with Snowplow's support.
Robin Patel encapsulated his appreciation for Snowplow:
“The fact that Snowplow manages the infrastructure as a paid service and we just have data arriving in our Snowflake instance is a massive weight off our shoulders.... Snowplow has always been stellar in providing customer service and support.”
ROBIN PATEL | HEAD OF DATA & ANALYTICS, SECRET ESCAPES
Secret Escapes, together with Snowplow, is excited to improve how it understands its customers. The company aims to create more personalized experiences to help it grow in an increasingly competitive travel sector. By using data wisely, Secret Escapes can show how a data-driven approach not only boosts its business but also brings more value to its customers.
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