Think about it. As a digital marketing enthusiast, you most probably have been inspired by the marketing tactics of the travel industry at least once in your career. Low-cost carriers like Ryanair can teach you a lot about upselling and cross-selling, Airbnb and Uber are your professors for UX, but for conversion rate optimisation (CRO), Booking.com should be your Yoda.
CRO is not just about selling more
While CRO is still a fairly young digital marketing discipline, Booking.com got into it early – more than eight years ago, to be exact. That’s when this travel giant started their ongoing program of mass experiments and UX development. Back in 2013, an Evercore report stated that Booking.com’s ability to “better leverage conversion improvements” is one of their key competitive advantages. Furthermore, the report stated that:
This alone has contributed to Booking.com enjoying conversion rates that approximate 2-3x the industry average.”
A couple of decades ago, airlines were the queens of loyalty programs, an inspiration to many companies from different industries. When low-cost carriers disrupted the market with unbundling, and then developed upsell and cross-sell tactics for before, during and after the flight, airlines became a muse for all who wanted to increase their Average Order Value (AOV) and revenue.
Since 2015, when Ryanair stated that it wants to become ‘the Amazon of travel’, this buzzword hasn’t had a break in the travel industry. Airlines became retailers – they try to sell more to each of their customers. But you see – that’s exactly the problem:
Airlines are still focused on more: more customers, more upselling and more revenue from cross-selling. But the true travel leaders, like Booking.com, are focused on less – less friction through a better user experience.
Eliminating all of the friction by focusing on the customers – to their desires and aversions – is following the principles of CRO.
So, in my opinion, good retail practices are not the same as CRO.
- Personalisation is not the same as understanding what your customer wants right now.
- Upselling is not the same as informing your customer in a clean and transparent way that sells.
- Making your store pretty is not the same as making the purchase or booking process fluid.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In September 2017, this was still merely a hunch.
How I decided to investigate the maturity of CRO in the airline industry
After reading Michael Hanke’s Airline E-Commerce, I was shocked to realise that CRO is not mentioned in the entire 600-page book – not even once!
Similarly, ConversionXL’s “2017 State of Conversion Optimisation Report” stated that 58% of conversion optimisers have only been in CRO roles for 2 years or less.
So, I wanted to know why CRO is still so new to most airlines. Where exactly do airlines stand with CRO maturity?
My Diggintravel team and I got to work.
Diggintravel’s Airline CRO Survey Report
By working 7 days per week and long into the night over just a 4-week period, we managed to launch the first-ever Airline CRO Survey Report.
A total of 28 airlines from all around the world participated in our survey. We managed to capture the full spectrum of the airline business world, from LCCs to FSCs and from small to large airlines.
The goal of the survey was to evaluate the maturity of CRO processes and the key challenges airline professionals face in their conversion optimisation efforts.
In order to do this, we created our Airline Conversion Optimisation Maturity Model, which consists of 7 areas:
- 6 general CRO areas (people, skills, activities, test quantity, tools, organisational support); and
- 1 airline-specific area (internet booking engine – IBE).
Each area was ranked from Level 1 (basic) to Level 5 (most advanced).
Even though the Airline Conversion Optimisation Maturity Model was built to measure the CRO maturity of the airlines, it is applicable to all forms of business.
Learnings – how airlines compare to other industries
When we launched the Airline Conversion Optimisation Survey, we perceived CRO as something special or unique to airlines. However, we discovered that CRO maturity in the airline industry is quite similar to that of other fields.
Most of the similarities are connected to the fact that CRO is still a young discipline. You see, the 2017 State of Conversion Optimisation Report conducted by ConversionXL and Sentient Ascend – which was our benchmark when searching for similarities between airlines’ CRO and these tactics in other businesses – stated that:
“58% of [optimisation professionals] have only been in CRO roles for 0-2 years. The industry is still relatively young and gaining momentum.”
Of course, the same goes for the airline industry. And this brings us to the first similarity between the airline and other industries regarding CRO.
Four key comparisons between airlines and other industries in regard to handling CRO
Key comparison #1
CRO is a fairly young discipline, and not only in the airline world. However, travel leaders jumped on the bandwagon early.
Key comparison #2
For most, CRO is not yet a structured process. According to the 2017 State of Conversion Optimisation Report, 64% of optimisation professionals still work in a non-structured manner. They don’t plan, fully analyse or document all CRO processes.
One of the indicators that CRO is not yet perceived as a standard in companies is the fact that 47% of optimisers still work at companies where CRO expenses are not included in the budget. This means that HR departments are not headhunting for CRO specialists, and the activities are not fully premeditated as part of the strategy or P&Ls.
Key comparison #3
As a consequence of this unstructured approach, in the vast majority of cases CRO is still being operated by the person most skilled in digital marketing within the company. Instead of employing CRO specialists, companies rely on digital marketing professionals for CRO knowledge.
In 64% of airlines, CRO is performed by an online marketing specialist. The same goes for other industries.
Key comparison #4
In comparison to other industries, the airline industry still falls behind in CRO efforts when it comes to A/B testing and other CRO experiments. While in other industries, 52% of optimisers experiment on a regular basis (at least 12 tests per year), our study showed that only 32% of airlines do this.
Conclusion—How do you become a Leader?
So what is it that we can learn from the airline and travel industry leaders when it comes to conversion rate optimisation? To answer this, we have to rephrase the question:
What we can learn from the CRO leaders?
You see, the airline industry is pretty similar to others when it comes to CRO, because we’re all just at the beginning of this important marketing discipline. But it’s not too early to learn from the best.
Booking.com and Airbnb are leaders when it comes to CRO efforts in the travel industry. A great amount of tests took them far ahead, and we should all derive inspiration from that. However, through our 2017 Airline CRO research, we detected four airlines that can also be considered CRO leaders.
It’s true that the majority of these four airlines are large players, but one of the things that is essential to their success and CRO maturity is that they have adopted a ‘CRO way-of-thinking’ as part of their culture:
- CRO, testing and experimenting are recognised as crucial processes on an organisational level.
- Roles like Conversion Optimisation Expert, Specialist or Executive are common in this group.
- All Leaders have established their own CRO teams. Led by a CRO specialist, these teams are coached and encouraged to learn and broaden their spectrum of skills and knowledge.
So, if you’re wondering what you can take from the best, it’s three things:
- CRO is a process, not a project; it’s about constant learning and optimisation, not a bag of tricks.
- CRO should be part of the culture of the whole company, not limited to one department or one person’s interest.
- Most importantly: More experiments mean bigger growth and success.
The Econsultancy 2017 yearly CRO report reveals the same lesson as Diggintravel’s 2017 Airline CRO Report: The more you experiment, the better your results will be. Airline Leaders perform 5 to 10 tests per month.
And don’t forget, it’s not about you and ‘more’, it’s about understanding your customers better, continuous learning through experimentation and creating less friction.