HolidayPirates engages travelers with fast, relevant marketing messages powered by Vonage and WhatsApp

HolidayPirates wanted to engage budget-savvy travel hunters looking for deals with the most relevant offers from its travel platform partners. To ensure that readers didn’t miss out on travel packages and deals that could close within hours, the company needed a faster, more scalable communications channel to give readers access to offers in real time. With the Vonage Conversational Commerce solution powered by Jumper.ai, HolidayPirates is able to elevate customer experiences using the WhatsApp Business Platform, meeting customers where they are.

Leverage a real-time marketing channel for better customer engagement

Every day, editorial teams at international travel company HolidayPirates search the internet for the latest travel offers, curating everything from flight packages to resort stays for budget-conscious travelers. Using the HolidayPirates website and app allows readers to view packages from leading online travel platforms, saving them the time of comparison-shopping on their own.

With the travel deals coming and going quickly, the company sent daily email updates to its nearly one million subscribers about new travel opportunities. Readers who were away from their emails or couldn’t access the app during the day risked missing exciting offers. Equally challenging was that the company couldn’t measure the attractiveness of a travel deal and what motivated a customer to take action, making it difficult to target subscribers with relevant offers.

As travel resumed after the pandemic, HolidayPirates needed a faster, more scalable way of reaching subscribers. After determining that WhatsApp was widely popular among its customers, HolidayPirates partnered with Vonage to leverage the Jumper.ai solution and build a powerful marketing and communications channel with WhatsApp Business Platform.

Using WhatsApp, the company broadcasts messages about new travel packages in real-time to subscribers. Links from WhatsApp take subscribers straight to the offer on the HolidayPirates website, where they can review it before visiting a travel partner directly.

HolidayPirates promoted the WhatsApp channel through email, social media, and its website. To grow the channel with people looking for their next big adventure, the company created a contest giving new WhatsApp subscribers a chance to win trips and other prizes. Subscribers were encouraged to share their HolidayPirates offer with friends and family, which increased their odds of winning.

“Since leveraging Vonage's Jumper.ai solution to add the WhatsApp channel, we’ve grown our WhatsApp subscriber base by 53 percent in only three months, now reaching over 220,000 subscribers eager to engage with the offers we share,” says Kamila Skötsch, Global CRM Team Lead, HolidayPirates. “We’ve seen a tenfold increase in subscriber engagement through WhatsApp compared to email offers and over twofold the engagement over app notifications.”

Turning conversations and engagement into sales

HolidayPirates started to capture subscriber preferences by sending messages inviting customers to choose between several specific deals, such as beach, city, or hiking trips. They automatically receive a message routing them to their choice – while the company discovers the offers that appeal to different groups of subscribers. Wanting a faster, more customized way of engaging with subscribers, HolidayPirates uses Vonage Conversational Commerce Platform powered by Jumper.ai to develop subscriber segments and deliver relevant travel offers via WhatsApp.

In addition to a daily message, HolidayPirates will target its most active subscribers with an additional one to three compelling WhatsApp conversations per week. As more subscribers using WhatsApp act on deals that might close within hours, they drive higher engagement than any other channel.

“With WhatsApp and Vonage, we’ve been able to better identify and market to the top 25 percent of our active subscribers,” says Skötsch. “Our subscribers using WhatsApp are faster to act on deals than people using other channels, generating more traffic to our partners with click-through-rates as high as 40 percent, andsome messages receiving a 97 percent open rate.”

Learn more about how Vonage can help you build better connections, communications and engagements with employees and customers around the world.