Intrepid Travel uses real-time and first-party data analytics to boost sales

Intrepid Travel is seeing a substantial increase in bookings and revenue from a personalisation initiative that makes use of first-party data, real-time behavioural data and AI.

Credit: Intrepid.

Chief customer officer Leigh Barnes told iTnews that 30 “behavioural email journeys” introduced during the 2023 calendar year had made a material difference to the tour operator's fortunes in a booming tourism market.

A "behavioural email journey" is a targeted approach to email marketing that sends personalised emails to subscribers based on their actions, preferences, and behaviours. 

Barnes said that individuals' travel preferences are predicted based on their real-time interactions with Intrepid’s customer-facing platforms, as well as by using historical data like their previous bookings.  

“For example, we send an automated email to subscribers who have been browsing trips in a specific micro-region," Barnes said.

“The email they receive includes information on that micro-region and its related trips. The aim of this email is to move the user further down the funnel to complete a booking.” 

Event stream processing 

The company’s event stream processing (ESP) architecture includes Salesforce Marketing Cloud, “which is where we set up our automations and marketing journeys” and Intrepid’s Tealium Audience Stream customer data platform (CDP), Barnes said. 

In addition to the real-time, event data sent from Tealium, Marketing Cloud’s analytics are also fed data from Intrepid’s Salesforce-based customer relationship management system (CRM).

“In our ESP we have access to both CRM and CDP data. Using SQL queries, we create 'audiences'. As subscribers meet the 'audience' requirements, they enter the journey relevant to their onsite behaviour.”

Although the journeys launched only recently, they are the culmination of a six-year digital transformation to several core systems. 

Intrepid’s first Salesforce CRM was deployed in 2018 to replace several siloed databases, bespoke solutions and processes managed with Excel spreadsheets. 

By 2022, Intrepid centralised 10 disparate databases across 30 countries into a mix of Salesforce's service, marketing and experience clouds, which Barnes said enabled its personalised, automated trip offers and content marketing campaigns, moving away from "sending a one-size-fits-all campaign email to subscribers.”

Further automating sales with AI

Intrepid is now experimenting with Salesforce’s Einstein Copy Insights to further enhance its email behavioural journeys.

Einstein Copy Insights aims to identify what language used in emails generates the highest engagement, potentially improving success rates even further.

Specifically, the tool uses text analytics and natural language processing to evaluate an email’s subject line and body based on previous emails’ engagement rates and uses content from successful, previous emails to direct how new ones are generated. 

Barnes said Intrepid is yet to formally integrate Einstein Copy Insights into the personalised channel. 

“It’s still early days and we’re not completely relying on it yet, but good to be early adaptors,” Barnes said. 

Migration to headless CMS near complete 

Since 2021, Intrepid has been working with Endava-owned channel partner Mudbath to incrementally move its Drupal 7-based website to ContentStack’s “headless” CMS, which has a decoupled front and backend.

“This [ContentStack] provides an API to our website so that the technology chosen to power the website does not have to be tied to the content management system technology," Barnes said.

“We are currently engaging with approximately 70 percent of web traffic now on our new website.”

A website the size of Intrepid.com - with 14 regional versions, a host of sub-brands and microsites totalling over 25,000 web pages - benefits from the composability that the headless CMS provides, Barnes added.

Other digital experience and performance-oriented investments Intrepid has made recently include using the Fastly content delivery network (CDN) and running more serverless web infrastructure.

Tech can’t have all the credit 

Barnes said that technology was not the only factor behind the spike in revenue from online sales channels, with the world’s post-Covid travel hunger also playing a part.

Total revenue from trip bookings, accounting for all sales channels, grew from $370 million to $621 million between the 2023 and 2024 calendar years respectively.  

The online sales growth also corresponds with increased brand awareness during 2023, which was supported by a large advertising campaign and search engine optimisation focus.