Travel Startup that Became One of the Leading Travel Company

Rehlat is an online travel startup that started small as a proof of concept in 2014 and was formally launched in 2015 with its offices spread across Kuwait, UAE, India, and Egypt. The team comprises of e-commerce and travel experts with collective experience of over two decades. Rehlat today is considered as one of the leading online travel companies in Kuwait and one of the fastest growing in the Middle East region as, within one year, the company has seen a growth in excess of 200%.

Recovering Abandoned Bookings in Real-Time

The ability to provide users with real-time updates related to flight searches and retarget them when they abandon that search is something that Rehlat’s marketing team has always been after. Retargeting via the conventional channel of email was not only restricting their reach but also with spam blockers on the rise, the open rates of those handful emails itself started to plummet. Looking for a fresher and better alternative, Reheat decided to give web push notifications a try.

Building a Sustainable Subscriber Base

Rehlat kick-started the implementation on the parent domain to initially test the waters. After acquiring 20k subscribers in less than a month, they spent no time in implementing it on the rest of the domains too. Post that there was no looking back for Rehlat as they acquired 100k+ subscribers in less than 6 months! With almost an equal spread on mobile and desktop, a sustainable and healthy marketing list was created across all the three domains - rehlat.com, rehlat.ae and rehlat.com.sa

We are currently using iZooto across all our web properties. The ease of managing user communication swiftly is great. We have consistently seen some great result across platforms (mweb and desktop).

- Laxman Kumar, Senior Manager - Digital Marketing

Tailor Fit Use Cases Drive Engagement

Being an online travel company, Rehlat had some pretty distinct use cases that they wanted to focus on like offers and flash sales, fare alerts, geo-targeted campaigns, etc for both flights and hotels that they dealt with. Without losing time, Rehlat started pushing regular campaigns that catered to this by segmenting their subscribers as per the preferred language - English or Arabic.

With an average CTR of 10.4%, Rehlat was able to trigger the right kind of emotions by playing the geo-targeting feature correctly. This also resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of time spent on the website per session when compared with other marketing mediums like social campaigns. As conversions started to pour in, Rehlat also noticed that their bounce rates decreased by 50%!

Contextual Retargeting Campaigns Improves Conversions

In order to target the subscribers who abandon flight and hotel bookings, once again audience segments were created based on the chosen language. These audiences were then scheduled with automatic drip campaigns that targeted each segment on a daily basis. The motive behind these campaigns was simple - retarget the users abandoning the booking process and get them back on the website to complete the transaction. With the help of the design and content teams, the communication for each campaign was carefully drafted to ensure that they are laser-focused and contextual for that very audience set.

With these automated campaigns going live, Rehlat received a 2x increase in their conversions which boosted the total contribution of web push notifications to a good 3% of the overall sales.

We were easily able to automate our retargeting campaigns that solved the case of abandoned booking and improved our conversions by a great deal. Really happy with iZooto as a platform and the team behind it!

Skyrocketing Sales

Availing iZooto, Rehlat was able to evolve their marketing strategy from the usual batch and spray method to a much refined and sophisticated workflow that included contextual content, precise timing, and a highly interested audience segment. This not only boosted their conversion rates by 2.5x but also ensured that they closed up to 10% of potential sales within 4 hours!

Not only did the conversion rates shoot up but it also increased iZooto’s contribution in terms of revenue by a solid 2x with 40% of the amount coming purely from Playbooks! Apart from this, these campaigns also assisted in over 1900 transactions proving that its impact throughout the buying cycle of a user.