Expedia plans major email marketing push in Europe

Expedia plans to increase the percentage of targeted e-mails that it sends to its consumers in Europe. “We’re going to expand those programs into the European markets and hopefully we’ll see some good returns there,” Expedia Inc chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts last week. Targeted e-mails elicit conversions “at much, much higher rates: five,…

Expedia plans to increase the percentage of targeted e-mails that it sends to its consumers in Europe.

“We’re going to expand those programs into the European markets and hopefully we’ll see some good returns there,” Expedia Inc chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts last week.

Targeted e-mails elicit conversions “at much, much higher rates: five, ten, some of them 30 times the rates” that non-targeted emails produce, Khosrowshahi said.

He noted that Expedia sends “a much higher-percentage” of targeted e-mails to its US customers than it does to its clientele in Europe.

But, that’s changing.

So, what’s ahead? If Expedia’s data-mining technology ascertains that a consumer searched for a London-Paris flight and didn’t buy, and the fare subsequently decreases ten percent to 15 percent, then Expedia will send a personalized e-mail to that would-be traveller.

“We saw you search for this flight,” Khosrowshahi said. “The price has changed. Do you want to buy?”

Khosrowshahi added: “That email converts at multiples … of an e-mail that’s not personalised – ten to 20 times non-personalised e-mails.”

Expedia has invested in such data-mining, or CRM technology, and intends to utilise it on many fronts, an advantage it may be able to leverage against smaller competitors.

The technology, Khosrowshahi said, “…is getting better at presenting the right hotel to the right consumer,” based on the traveller’s preferences or search patterns.

These practice and others, he said, “hopefully can drive conversion on a go-forward basis. That is the kind of new data-mining technology that we’ve built.”