Congratulations on winning Best Customer Conversion Platform at the 2020 Performance Marketing Awards! Tell us about your campaign and winning this award?
Uniqodo was over the moon to win Best Customer Conversion Platform for Travelodge at the 2020 Performance Marketing Awards. Travel is by its very nature a complex space to market, taking into account the sheer scale of product and date combinations, alongside changing trading conditions and availability. To be able to serve compelling promotions to customers requires a sophisticated promotions platform to create intelligent and real-time validation rules, but also the activation tools to effectively market and message to customers when they’re searching online.
With Uniqodo, Travelodge is able to react quickly to hotel trading conditions and tailor their approach based on commercial needs. They use Uniqodo’s Promotion Engine and conversion tools directly within their main .co.uk e-commerce website to enable tailored UX advancement with limited need for internal development resource. It allows Travelodge to run targeted and controlled discounts on specific locations and hotel searches to drive incremental bookings for targeted stay dates, room types and other niche / targeted UX rules.
Uniqodo’s technology enables instantaneous promotion eligibility checks, advanced data validation for available rooms and on-site promotion issuance to increase conversion rates, incremental revenue and lengthen the average stay. Travelodge even receives niche and tailored promotional reports to support
performance.
How did it feel to know that the industry helped support you to get this award?
Whilst promotions is where we started back in 2014, over the last 6 years we’ve been working as an extension to our client’s teams to not only deliver secure, controlled and advanced promotional capabilities, but also creating activation solutions that create e2e Promotions Experience for customers and importantly drive increased conversion for Travelodge and our clients. To be recognised alongside some great and well established CRO businesses as a team and solution that can compete in the conversion space is a real honour and a testament to the hard work and creativity of the Uniqodo team.
Being part of the Performance industry certainly pushes us to constantly adapt and enhance what we do to help drive great results for Travelodge and our other clients. We are constantly learning with the wider industry what a great customer experience online involves, especially as e-commerce has become a real life-line for the country and indeed the world as we deal with the situation of lockdown and spending more time at home and online.
The human touch has been a critical element of this year’s entries. How has team collaboration been vital to your campaign success?
Uniqodo’s mantra has always been to solve every problem our clients present us with. In practice, that means using our technology to provide advanced capabilities, but also combining that with bespoke solutions to deliver upon expectations. We’re just going through a bit of a re-branding exercise, and that sense of being both SaaS and bespoke is core to the evolution of how we talk about Uniqodo, but it has always been foundational to the way we’ve built our business.
Both our client success team and our engineers work hands on with clients to understand their needs and find new ways to overcome both technical and business challenges. We are very much an extension of our clients’ teams, taking away the administrative and technical burdens and providing our promotional experience and expertise.
From your experiences, what qualities make an award-winning entry?
Award winning entries are about demonstrating authentic and exciting results. It doesn’t always have to be about the shiny new thing, but can also be about outstanding delivery and effective implementation of a strategy or solution. In our case, we believe the role of ‘Promotions Experience’ or PX is an evolution for digital promotions, so a little bit of a shiny new thing, but grounded in the knowledge that it’s a hard-working, performance-driven solution; advanced promotional capability AND activation throughout the customer journey to build complex requirements into beautifully seamless promotions for your customers.
And of course the proof is always in the pudding. Helping Travelodge to increase conversion rates by up to 23% and drive incremental stay dates by 36% is testament to the hard work and technical IP of Uniqodo.
Lastly, what’s your take on the PMAs as a necessary vehicle for driving the performance marketing industry forward?
Performance is only going to gain importance from here on in. It has been widely heralded this year that e-commerce is now mainstream. What we will see is a rapid evolution of how you not only drive sales online, but how you build a brand through digital means. Creating and crafting digital partnerships in every guise with the ability to measure performance at every stage of the campaign presents an amazing opportunity for the performance and mar tech industry to be part of that effort, and the awards are a chance to showcase these innovations. We are excited not only to see what great ideas come out of the trials and tribulations of the pandemic era, but also to answer the next wave of challenges our clients face to continue to push the boundaries of delivering next generation promotional capabilities. Watch this space.