How Customer.io helped Journy 3x response through effective testing
The experts at Journy know all about creating rewarding journeys for their customers—as a travel concierge service, that’s the heart and soul of their business. They design personalized travel itineraries to match their users’ individual tastes and desires—but they realized that a customer’s journey through using their service was just as important as the vacation they booked. That’s why they turned to Customer.io. From acquiring new leads all the way through conversion and beyond, Journy uses Customer.io to drive customer engagement—and business growth. With Customer.io, Journy’s emails go much deeper than the “Dear {FirstName}” approach we’re all so familiar with, and instead line up with what customers are doing, thinking, and wanting in the moment.
Starting new travelers off on the right foot
One of Journy’s primary ways to gain new customers is running giveaways with brand partners. Once they get an entry, they use Customer.io to trigger targeted email communications—and track how they’re performing. Claire Zhang, Journy’s Growth Lead, notes that she uses Customer.io every day to monitor metrics. “I count on Customer.io daily to provide insights on one of our main marketing channels,” she says, and those insights have driven refinements to their process.
“We take the data that Customer.io reports,” says Claire, “and use the insights to improve our success.” That’s how Journy realized they needed to personalize their drip campaigns more. “We started off by putting everyone into one triggered campaign,” says Claire, “but we’ve refined that to treat brand-new sign-ups differently from more qualified leads.”
“I count on Customer.io daily to provide insights on one of our main marketing channels”
This shift has helped Journy engage with new leads more meaningfully. Claire explains: “Our initial onboarding email campaign for totally new new leads that come in from the giveaways introduces our service and leads users to fill out a form. People who click through and fill out the form are more qualified leads, so they enter a different campaign that’s focused on giving them a promo code and trying to get them to book as fast as possible.” This refinement has allowed Journy to drop lower-qualified leads into a newsletter campaign for ongoing engagement, while moving highly motivated users to a fast-track toward conversion.
Insight=improvement=increased engagement
Ongoing testing and analysis of the results is a key feature of Journy’s email marketing—it’s what allows them to continually improve outcomes. “The A/B testing features in Customer.io really helped us get some interesting insights,” Claire says. They recently challenged the conventional wisdom of shorter-is-always-better by A/B testing a traditionally short email with a quite long one.
Using AB testing, Journy could dispel one-size-fits-all content length myths.
“The results—it was like whoa! The conversion rate was three to four times better for the long email.” Journy realized that because users demand a high degree of trust from a travel service, they actually respond well to emails with lots of information. Claire points out that “longer copy actually worked better for us, which runs counter to conventional marketing wisdom, but is a very valuable insight to us.”
“The results—it was like whoa! The conversion rate was three to four times better for the long email.”
Keeping the connection after conversion
Journy doesn’t drop their tailored approach to email after users convert. In fact, Claire notes, “One of the reasons we migrated to Customer.io was for more options with transactional emails.” By leveraging Customer.io’s ability to capture any customer attributes they want, Journy drives customer loyalty with highly personal emails. “Being able to tag customers with any attribute data I want, and being able to use Liquid to personalize messages with that data has been great,” says Claire. “It’s like writing formulas in Excel, but being able to do that in email is cool.”
Action conditions help Claire tailor the messaging experience to Journy’s customers
Driving rapid growth with limited resources
“Customer.io is super valuable to us as a growth tool, not just an ESP,” says Claire. “We communicate with both customers and potential customers. And we’re starting to get a little more granular with targeting emails to new customers.” The wealth of integrations that Customer.io supports makes that easy.
“Our tech resources are pretty limited, since we’re a small company at this point,” Claire notes, so she’s especially appreciated Customer.io’s responsive support. “When I emailed Customer.io support, they were great—fabulous,” she says. “Someone from customer service actually gave me a clever idea for setting up a Zapier integration that solved a major problem we were having.”
“Customer.io is super valuable to us as a growth tool, not just an ESP”
Realizing new possibilities with Customer.io
“Having Customer.io in my toolbox just makes me feel like ‘Oh, I can do all of these things!’ when setting email strategy,” says Claire. “It opens up a lot of possibilities for us to communicate with customers, test different ideas, and find what really works.”
As Journy continues to grow and offer more travelers personalized service for their adventures, they see Customer.io as crucial in keeping their communications just as personalized and relevant. “We come up with so many ideas for new ways to talk to our customers in our editorial meetings,” says Claire, “and Customer.io is key in executing those ideas.”