On The Beach has perfected its personalized messaging by using AB Tasty’s experience optimization platform to speak to its different customer segments, leveraging data-driven decision-making to get more beaches to more people.
On The Beach is a UK travel company specializing in beach holidays. Known for their vibrant and dynamic brand image, they provide hassle-free and affordable beach holiday experiences.
They strive to appeal to a wide range of travelers, offering a wide selection of destinations, accommodations, and activities.
Often highlighting the excitement and joy of beach vacations, their website showcases the company’s commitment to creating unforgettable holiday experiences. By promoting transparency, flexibility, and excellent customer service, On The Beach has established itself as a trusted and sought-after brand in the UK travel industry.
Fine Tuning the Customer Journey
As On The Beach caters to a wide range of customers, it’s important to ensure that their website provides a personalized experience according to each customer’s needs.
Customers start the journey of looking for their perfect holiday, they may often visit a website multiple times before making a final decision and reaching the final stage of purchase.
This means they have new or returning customers coming to their website. The company should be able to show it understands its customers by providing personalized and targeted messaging along the different stages of the customer/purchasing journey.
This is where testing and experimentation become vital as On The Beach finds the right messaging with the highest positive impact on its different user segments. The Conversion Rate Optimization Manager, Alex McClean, explained,
“We’re trying to look at how we can take our different customer types and give them a better, improved journey”.
An example is when they used different badges to recommend holidays to individual segments coming into their site. With the help of AB Tasty, they discovered that new users preferred a recommendation marked “Bestsellers” and that returning users reacted better to “Our pick”, as they already had trust in the brand.
Testing these various types of messages allowed them to determine the right messaging for each user group, ultimately leading to increased bookings.
The Roll-Out of AB Tasty Across the Company
On The Beach understood the advantage of being able to test and learn after seeing the impact that A/B testing has on their business. In this way, after trying simple tests, based on content and product placement, they started to increase the number of tests they did a month while bringing in other team members.
By sharing test results, learnings, and best practices, On The Beach ensured that all departments, including marketing, product development, and customer support, had access to the latest information. This cross-team collaboration enabled the company to make data-driven decisions, implement successful optimizations, and continuously enhance the overall user experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and business growth. A real experimentation culture was fostered.
When we first started using AB Tasty we were looking at rolling out maybe five to ten tests a month. But now, as the business has advanced its testing capabilities and more people are getting involved, we’re rolling out 20-30 tests, with buy-in from the whole business
Key Support from AB Tasty
One of the great advantages for On The Beach, as their testing program expands, is being able to learn at speed, as well as the support they receive from AB Tasty’s teams.
With a responsive and knowledgeable support staff, AB Tasty assists On The Beach in setting up tests, interpreting results, and implementing optimizations. They offer timely and personalized assistance, guiding the company through the testing process and offering expert advice on best practices.
Alex explains,
“For us, the real reason that we chose AB Tasty, and what differentiated AB Tasty from the competitors was the level of service that we were offered. We have complete access to developers, really attentive CSMs, It’s really beneficial to keep things moving where we don’t need to go to our development team”
The support from AB Tasty means that On The Beach can leverage and grow at speed. The learnings that are achieved through testing mean they can improve their site experience and conversions, re-iterate, and grow to provide a customer experience that speaks to their audience.
“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.
