Travel Affiliate Network Automated Direct Marketing and Reduced Affiliate Churn

We can’t say exactly how much we earn thanks to Mindbox, nor is this our goal. The main thing is that thanks to marketing automation, we have managed to reduce the churn rate of affiliates, that is, to increase their retention and convert them into making their first payment.

Although this didn’t happen immediately, we found the right criterion for determining the churn rate – namely, when the customer stops logging in to their account. The period when this may happen depends on the stage of the customer's life cycle: seven days for new users, two weeks for those who made their first payment, and a month for permanent users.

We also look at the effectiveness of each specific offer, whether affiliates are starting to visit their accounts actively, and whether the time it takes to make the first payment decreases. This is how we are gradually trying to analyze automation results in concrete facts and figures.

Without Mindbox, we would not have been able to work with such specialized segments in manual promotional campaigns, launch trigger campaigns for local promotions, and track user activity in them. We could set up triggers for large segments in any platform, but only here can we automate specialized offers.

We used to bother customers a lot, and it was almost impossible for them to unsubscribe from campaigns. Now we have uniform sending rules, the communication load on affiliates has decreased, and our campaigns have become consistent.

Everything works perfectly, we have no complaints. For example, we have set up automatic communication sequences that work without our intervention, benefit the business, and increase the satisfaction of affiliates.

We are not using all of Mindbox’s tools yet as the unified customer profile has already opened up a wide range of opportunities for personalized work between our sales managers and affiliates.

The platform itself is constantly moving and evolving: when we first implemented the platform, the interface was incredibly complicated; now everything has become clear and convenient. I’m also delighted with the support we’ve received. Mindbox’s staff are the best thing about the company.

Initially, we relied on another email marketing service, but it did not have the functionality of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). For instance, the same person who registered for four webinars was recorded on in our platform as four separate customers that were completely unrelated to each other.

We realized that we needed a system that could build customer profiles without any issues. In our case, Mindbox turned out to be the system we were looking for. The final argument in its favor is that almost all the emails I receive are created using this platform.

Manual campaigns are a very important channel for us. We never send them to large audience segments. Even if we’re launching a big promotion for all affiliates, we still show different parts of it to different segments.

Manual campaigns work well, and there will only be more of them in the future. We will never be able to automate all communications because we have too many promotions, webinars, and excursions for specific business verticals.

It's crucial that the platform allows us to create very specific, targeted segments – for example, taking into account the stage of the customer's life cycle, the business vertical, and the date the customer last logged in to their account. We simply build segments according to the conditions we require inside the platform, thus eliminating the need to involve analysts or the IT department.

Thanks to filters, highly complex segments are available to us – for example, affiliates who earn from X to Y amount on a specific vertical or customers who went into churn in 2019, but came back to us at a later date.

Previously, we had to manually send up to 10 digests on offers per day. This took about an hour, however, our email marketer had to constantly prioritize and postpone less important news.

Now, urgent news are sent promptly: the trigger checks if there are any new offers, and automatically sends an email every day. The marketer only needs to make sure that the campaign has been formed correctly.

Reactivation works very well. For example, we recently sent an email to several thousand inactive customers offering our help. We got 150 responses. We helped a lot of people, and they came back to us.