Best customer data platform (CDP) for airlines, travel, and hospitality brands

Insider is an ideal customer data platform (CDP) for achieving that due to its:

• Expert customer support team that speeds up the data aggregation and helps companies generate a meaningful return on investment (ROI) as fast as possible.
• Built-in data activation channels, which enable you to consolidate your martech stack, instead of using a bunch of different point solutions in addition to your CDP.
• Advanced personalization and automation capabilities, which let you maximize conversions and revenue by shortening the flight booking process, driving ancillary purchases, reducing cart abandonment, and more.

In this guide, we’ll explore how Insider’s enterprise CDP can help you unify your customer data and activate it across 12+ channels, including your website, mobile app, and

Airlines and travel companies (airBaltic, Pegasus, Picniq), telecommunications brands (Vodafone, Inea, Circles.life), retailers (Avon, Mac Cosmetics, Clarins), and many others use Insider to unify their customer data, segment audiences, and deliver personalized experiences across 12+ channels.

To see how Insider can benefit your business, book a demo with our team or try the platform yourself.

Omnichannel identity resolution for accurate, 360-degree customer views

Insider’s CDP is built to aggregate data from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, point-of-sale devices, analytics platforms, customer service tools, and much more.

The most important result of this process is getting clear and reliable 360-degree profiles of all your customers. These profiles can serve as a foundation for all your marketing efforts, as they contain everything all relevant information about your customers, including:

• Names, demographics, and contact info.
• Predictive characteristics, like likelihood to purchase or engage.
• Behavioral data, like interactions with your website or messaging channels.
• Previous flights, travel bookings, and other purchase information.
• Survey responses and other first-party data.

Each profile gets automatically updated when customers interact with your brand at branch offices or across digital channels like your website, mobile app, email, and so on. This helps you understand your customers even better over time.

Our CDP even creates unified profiles of all anonymous visitors who browse your site without leaving any contact information. This gives you the ability to tailor the on-site experience to them (i.e., anonymous visitor personalization), which drastically reduces the time and resources required to turn anonymous visitors into leads and customers.

Lastly, our CDP stores this visitor data for 90 days, so you have plenty of time to convert them into paying customers. Unified data is stored for five years by default but that period can be extended depending on your needs.

Segmentation for accurate customer targeting

Insider also comes with advanced segmentation capabilities for finding and targeting the right customers with your campaigns. You can use 120+ attributes, including traits, behaviors, and preferences across three different audience types:

• Standard, which include characteristics like locations, demographics, devices, operating systems, and more. 
• Predefined, which include leads, cart and browser abandoners, mobile app users, customers who’ve interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and more.

• Predictive like customers with a discount affinity, with a high likelihood of buying or engaging on a specific channel, and more. These are created by our AI-powered predictive engine. You can learn more in our guide to predictive marketing.

Behavioral analytics for granular customer insights

Insider gives you plenty of tools for analyzing your data to get valuable insights into your customers’ behaviors, including:

• Flows, which automatically visualizes all the different paths your users take to reach a conversion goal, like booking a flight (or another event) or scheduling a meeting with your team. 
• Funnels, which you can use to visualize and analyze how users navigate through important goals, so you can see where most drop-offs occur.

• Message frequency analysis, which shows how different types of customers (e.g., inactive, loyal, VIPs, and more) interact with your messages.

• Channel reachability analysis, which shows you which touchpoints different customer segments are actually using.

These and other Insider behavioral analytics tools enable you to get a deep understanding of your customers and power your marketing strategy with reliable insights.

Built-in activation channels, personalization tools, and automation capabilities

One of Insider’s biggest strengths is that it’s more than just a CDP. In fact, our platform supports a plethora of activation channels and personalization capabilities that most traditional CDPs don’t. 

That’s why Insider is a leader in various categories based on reviews from customers and industry experts, including:

• Mobile marketing software by G2.
• Personalization engines by Gartner.
• Omnichannel marketing platforms by IDC.

This means you can use Insider to unify your data, segment it, analyze it, and activate it — all with just one platform. Plus, our CDP comes at no extra cost when you’re using Insider’s personalization and automation capabilities.

Bringing all your channels under the same umbrella also drastically simplifies your workflows and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your martech stack. 

Versatile channel access

Insider enables you to reach your customers where they’re at by supporting a variety of channels, including:

• SMS.
• Email.
• WhatsApp.
• Push notifications.
• Websites and mobile apps.
• Online ads (e.g., on Google, Facebook, and TikTok).
• And more.

Of course, you don’t have to use all of Insider’s channels and capabilities right away. Many of our clients start with one or two channels and use cases — like website personalization and email marketing — then expand to other ones as they see the value Insider brings to their organization.

For example, here are a few ways you can use Insider to personalize key touchpoints in your customers’ journeys:

• Website and mobile app personalization: You can tailor everything from content, messaging, banners, and more to each individual customer. You can also use various engaging elements like prefilled search, price alerts, and social proof that reduce friction during the booking funnel and generate more conversions.

• Email marketing personalization: You can use Insider to tailor each email with the recipient’s name, birthday, last browsed products, and more. You can also leverage AMP emails to deliver a completely interactive experience where customers can make bookings, answer surveys, and browse products without leaving your emails.

• Messaging channel personalization: Messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger can be extremely versatile for promoting products, sending price drop alerts, and event reminders. For example, you can use WhatsApp to send reminders before flights with boarding passes for a smooth customer experience.

Again, these are just a few of the touchpoints you can personalize with Insider. For a more detailed look into this topic, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.

Omnichannel campaign orchestration

Reaching customers where they’re at has always been an essential part of an essential marketing strategy. However, in order to deliver a completely seamless experience, you also need to tie all channels into a cohesive experience, based on each customer’s needs and preferences.

Insider’s customer journey builder and marketing automation tool — Architect — enables you to do exactly that. You can use Architect to build all sorts of automated customer journeys, including:

• Email survey flows followed by relevant suggestions about travel destinations.
• Welcome flows for people who just subscribed to your newsletter to learn about upcoming flights or trips.
• Other complex omnichannel marketing automations, e.g., to upsell or cross-sell different products and services.
• Cart and browser abandonment automations across channels like web push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. 

All of this is controlled via the user-friendly drag-and-drop editor you see below. You can use it to select channels, set wait times, provide conditions that must be met before moving on to the next step, and much more.

Put simply, you can use Architect to deliver consistent experiences across all touchpoints that exceed your customers’ expectations and improve key metrics like engagement, revenue, and retention.

You can also analyze each campaign’s performance right in the journey builder or in a dedicated, fully customizable analytics dashboard.

• Send-Time Optimization (STO): Similar to the previous feature, STO also analyzes customer behavior and predicts the most optimal times to trigger each message. STO can be enabled for each individual message in your campaigns.

• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection: One of the most time-consuming tasks around A/B testing is checking the results, interpreting them, and adjusting your journeys accordingly. This feature takes that off your plate by automatically guiding users to the winning path in an A/B test, based on a metric you select beforehand (e.g., open rates, conversion rates, or revenue).

• Segment, journey, and content creation: Our platform’s generative AI toolkit (Sirius AI) can save you tons of time and effort as it can generate customer segments, journeys, copy, and images for you. All you need to do is provide a text prompt with your goal and Insider will do the rest.

Best-in-class customer support for fast implementation and ROI

We know from experience that setting up a CDP can be a long, difficult, and resource-intensive process. As a result, it usually takes months for companies to see any meaningful ROI from their investment.

That’s why we’ve invested a lot of time, effort, and resources into building the best implementation process and customer support team, which is why customers consistently rank Insider as the best CDP in terms of ease of setup, ease of use, and quality of support.

Our global, experienced teams ensure every Insider client:

• Get assistance during the setup at no extra charge. Our teams help you involve the right stakeholders in the process, bring together the necessary data depending on your goals, integrate with other solutions in your ecosystem, and more.
• Gets fast response and resolution times. As a global company with 26 offices on six continents, we’re uniquely positioned to provide fast support to businesses all over the world. 
• Understand how the platform works and how to leverage it for their goals. They also analyze customer behavior data to provide ideas for implementing marketing strategies that can drive conversions and revenue right away.

Additionally, our platform’s Integration Hub lets you easily connect Insider to 100+ tools across 20+ categories with minimal reliance on technical teams. This means you can have Insider share essential data with other solutions in your ecosystem, including:

• CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact.
• Analytics and attribution platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and AppsFlyer.
• Marketing automation tools like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
• Other CDPs like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
• Live chat software like Drift and Intercom.
• And many other popular SaaS solutions.

You can also connect to legacy systems and other sources using our flexible API. 

How 3 airlines and travel brands used Insider to unify data, boost conversions, and generate revenue

As you can see, Insider is a versatile enterprise marketing platform that can be used for all sorts of use cases, beyond data unification, omnichannel resolution, and segmentation. 

Here are three examples of airline and travel companies that used Insider to achieve key business goals using channels like onsite, email, online ads, WhatsApp, and more:

1. Piqniq — the number one website for parents looking for a family day out inspiration and to purchase tickets in the UK — used Insider to unify their customer data. Then, they leveraged their unified data to deliver personalized journeys across their website, email, and WhatsApp. Their onsite personalization delivered a 19x ROI, while their personalized journeys — a 5x ROI.

• 2. Pegasus — one of Europe’s largest low-cost airlines — used Insider to optimize their online ads and on-site experience to appeal to both new and existing customers. They used predictive segmentation to improve their online ad targeting and social proof to add trust and urgency to their website. They were able to generate a 17% increase in return on ad spend and a 93% increase in mobile conversion rates. 

• 3. airBaltic — a regional airline serving 60 destinations since 1995 — used Insider to segment their customers more effectively and experiment with different homepage variations. Their team leveraged Insider’s A/B testing to test the different variations of their homepage. This helped them achieve a 5.8% increase in conversion rates and deliver engaging customer experiences (without needing IT support).

If you want more examples across different industries and use cases, check out all case studies on our website.

Unify your customer data and deliver individualized experiences with Insider

Insider is an ideal CDP for airlines and travel companies looking to:

• Unify customer data from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, APIs, POS devices, analytics software, and more — and get accurate, 360-degree customer profiles.
• Work with an experienced, global support team that ensures a fast implementation process, quick ROI and successful data activation across all channels
• Keep customer data secure and comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR.
• Simplify their martech stack and save resources by using one platform to unify their customer data and activate it across 12+ touchpoints, like their website, mobile app, email communications, messaging channels, and more.
• Individualize every touchpoint and drive customer engagement using advanced personalization tools, a versatile customer journey builder, and proven, ready-made templates for tons of use cases.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.