How did Saga gain a clear view of which channels were bringing in their highest-value sales calls?

Creating a new destination for a new demographic by identifying and optimising high-performing channels

The challenge

Saga Holidays have historically been very good at identifying the points where their customers have purchased holidays. However, as a new generation enters their demographic, it was becoming important that they gain an understanding of what was bringing people in at the top of the funnel, how their customer journey was being influenced, and put themselves in a position to optimise this process for better results in future.

Phone calls still play a big part in the sales cycle of their largest packages, where people often want to speak to directly with a travel agent before buying the holiday of a lifetime. But Saga had no way of knowing what was leading to these substantially valuable buyer journeys once the phone was picked up.

Why Infinity?

Saga Holidays chose Infinity in early 2017 after it became clear our experience serving travel brands meant our customer success team had a deep understanding of their needs underpinned by market leading call tracking technology. An attentive support team also presented a swift, seamless onboarding.

The solution

Saga Holidays used Infinity’s call tracking to monitor the channels that were bringing customers into the top of their funnel. Infinity tracked all of the separate visits someone made before making a call, including the source, individual pages visited, digital touchpoints, and any paid keywords that were clicked. Saga also monitored the number of bookings made and brochures requested to gain insight into what was leading new customers to those actions.

But knowing the channels responsible was only part of the picture. Their agency, iProspect, analysed the outcomes of phone calls they were receiving. From this research, they set custom parameters in Infinity to identify which calls were likely to be ones that lead to large sales, and which were more likely to be low value or customer support calls to minimise.

This tailored approach meant Saga were seeing and acting upon metrics that mattered to them, with a tremendously informed attribution knowledge.

The outcome

Saga Holidays now have a clear view of what channels are bringing in some of their highest value customers, including the new ones they needed to attract. A big discovery was the impact that their organic search efforts were having on the business. Key performance metrics uncovered and acted upon since April 2017 include:

• Discovered that SEO was responsible for 36% of their relevant, high-grade calls
• Website referral traffic is now driving over 22% more high value calls
• A 25% reduction in the ratio of support calls from direct website traffic
• Highlighted previously unknown commercial values of email and social campaigns
• Lowered the amount of low quality calls from PPC by 4%

They will now be expanding their use of Infinity to analyse commercial performance from digital campaigns.

What the client says

Infinity have provided valuable insight into our online call behaviour we were unable to see before, filling a gap in our understanding of how we were connecting with new customers. A big surprise was seeing how many new customers were finding us via SEO before picking up the phone, this journey was previously a black hole for us that we couldn’t analyse. The onboarding process was smooth, and we were up and running very quickly. We recently synced Infinity with our digital agency to optimise our paid campaigns based on what’s driving high value calls.Edward Day | Senior Web Analyst, Saga Holidays