Situation:

We were able to successfully acquire a few hundred thousand downloads through various channels, but our active users from day three to day 30 post activation was 30% to 15%. Our emails were not effective in capturing user's attention and with so much noise in travel, we needed a way to break through the noise at the right time!​

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Task:

My next task was to develop both Push and SMS messaging campaigns that would drive up interest and activation. We came up with the free airport transfer promotion and I oversaw the product development to support a campaign to promote the free car ride in NYC and San Francisco to our users when we believed they were traveling to and from either city.

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Action:

​I sourced out Twilio to support a SMS/Push campaign that leveraging geo-fencing to target users based on their location and behavior. I built out the business requirements for the dev team to implement the ability to send SMS and or Push notifications based on an app user arriving at SFO/Newark/JFK from another location and remind them that we can pick them for free if they book a hotel with us. We would also send deep links to hotels in those cities with special offers.

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Results:

​We were able to achieve an average activation rate of 38% 30-days after downloading the app. This campaign was so effective we were able to get customers to cancel their reservations and book with Virgo while at the airport which represented almost 20% of our bookings.