Twiddy & Company delivers southern hospitality at scale with Aidaptive

Introduction

Twiddy & Co provides southern hospitality across 1000+ homes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Their business thrives on strong relationships, repeat business, and word-of-mouth referrals.

But the era of COVID-19 introduced new volatility, making profits less predictable. Between government restrictions, bridge closures, and an unsettled country, the team knew they had only a few major paths on how to move forward.

Historically, the leadership team at Twiddy has always been keen to learn + follow best practices, find innovative ways to grow, and get technical when necessary. They have a strong track record of gathering and using their business data to drive decision making.

The Twiddy team chose to explore new ways to merge the fundamentals they knew – collecting and measuring business data – with modern techniques that empower that data to work in leveraged ways.

Taking the next step

The Twiddy team partnered with Aidaptive to uncover creative methods to activate their data to generate revenue growth.

Twiddy combined their experience and business data with Aidaptive’s AI and machine learning platform, creating a plan that would enable them to personalize the guest experience and deliver southern hospitality at scale.

Twiddy’s goals were twofold: 

1. Deliver a personalized vacation booking experience to tens of thousands of prospective guests.
2. Optimize the rental income of more than a thousand property owners.

It can’t be stressed enough how much Twiddy & Company care about their loyal guests – this was and is a priority for their business: to take care of new and previous customers and provide them a high quality experience.

Taking that into account, the two teams met in person and over video calls and discussed the possibilities. Aidaptive’s team ran a data assessment to understand if there were opportunities to capitalize on their existing data to make impactful changes to their acquisition funnel. Turns out, there was “gold” hiding in plain sight. They just needed the right set of tools to highlight it.

Defining and executing solutions

Aidapatives’s machine learning looked for the correlations across the current and previous customer base, the website and booking behavior, and marketing campaign successes and failures. 

That “ML” was able to map out a path to extract more bookings and revenue, maintain lower expenses, and ultimately do it all by providing a dynamic individually personalized recommendation to their CRM leads. 

The two teams settled on a path forward. 

Twiddy would deploy machine learning as the intelligence engine behind their marketing campaigns and website experience. The idea would be to create a personalized guest experience that includes unique property recommendations and pricing offers that drive higher conversions & maximize revenue per night.

Powered by Machine Learning

Here is how the new system was put to work:

Highest-Value Guests. We identified the prospective guests that are most valuable and most likely to book next. Based on real and predicted engagement with the Twiddy brand – along with other indexed similarities and behavioral attributes – the intelligence engine calculated the lifetime value for each lead in their CRM. Once that work had been done, the audience could be prioritized and segmented to engage with.

Property Predictions. We predicted the top three properties that fit best for each individual guest’s profile. Through statistical models that build a sort of similarity matrix that compared each property to all other properties – and each Lead to all other past and prospective guests – the ideal property recommendations were calculated for every individual customer in the database.

Optimized, Individualized Prices. We calculated precise price points for each property, guest, and timeframe permutation that had the highest probability of converting to a reservation. By layering the many data pieces together, the Aidaptive machine learning engine determined optimal prices that met Twiddy’s various goals. 

Launch Tailored Email Promotions. We dynamically inserted the calculations into email campaigns and tracked the ensuing conversions. After segmenting the leads into prioritized cohorts, the predicted properties and prices were sent out to groups on a set cadence. The results – clicks, bookings, and other low-funnel actions – were captured and fed back into the machine learning algorithms as input to improve the calculation intelligence for next time.

Our collaboration results

Time to Value. Between the first data scoping discussions between our two teams, and new revenue being generated from the Aidaptive-powered campaigns, it took only 6 weeks.

Net-new Incremental Revenue. As a result of the personalization work and machine learning predictions providing intelligence to their campaigns, Twiddy was able to generate $1 million+ within the first month. An extremely exciting outcome!

Better Customer Engagement. When compared to standard campaigns, the personalized recommendations and experience supported by Aidaptive improved Twiddy’s website engagement rates by ~40%.

Recognition. Twiddy was mentioned in the Harvard Business Review’s article on the digital transformation of mid-market companies. They were recognized as a leader in utilizing data, CRM, and digital tools to communicate effectively with customers and grow their business with historic occupancy rates.

Full Funnel Roll-out. Twiddy loved the results and process so much that they are finding ways to deploy the Aidapative intelligence engine across their entire booking funnel. Together, our teams are getting creative about ways to increase conversions and raise the bottom line, from one-off campaigns to ongoing optimization behind the scenes. Next up? Converting more of the anonymous website visitors they work so hard to bring in.

Interested in learning more?

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