How Trainline drives a 6x increase in conversions with Voucherify and Braze

Trainline is the leading independent rail and coach travel platform, providing rail and coach tickets to millions of travelers across Europe. Through their highly-rated website and mobile app, users can seamlessly search, book, and manage their journeys all in one place. Trainline consolidates millions of routes, fares, and journey times from over 270 rail and coach carriers across 45 countries.

• No way to execute targeted discount campaigns.
• Limited CRM capabilities to run advanced scenarios to boost customer activation, and retention, and prevent churn in a targeted, measurable way.
• No split testing of incentives, resulting in sub-optimal promotions.

Before Voucherify, Trainline struggled to create personalized campaigns to drive activation, retention, and churn prevention in a highly targeted and measurable way across diverse audiences. They also needed a better promotion system to measure their promotional impact and test different incentives, to optimize ROI from promotions.

To fix this, Trainline integrated Voucherify with Braze, the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™. This collaboration aimed to maximize promotional potential, make train travel more affordable, and enhance the overall customer experience through data-driven insights and promotion automation.

Their CRM campaigns with promo codes show that customers are up to six times more likely to buy from a Voucherify campaign than a regular one. This has significantly boosted their revenue, which is a big win for them.

“Voucherify was instrumental for some of our most important initiatives, allowing us to provide single use codes and help with activation, reactivation, nurture, and abandoned basket campaigns. Using Voucherify via connected content allowed us to fully automate the distribution of promo codes, which reduced the risk of abuse.”

Targeted discount coupons with metadata

With Voucherify, Trainline can launch campaigns on a large scale while using rules to make sure offers are targeted and specific. This helps reduce the risk of fraud, improve promotional ROI, and avoid any unexpected issues.

"Voucherify enabled a whole series of new marketing initiatives which can now be used to drive activation, retention, and churn prevention in a highly targeted and measurable way."

These campaigns utilize Voucherify discount coupons, offering either fixed or percentage discounts. Trainline uses unique to each customer (bulk) discount codes or generic (standalone) promotions, depending on business needs.

Trainline uses Voucherify's metadata, which includes fields such as currency, product type per voucher and product (e.g., railcard, travel, seasons). Additionally, they incorporate vendor-specific product metadata to run campaigns targeted at specific providers.

All Trainline’s campaigns are triggered in Braze when a user either enters a specific lifecycle or performs an event. The email messages pertaining to these initiatives contain a connected content call to Voucherify to assign and send out a single-use code for the user.

Geolocation-based campaigns and more

Trainline offers a variety of deals on their website, helping customers find the best options for UK train travel. These deals are tailored to different customer preferences and are categorized based on either preference or location. For instance, deals are organized by regions where Trainline operates, such as the Midlands, London, South West, East Anglia, and others.

Additionally, Trainline’s promotional offers include 2 for 1 deals, allowing travelers to buy two railcards for only £30. They also offer Duo Saver tickets, which provide a discounted price on day return tickets for two people traveling together on weekends. The second person receives a 50% discount, resulting in a 25% discount per person.

The powerful duo of Voucherify and Braze

The integration between Braze and Voucherify relies on a Connected Content call between Braze email steps, campaigns, and Voucherify. This approach provides better control and optimizes API usage. It also ensures that all voucher code details are included within email content and terms & conditions for full personalization.

Trainline’s CRM team uses Braze and Voucherify for various initiatives across different lifecycle stages, such as onboarding, nurturing, retention, and reactivation. Braze allows for impact measurement by comparing the uplift of variants against a control group, ensuring true incrementality and payback.

With personalized promo campaigns, Trainline runs Voucherify campaigns targeting various customer segments and lifecycle stages. These campaigns focus on, for example:

• Activation and nurture: Driving 1st, 2nd, and 3rd transactions.
• Reactivation: Encouraging churned and inactive customers to return.
• Key calendar moments: Maximizing impact during important periods.

Discounts are usually a percentage or net amount off the total basket value, and different offer mechanics are split-tested to find the most effective ones for each customer segment.