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Smart Notifications for Costa Cruises: Personalising the Booking Journey to Boost Conversion
How collaboration, user research, and iterative design helped reduce abandonment and improve user engagement during the booking experience.
Why this case? It highlights my skills in personalization, data-driven design, and creating measurable impact while aligning user needs with business goals.
My growth opportunities
Cross-Functional Teamwork: Worked closely with developers, marketers, and PMs to ensure consistency and impact.
Data-Informed Design: Used behavioural insights to guide design decisions.
Iterative Process: Leveraged continuous feedback and testing to refine the solution.
Increase in completed bookings
Improvement in user flow through the funnel
context
Understanding the challenge
Costa Cruises faced a high abandonment rate on its website during the booking process. Our challenge was to understand user needs and guide them through the booking journey while improving engagement and conversion rates.
To address this, we focused on emotional connection with users rather than relying solely on Google Analytics. This approach helped us explore how personalised smart notifications could improve the experience.
problem
Increasing engagement and reducing abandonement
My approach: Channel my excitement into asking the right questions! DO NOT rush to solutionizing before understanding business constraints
How might we keep users on the site longer and improve the conversion rate?
Key challenges identified:
Users were leaving the site without completing their booking.
Lack of contextual guidance left users unsure of the next steps.
analysis
Emphatiziong with users to identify needs
We conducted in-depth user research through:
Background Research
Online Surveys targeting different user segments: couples, families, silver couples, and repeat customers.
Behavioural Flow Analysis to track user paths and drop-off points.
From this research, we developed personalised smart notifications for different stages of the booking funnel based on user behaviour.
Key Insights:
Personalised messaging can guide users through the process and reduce confusion.
Different user types (e.g., cold, warm, hot) require different triggers to stay engaged.
Solution
Introducing smart notifcations
We designed a series of personalised notifications throughout the booking funnel to create a dialogue with users and guide them to complete their purchase.
Examples of Notifications:
Highlighting exclusive offers for logged-in users.
Recommending cabin upgrades and additional services.
Encouraging users to complete their booking with gentle nudges.
feedback
Collaborating as the key to success
Tip: Share the proposal with higher-level roles (like the Group PM) to gain stakeholder buy-in by highlighting the user and business impact of implementing it
The project was a collaborative effort involving multiple roles:
Product Manager for strategy and planning.
UX/UI Designers for research, ideation, and prototype development.
Developers for technical implementation.
Marketer for messaging and conversion optimisation.
Through continuous feedback, prototype testing, and A/B testing, we refined the notifications to achieve maximum impact.
refinement
Iterating based on data and user feedback
We tested the solution through:
Prototype Testing to validate the user experience.
User Testing and A/B Testing to optimise conversion and engagement.
Each iteration improved the relevance and effectiveness of the smart notifications.
build it
How we measure success!
We tracked key metrics to monitor the impact of the smart notifications:
Web Conversion Rate: Increase in completed bookings.
Funnel Transition Rate by User Type: Improvement in user flow through the funnel.
