Travel came back faster than they did. And competitors had taken the ground.
Travel | Rebuilding from zero | Intent targeting | Email
From a cold restart to profitable paid acquisition
Higher conversion rate
Higher first-purchase conversion
Of pre-COVID monthly revenue recovered within 6 months
The Client
A design-led DTC luggage and travel accessories brand with a strong product and loyal customer base. During 2020 and 2021, they significantly reduced paid acquisition as global travel slowed. By the time demand returned, the acquisition environment had changed. CPMs had increased dramatically, their existing audiences had gone cold, and competitors that continued investing had built a significant head start.
The Challenge
They were effectively starting again in a category where larger competitors had continued investing throughout the downturn.
Their existing audiences were cold, previous creative had lost relevance, and simply restarting the pre-COVID playbook wasn't going to work.
The challenge was to rebuild profitable acquisition without trying to outspend established competitors for the same broad travel audience.
Objective
Rebuild profitable customer acquisition by finding pockets of high intent where the brand could compete on relevance rather than budget.
What we did
We stopped treating “travellers” as one audience.
Instead, we focused acquisition around the 6–8 weeks before a planned trip. The period when luggage moves from a hypothetical future purchase to an immediate consideration.
We rebuilt creative around the customer's situation, not the product.
Instead of leading with generic luggage features, creative addressed the scenarios, needs and anxieties that become relevant immediately before travelling.
We created a way to capture high-intent customers before they were ready to buy.
A pre-travel checklist turned paid traffic into email leads. Those subscribers were then nurtured with useful travel content before product messaging was introduced.
On Paid Search, we concentrated spend around high-intent category queries rather than expensive competitive terms where established brands had an advantage.
The outcome
- Re-established profitable paid acquisition within 11 weeks of restarting
- Pre-trip acquisition converted at 3.1x the rate of generic travel campaigns
- Nurtured email leads converted to first purchase at 6.4x the rate of cold paid traffic
- Recovered 80% of pre-COVID monthly revenue within six months
“We had a great brand, but we'd lost our acquisition engine. We couldn't compete with larger brands simply by spending more. Finding customers in the weeks before they travelled gave us a way back into the market." CMO, luggage brand
When you cannot win on volume or budget, win on timing. Not every customer inside your TAM has the same value today. By identifying the moments when purchase intent changes and rebuilding acquisition around those moments, you can create pockets of efficiency even in highly competitive categories.
