For the past few years Roundarch has been partnering with Avis Budget Group to develop a consolidated digital strategy.   In June, Aman Datta, vice president of Roundarch, and Kathryn Kiritsis, director of online marketing at Avis Budget Group presented at the Association of Travel Marketing Executives (ATME) Travel Marketing Conference in Boston, MA.  AMTE, chaired by Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research, is a non-profit, professional association made up of experienced and innovative travel industry marketers.  We were very excited to share our strategy and the success of our partnership with Avis Budget Group at the conference.  Roundarch and Avis Budget Group have partnered to focus on a “go to where the customer is” strategy for digital marketing/commerce including a redesigned Web site, mobile apps, fully-functional booking widgets and a comprehensive optimization strategy.

The first step in this strategy was to develop personas to serve as the foundation.

After developing the personas we worked with Avis to completely redesign the car rental experience on Avis.com.  The rental process was reduced from 5 clicks on different pages to 3 clicks all on one page while displaying choices and prices dynamically to improve conversion.  Then we expanded to the mobile space with the first-to-market iPhone app for Avis.  We continue to work with Avis Budget Group to grow in the mobile space with apps on other platforms as well as site extensions that allow Avis to take their experience to affiliate sites.  This mobile strategy has resulted in a 300% increase in mobile revenues.  We have also partnered with Avis Budget Group to focus on optimization including multivariate testing and improved organic search.  The case for optimization is compelling:

• Revenue from SEO has doubled each of the 4 years since Avis upgrades its SEO efforts with a 40% decrease in SEM costs.
• Together search makes up over 25% of online revenue for both the Avis and Budget Brands.
• Budget conversion rate more than doubles for incremental SEO traffic.
• Landing page conversion from search traffic increased by 30%.

Recently, Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research published a case study outlining how successfully Avis has used personas to drive SEO, specifically organic search, in the past few years.

“Over the last few years, we’ve invested a considerable amount of money on this SEO project, but it’s still less than 10% of what we spend on paid search.  SEO is more cost-effective than paid search, so we need to strike the best balance.”

John Peebles, vice president of Avis Budget Group

Our partnership with Avis Budget Group has shown that a comprehensive digital strategy is essential in the market today.  We are continuing to not just plan for the future of digital marketing, but evolve with new technologies and design the future of digital marketing to best align with the customer.

The Avis iPhone app that was designed and developed by Roundarch is featured in an Apple television spot.

John Peebles and Aman Datta

Aman Datta, Vice President of Roundarch, and John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis Budget Group, were keynote presenters at the Autonomy Interwoven GearUp 2009 Executive Briefing Roadshow in New York City this past Monday (4.27). Roundarch is a Platinum Partner of Interwoven and this event gave us the opportunity to share the Avis innovations with Autonomy and Interwoven executives, customers, and other partners. The presentation entitled “Driving Next Generation Solutions at Avis” explained how Roundarch and Avis used Interwoven solutions throughout the Avis project to develop an entirely new way to experience the car rental reservation process. Roundarch developed a multi-channel approach for Avis and three components of this approach were showcased in the presentation.

1. Avis.com – This was a full site redesign. Based on strategic research, Roundarch developed a new user experience and design that evolves the entire online car rental experience.

2. Site Extensions – This is a concept Roundarch has developed as a way to leverage the Avis.com site experience and extend the reach of Avis to partner sites and other sites on the Web. It is developed in Adobe Flex and is one of many innovations that Roundarch and Avis are bringing to the travel market. This site extension can be found at www.rentacar.com as well as on Air New Zealand.

3. iPhone app – Responding to customer needs to rent cars on the go, Roundarch saw a demand for the development of an Avis iPhone application as part of the overall strategy. Avis is the first car rental company to release a fully integrated mobile application.

The key goal of this multi-channel approach is to allow customers to perform a full service reservation process from multiple digital points. The project was not just about redesigning the website, but thinking about the entire reservation process in a whole new way.

Later in the day, Datta also participated in a panel discussion with Renee Rodgers, Senior Director of Interactive at Avaya and Patrick Gardella, Senior Director Interactive Architecture for Discovery Communications that was led by Anthony Bettencourt, CEO, Autonomy Interwoven. The discussion covered the future trends of the Web and how Autonomy Interwoven’s solutions are working to capitalize on these Web trends for clients such as Avis.

Patrick Gardella, Renee Rodgers, Aman Datta, and Anthony Bettencourt

GearUp 2009 Executive Briefing Roadshow is currently touring 5 cities across the globe.

Additional photos of the event.

Photos of the iPhone application.

South by Southwest 2009 (SXSW) is right around the corner.  Several folks from Roundarch are heading down for the interactive portion of the show (March 13-17).  We are all getting excited to interact with some great minds in the design and emerging technologies space.  There is always such buzz around SXSW because there are so many opportunities to share innovative ideas, learn about really amazing new technologies, get a feel for the next trends in the industry and have a great time in the process.  I am especially excited Roundarch will have a booth this year because it will give us an opportunity to share some of the really impressive projects we have had the opportunity to work on recently.

The great thing about the interactive portion of the conference is that it covers everything from web design and usability to innovative technology business models and digital creativity.  SWSW is such a popular event because it is a five day festival of panels and conversations/discussions that trends away from the standard lecture circuit, making it much more interactive, and generally a great time.  As passé as it is to say, it’s truly an out-of-the-box thought process, limit-pushing environment.  And because of that, it makes for a very electric and exciting time.

There will be a whole crew from Roundarch at the event: Dave Meeker, Adam Flater, Pek Pongpaet, Saurab Bhargava, Mark Ferry, Paul Buranosky and myself.

Dave Meeker is one of our foremost thought leaders in the User Experience space; he knows more about the UX world than anyone I know.  He always has great ideas and can keep you entertained and excited even with a topic you may not have been interested in before (yes, his passion is that high).  He and Adam Flater will be showing some demos of Merapi.  Also, Adam Flater will be speaking on a panel with Chuck Freedman of Ribbit to demo the use of Merapi to capture audio in Flex.Check it out…very cool stuff and really impressive live demos.

Pek Pongpaet is one or our interactive developer/UX guys and has a few projects in the works he is planning on unveiling at SXSW.  I haven’t even seen them yet, but they are guaranteed to impress, I can’t wait.

Saurab Bhargava will be showcasing our innovative work with Avis.  There are many aspects to the project including an iPhone app, but this site shows a whole new way to think about car rental online, and is really improving their business and marketing strategies.

Mark Ferry will demo an app we did for a major mobile device manufacturer that is just in the process of being deployed.  This new system will diagnose and repair phones from any windows-based computer with an internet connection.  The solution is expected to save the company a fortune on administrative costs while also improving overall customer service. He will be at the Roundarch booth throughout the event and the Microsoft Silverlight booth at the following times:
Sunday, March 15th 2-4pm
Monday, March 16th 2-4pm

We also will be showing a few interactive timelines we did for The History Channel and some of our work we did for the USAF, both of which have amazing visuals and UX.  These have really redefined what a timeline can be, and have a nicely integrated CMS system to support it.

Please hit up Paul Buranosky if you want to plan a visit during the event or just stop by our booth (#611).  A group of us will be blogging throughout the event too, so be sure to check back for updates.