Ahead of our 2019 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, staged in partnership with our headline partner Dynata, and our partners DAX and TabMo, well be previewing the nominees in each category,giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. In today’s preview, we take a look at the best travel & tourism campaigns and solutions.

First Group & Future Platforms: First Bus App
The First Group used to have a separate journey planning and a separate mTickets app, which were both used regularly by users. It turned to Future Platforms to combine the two into a single journey planning, support, and ticketing solution.

The aim was to unify the apps and develop a valuable and effective mobile experience – relevant in today’s information-everywhere world – and deliver a frictionless experience that guides the passenger through a seamless journey, from the first to last mile.

The Future Platforms UX team used a series of user research methods to ensure it had an in-depth, data-driven understanding of bus and rail travellers in order to make planning and ticket purchasing easier and quicker. The research showed that there was a need to reduce anxiety around public transport reliance and, importantly, build trust with their customers.

The research phase began with interviewing passengers in cities around the UK to gain an understanding of how they feel about First Bus’ apps. Then, once the beta app was released, Future Platforms monitored how users navigated the app and also carried out two diary studies during a six-week period on 12 different people trialling the app.

Future Platforms used the latest versions of Swift and Kotlin to develop the app across iOS and Android devices.

The app, which has been fully rolled out all 350,000 First Bus users, has an app store rating of 4.6 out of five. It has made journey planning more efficient, with users now able to check bus times and purchase tickets in just a few clicks within one app.

MyTaxi & Yodel Mobile: App Growth Campaign
MyTaxi wished to focus on the user funnel from impression to rebooking as it continued to expand its reach across cities in the UK. Its objectives were to utilise effective channels for acquisition, populate the app with high-intent users, encourage first time user booking, and increase retention and average re-booking per user.

Yodel incorporated these objectives into three stages of its strategy, starting with increasing impression to install, then increasing install to first time user, and finally increasing first time user re-booking.

The app marketing consultancy used a combination of app store optimisation, push and in-app messaging, and highly targeted and retargeting campaigns.

Unfortunately, any further details are strictly confidential, but the campaign garnered highly positive results for MyTaxi.

The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 14 November. To book your place at this celebration of the best in mobile marketing, click here.