An intuitive mobile app for seamless booking of bus tickets

Čazmatrans is one of the leading domestic bus providers, transporting passengers since 1949. No wonder they conducted their business the old way - relying on offline ticket sales and doing most of the communication “eye to eye”.
In order to compete with international companies and enter the realm of major digital players, they parked it in our yard.
The joureny started with a discovery workshop to completely understand their position, set goals and select tactics.
The focus was on two main tracks: start with the performance marketing campaign that will increase visibility and revenue through their existing website, and then launch a new mobile app and use it as an additional sales channel.In order to provide a truly unified experience for the consumers, we needed to upgrade their website as well.
React Native was our technology of choice, since it allows us to create both the mobile app and the website based on a single codebase - which will also make future updates easier and friendlier on the budget.
We decided to single out the most frequent bus routes and focus on building up their volumes. Our task was to find out how people search for those bus routes and estimate monthly volumes and costs.
To optimize for better ad rank and results, we created several landing pages, each one specifically aimed at each route and direction. That allowed us to carefully craft specific keywords and get the best results from the start. Landing pages had all the relevant information and the checkout forms were pre-filled with available data to make the transaction just a click away.
The campaign was launched in September 2019 and the results were great.
The user journey was simplified so the consumers could search bus routes, compare prices, buy tickets, and travel with ease. We created digital tickets to ease the process even more, so they could even buy a ticket during the commute to their bus station and board without any issues.
To make sure the process was easy to understand, we worked on polishing microcopies and aligning them with the new and fresh better fitting tone-of-voice. A new visual direction, simple wording, and a simplified checkout funnel made the app an instant success.
The mobile app got great retention from the get-go, 35% of all users are using the app on a weekly basis. The app also features a 5.2% of users completing in-app purchases.
The search campaign results were s-p-e-c-t-a-c-u-l-a-r. It got a 60% impression share on all campaigns with an average Cost Per Click (CPC) being 0,028 EUR. The Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was a whopping 1.338%. The campaign also helped increase website traffic by 37%.
And last but not least, both the mobile app and the campaign were shortlisted in the Croatian annual MIXX awards, in their respective categories.