In 2016, Cyclistic launched a successful bike-share offering. Since then, the program has grown to a fleet of 5,824 bicycles that are geotracked and locked into a network of 692 stations across Chicago. The bikes can be unlocked from one station and returned to any other station in the system anytime. Until now, Cyclistic’s marketing strategy relied on building general awareness and appealing to broad consumer segments. One approach that helped make these things possible was the flexibility of its pricing plans: single-ride passes, full-day passes, and annual memberships. Customers who purchase single-ride or full-day passes are referred to as casual riders. Customers who purchase annual memberships are Cyclistic members. Cyclistic’s finance analysts have concluded that annual members are much more profitable than casual riders. Although the pricing flexibility helps Cyclistic attract more customers, the director of marketing believes that maximizing the number of annual members will be key to future growth. Rather than creating a marketing campaign that targets all-new customers, the director of marketing believes there is a very good chance to convert casual riders into members. She notes that casual riders are already aware of the Cyclistic program and have chosen Cyclistic for their mobility needs. The director of marketing has set a clear goal: Design marketing strategies aimed at converting casual riders into annual members. In order to do that, however, the marketing analyst team needs to better understand how annual members and casual riders differ, why casual riders would buy a membership, and how digital media could affect their marketing tactics.
After gathering all the data together from 2022, the exploration begun. Some patterns were immediately shown. The analysis was divided into three categories: number of trips, location, ride length.
As the chart “Percentage of monthly growth compared to January” shows, there is a clear seasonality for casual users. For members, the usage of the service does not show a drastic difference. However, chart “Difference in the number of rides between member and casual” shows that for months where the seasonality reaches its peak for casual users, the difference in the number of rides decreases. From those charts we learn that casual riders have a clear seasonality and for the months where the peak is higher, the number of casual riders almost match the number of members.​
In the map below, the pattern is clear for casual users. Dots shown in the map represent the most popular destinations for members and casual riders. Casual riders are more active in the upper part of the map while members are active in two areas.
The most common length for rides in the mode, as it is clearly shown in the chart “Distribution of rides by user vs ride length”. From the chart it is also clear that data is wide spread, but most of the rides happen between 0 and 30 minutes.
From the analysis we can summarize the insights in the following table. Those are the main differences. The recommendation for the director of marketing is to focus on the similarities instead differences since it is easier to turn a casual rider into a member if they already share the same patterns.
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Therefore, the recommendations are the following:
• Provide single-ride users with a reloadable card to track their usage and spot them to make them the priority niche
• Offer a discount in December, January, and February to focus on casual rides that live in the city
• Focus advertising in those areas where the usage of the service is more popular