The main purpose of this study is to analyze well cleaned and processed data and get insights. These insights would enable the Cyclistic Executive team make data driven decisions as regards marketing strategies that would be aimed at converting casual riders into annual riders.
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.
“You are a junior data analyst working in the marketing analyst team at Cyclistic, a bike-share company in Chicago. The director of marketing believes the company’s future success depends on maximizing the number of annual memberships. Therefore, your team wants to understand how casual riders and annual members use Cyclistic bikes differently. From these insights, your team will design a new marketing strategy to convert casual riders into annual members. But first, Cyclistic executives must approve your recommendations, so they must be backed up with compelling data insights and professional data visualizations.”
- Annual members are much more profitable than casual riders.
- Based on the information provided, it would be easier to convert existing casual riders to annual members than on boarding new clients as annual members
- Cyclistic Executive Team
- Cyclistic Marketing Analytics Team
- Lili Moreno – Director of Marketing
To determine the differences in how both annual members and casual riders use Cyclistic bikes and to use the insights derived from this to determine best marketing strategies that would convert casual riders to annual members.
The data used would cover rider information spanning a one-year period from January 2020 to January 2022.
The data has been made available by Motivate International Inc. with license, and is originally stored in separate CSV files organized by the different months of the year here!
The total number of the rows contained in the Datasets combined is 5,698,833 knocking out spreadsheets as the tool of choice for cleaning since they are limited when very large datasets are involved.
For the purpose of this project, SQL(Postgresql) was used for data cleaning, processing and analysis.
Click HERE! To view processing queries.
After processing and cleaning, a total of 4,668,232 rows containing complete data is ready for analysis.
| Subscription type | Average ride length |
| Casual Member | 32.48 |
| Annual Member | 13.11 |
| Day of the week | Average ride length |
| Sunday | 27.68 |
| Monday | 20.47 |
| Tuesday | 18.09 |
| Wednesday | 17.96 |
| Thursday | 18.13 |
| Friday | 20.67 |
| Saturday | 26.06 |
| Day of the week | Average ride length |
| Saturday | 836,461 |
| Sunday | 723,531 |
| Friday | 666,589 |
| Wednesday | 627,851 |
| Tuesday | 615,556 |
| Thursday | 610,738 |
| Monday | 587,506 |
The data was exported in a CSV file to Tableau for visualization and further analysis.
An overview of the monthly distribution of rides taken by both member types shows a significant increase in the use of the bike share services from the beginning of the month of May through to the end of the month of September; predominantly around the summer period. Service usage drops during the winter period: November to February. We can conclude that the weather plays a pivotal role in influencing user behavior regardless of subscription type.
Click here! for interactive dashboard.
Annual members rides make up 55.85% of the total number of rides for the period being analyzed and Casual members make up about 44.15% which supports the theory that it would be easier to convert already existing casual members to annual members than onboarding new members since they already make up almost half of the year's business generated.
Click here! for interactive dashboard.
The chart above shows that while the number of rides for annual members remain consistent and evenly spread across the different days of the week and only peaking at the middle of the week, the number of rides for casual members see an approximate 90% increase in number on Saturdays and Sundays. This would lead to the conclusion that majority of the annual members use the service as they commute to work or their businesses during the weekdays while casual members are people who use the service more for leisure activities during the weekend.
Click here! for interactive dashboard.
A breakdown of ride type preferecence by both user types shows that:
- A majority of annual members lean towards the classic bikes with approximately 77% of the total number of rides by annual members use the classic bikes as ride type.
- 22% prefer the Electric bikes and less than 1% prefer the docked bikes.
- While a very negligible number of Annual members use the Docked bikes, approximately 15.2% of the total number of Casual members prefer the Docked bikes as their ride types.
Click here! for interactive dashboard.
- An annual membership package which would see a reduction in cost of subscription amounts for the months in the winter period to encourage more sign ups under the plan should be designed.
- Create a promo where the cost of using docked bikes under the annual membership plan is cheaper in the long run as opposed to using it under the casual membership package.
- Place ad materials in places where casual riders are likely to visit during the weekends; from the bike stations, to gyms, parks, movie theaters, grocery stores, etc for a more effective capturing if the intended target audience