A leading UK leisure airline
Challenge:
Our client, a low-cost airline, marketed primarily against bookings, not customers. This resulted in frequent fliers receiving a high volume of communications, and confusing messages about products. It also prevented them from using a customer-level history of previous bookings to understand the customer's preferences and booking habits. A little targeting had been used in direct communications using bookings information, but the marketing team was eager to adopt a more personalised approach.
Solution:
Consultancy Phase
Our sister business - 20:20 Dialogue - designed an effective way to retrieve daily data from the client's systems. The data was then cleaned and put through a proprietary matching process to group as many bookings as possible at a household and customer level whilst preventing false matches.
20:20 Dialogue then developed a customer segmentation to describe key customer groups based on booking behaviour, destination types, holiday types, travelling groups, prices paid, etc. The findings were presented to the marketing team via a planning workshop to explore these segments and use them to develop a tactical marketing plan.
We worked closely with the client’s IT team to develop a technical platform to support their marketing campaigns both in the short term, and in developing innovative new ways to communicate with customers going forward. The recommended technical roadmap was capable of delivering a high level of automation, in order to grow the number of individually targeted, triggered and personalised communications over time.
Development Phase
The client engaged 20:20 Dialogue as its outsourced contact execution partner. A database was developed in SQL Server and various data views, including a customer view, was created to support the campaign execution process. Campaigns are produced using 20:20 Dialogue’s proprietary Communications Builder software, which supports highly personalised, event-triggered campaigns, and enables sufficient automation to deliver the high volume of activity required.
20:20 Dialogue also delivered a customer matching process to link to client bookings and create a fully integrated customer level database from various data feeds including: the main bookings database, on-line activity, customer research and prospect data to support campaign objectives. This links automatically to 20:20 Dialogue’s email fulfilment system, which delivers high volumes of email (c. several million per month) with content selected from thousands of combinations of options based on the segment's preferred destinations, departure airports etc. The system then feeds individual customer-level response information (opens, clicks) back to the database.
