How to Boost Airline Customer Acquisition With 1-to-1 Marketing

AIRLINE MARKETING: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL 

If you’re a marketer in the airline industry, you probably know a few things about the state of online sales:

• You know that personalization is the new standard. In fact, 36% of consumers are willing to pay more for personalized experiences.
• You know that having an omnichannel strategy is essential to reaching all of your customers and prospects and delivering a consistent message and experience across channels.
• Speaking of The Customer Journey, you also know that in an industry where there’s very little product differentiation, you’re either competing on price or experience. Ideally, both.

But did you know that nearly 60% of consumers believe that their travel experience should deploy the use of AI and base their search results on past behaviors and/or personal preferences?

And did you know that 50% of global travelers say that personalized suggestions for destinations and things to do encourages them to book a trip?

Winning over a new generation of fliers

It would appear that customers are more open to personalized ads than most marketers may assume. But there’s a caveat: they specifically want a personalized experience. And with most sources citing Adblock usage to be upwards of 30%, customers are making it clear that if they don’t get the kind of experience they want, they will shut you out.

Until now, the solution has been to group your customers into audience-based buckets and toss ads in their general direction, hoping they’ll stick. It’s a far cry from the personal touch, but it was what technology could offer.

Marketers are still targeting ideas of people, not people themselves. Luckily, AI is changing all that.

HOW INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP

The Relay42 platform can help you acquire customers in a new, friendlier way. This is because it understands individual customers and knows where they are in their customer journey. Then it uses AI to offer each individual the perfect next best step based on everything it knows about the customer, including their real-time activity.

Put your customer data to work

Airlines have a wealth of reliable customer data, but most of them aren’t using it to their full advantage.

With Relay42, you can combine all of the customer data from multiple sources like your website, booking system, and even shared partner data. The result is rich customer profiles that you can use to orchestrate highly personalized individual journeys.

Relay42 recognizes your customers at every single phase of their journey, which gives you the opportunity to make an impact at any given moment. Even if your prospect doesn’t yet have a profile with your business, their data is still captured and stored using Relay42 technology. As soon as they land on your website (or a partner website) a profile is created and their behavior is stored. If they identify themselves at a later point, then that data will be automatically merged with their new profile.

This provides you with the full picture of each and every prospect and gives you every opportunity to offer them a relevant, engaging and highly personalized journey based on their real-time choices. 

BOOST ANCILLARY SALES WITHOUT DAMAGING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

The key to increasing ancillary sales without damaging your relationship with your customer is data. Most airlines are already using “personalized” bundling tactics, product-suggestion analytics, and dynamic pricing in the booking funnel and over the course of the travel journey.

But they’re not doing it on a truly individual basis.

At best, airline marketers are offering ancillaries based on large audiences and general personas. This translates to a throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks methodology that, while getting results now, puts you at risk of alienating your customers in the long run.

What’s the alternative?

Increase upselling and cross-selling opportunities with AI

The Relay42 platform gathers and organizes all of your customer data across channels to create unique user profiles. Then it enables businesses to orchestrate dynamic customer journeys personalized for those individual users in real time, with the help of AI.

AI has the ability to take each user’s entire history into account to predict what their next move will be, and then decide what the best possible product is to upsell or cross-sell at that moment.

No more guesswork.

ORCHESTRATE RELEVANT END-TO-END JOURNEYS

Of course, having highly detailed and always up-to-date customer profiles is only the first step. Relay42 also helps you plan and manage end-to-end journeys across all channels and ensure that the timing, channel and content of your message is always highly relevant. This is what we mean when we talk about Intelligent Journey Orchestration.

Customers want content and advertising that is helpful, rather than spammy and bothersome. Intelligent Journey Orchestration is the tool that can help your airline achieve this, by serving relevant ads that actually get people to notice and click.