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

***Updated on 28/05/2024***

Author:

Richard Jonkhof  Head of Customer Success & Strategy   Relay42

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

• You know that personalization has become a business standard. A 2023 PwC survey reports that 61% of executives rank personalization as a high priority, more than any other loyalty activator. 
• You know that consumers expect that too. According to a McKinsey’s 2021 survey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. A 2024 survey with consumers from the U.S. confirms this too – 50% of respondents feel that receiving personalized offers is extremely important. 
• You know that having an omnichannel customer strategy is essential for 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. 

And did you know that 72% of consumers who received personalized recommendations on their booking site report that their loyalty programs deliver what they value most, yet only 48% of those who receive personalized recommendations through email say the same (iSeatz, 2024)?

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 segments based on personas and toss ads in their general direction, hoping they’ll stick. 

It’s a far cry from the personal touch, but it was the best technology could offer. Marketers are still targeting ‘ideas’ of people, not the people themselves.
 

“We can’t work with a one-to-many marketing program because it’s just not relevant anymore. People find it irritating, they leave, and the campaigns aren’t effective. So we have to shift our advertising based on customer needs. Maybe we shouldn’t even call it advertising anymore, but just offering the right message at the right moment. You always have to be spot-on for the customer.” 

Pelle den Engelsman, Campaign Strategist at Transavia
 

Luckily, today’s marketing technologies can be powered by customer data platforms to provide a richer foundation of first-party data and leverage predictive AI  to elevate the experience from segment-driven campaigns to 1-to-1 experiences.

Personalize the experience for every customer and prospect

A customer data platform can help you acquire more customers in a more appealing way. It guides you to understand each individual interacting with your airline, and know exactly where they are in their customer journey. When combined with predictive AI it enables the marketing team to offer each person the next best action based on everything it knows about the customer journey, including their real-time activity.

Airlines have a great wealth of reliable customer data, but most of them aren’t using it to their full advantage. One of the main challenges for airlines stems from the fact that people often search for tickets on multiple devices while comparing offers, and most of this process happens before they log in.

With a capable CDP, airline marketers can combine all of the customer data from multiple sources, such as your website, booking system, app, or data from a partner. The result is fully unified customer profiles that you can use to orchestrate highly personalized individual journeys.

A customer data platform like Relay42 recognizes your customers at every single phase of their individual 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 in the CDP. 

As soon as they land on your website, an anonymous profile is created, and their behavior is stored. If they check out, subscribe or authenticate via a form at a later point, then their data will be automatically merged with their profile.

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

From individual profiles to always-on customer journeys 

The Relay42 CDP gathers and organizes all of your customer data across channels to create unique user profiles. However, having highly detailed and always up-to-date customer profiles is only the first step.

Therefore, Relay42 combines its CDP with built-in Journey Orchestration and Journey AI modules for planning and managing end-to-end journeys across all channels and ensuring that the timing, channel, and content of an individual’s message is always highly relevant.

Here’s an example of what a highly personalized omnichannel customer journey looks like: 
 

Discover more about how KLM, Transavia and AirFrance approach personalization in customer journeys, and read more about elevating your airline’s marketing strategies to maximize load factor, increase ancillary sales and boost brand loyalty via our e-book.

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