WhatsApp? I am on the plane!!

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Daniela Gallimberti

Within the airline industry, Digital Marketing plays a key role to engage customers, deliver value and save cost. In the recent years many airlines caught up with the new digital marketing trends to expand their channels of communication. Social media is becoming a marketing machine and airlines have taken advantage of this. Singapore Airlines, Etihad Airways and Emirates have benefited from social networks like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook.

As if this were not enough, Airlines are willing to go further than this. WhatsApp is one of the leading online communication apps with more than 700 million active users and it could provide an ideal platform to communicate directly with passengers before and during their day of travel.

According to Hayden (2014) mobile messaging is one of the most effective ways to reach customers as is the most direct channel to reach customers, while also being the most immediately received and seen by everyone to whom a message was sent. This is the reason of why Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion. Because the app service allow users to send mobile messages anywhere globally without SMS fees. Hayden also emphasized the ease and cost of most mobile tactics and explained that these tactics require low initial investment and lacks the development and management burdens associated with common technologies.

The Dutch LCC Trasavia airline has identified these benefits and has decided to use its resources to give it a try. Last year, the airline announced a experimental run in the use of the instant messaging service WhatsApp for customer service communication with select members of the airline’s Flying Blue programme.

Customers could ask questions via the messaging app, such as making inquiries about an existing booking, how to check in online or hand luggage rules. It aims to respond to questions within an hour and the airline can be reached via Whatsapp 7 days a week between 8am and 10pm.

Says Roy Scheerder, commercial director at Transavia, “We want everyone to make it as easy as possible to get in touch with Transavia. We see WhatsApp as nice addition to the already existing possibilities such as Facebook and Twitter.” […] “Because of the accessibility of WhatsApp customers expect an even quicker reaction than via Twitter and Facebook.”

This seems a very possible to be put in practise on mainland but, is it possible to be implemented in-flight?.

More and more airlines offer WIFI service to their passengers. However, not every flight has the access as about only a 24% of international flights give some chance of wifi connectivity. This could be a temporary barrier .In July 2013, Routehappy did a comprehensive inflight Wi-Fi research. In the year and a half since, it was found that globally Wi-Fi hotspots have increased 271% since the beginning of 2013.

Another barrier is the cost offering WiFi to passengers that they might not be willing to pay. According to analysts, inflight WiFi is costly because airlines see it more as a revenue generator than a perk for passengers. However, two budget airlines, Norwegian and JetBlue, are two of the few who offer free wifi for every passenger on board. By offering in-flight free wifi, the airlines can benefit differentiating themselves and win business away and win market share based on the passenger experience. As the new trend is showing the world “what is going on right now” through our social networkings, airlines could take this as an advantage and benefit from free advertising. Passengers could share in real time post a selfie from their seats, or Instagram their flight meal.

Considering all these digital marketing benefits, airlines should consider to offer free WI-FI inflight. WhatsApp works through internet connection and airlines not offering WI-FI in flight will not benefit from this. Furthermore, just a small segment of travellers is willing to pay for WI-FI inflight service, meaning that even if the airlines offer WIFI service they will not be able take a full advantage of WhatsApp benefits unless this is for free.

Hayden, Tim. The Mobile Commerce Revolution. Print.

How legacy airlines are using digital innovation to engage customers and improve they experience.

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Daniela Gallimberti

Low-cost airlines retain a lead when it comes to online engagement but do not necessarily have everything their own way. Legacy Airlines are constantly developing strategies to enhance customer experiences through digital marketing approaches in order to generate customer engagement.

Building long-term relationships with customers is essential for any sustainable business and this applies equally to online elements of a business. Customer Relationship Management is a marketing-led approach to building and long term business with customers. (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). Having more control over customer relationship allow airlines to increase their capacity to proactively monitor and plan how efficient they are with aspects such as routes, timetable, seat allocation, refreshments and cancellations during the flight.

Airlines such as Delta airlines has started using the Guest Service Tool, which provides its 22,000 flight attendants with key information so they can better engage with customers while in flight. Similar to this, British Airways and Iberia or its competitor Lufthansa have started incorporating ‘Head of Innovation and Technology’ roles and digital labs into the organisation in order to come up with ways to better engage with the customer.

The following points are some of the ways that legacy carriers are using to engage customers and differentiate from low-cost airlines.

#1 Boarding Wearables

In order to enhance a great customer experience, Legacy carriers should focus on every stage of the journey process, involving when passengers book the ticket, check-in, drop bags, board the plane, travel and arrive to destination. One of the innovations playing an important role in defining the airport experience is wearable technologies. Virgin Atlantic led the way being the first airline with a trial of its kind in London Heathrow’s Upper Class Wing, and has since announced that it will productionise Google Glass.

Smartwatches Bording passes are being offered by of Vueling, Iberia and AirBerlin and Copenhagen Airport has undertaken a passenger-facing trial of Google Glass, Furthermore, Japan Airlines has equipped select members of staff with smartwatches as part of an ongoing trial.

#2 Retail – Apps integrating NFC

Air New Zealand has taken advantage of today’s ‘coffee culture’ and has been featuring barista’s who make freshly brewed coffee to passenger’s preferences in its ‘Koru’ lounges for some time. Customers can order their favourite coffee by ticking a few boxes on a piece of paper, add their name and hand it over.However, this initiative has been taken to digital levels improving the flyers experiences.

In a clever move, passengers now can order Barista-made coffee via ANZ’s tablet or smartphone app the minute they walk into one of the airline’s Koru Clubs around New Zealand, including its international lounge at Auckland Airport.

#3 Innovative Content Campaigns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsMZRl71Zo4

Virgin America excelling itself in the world of social video, and launched a gigantic multichannel, world-building content campaign that is as hilarious as it is inventive. The campaign is a six-hour video in which “BLAH Airlines” illustrates a satire of how awful air travel can be. The message behind this ad is that BLAH Airlines is the antithesis of Virgin America, and that life is far too short to be wasting your time flying with any other airline. Furthermore, Virgin take the ad further by creating a website for BLAH Airlines that not only takes ages to load but is also non-responsive, mobile unfriendly, difficult to read. Responses from audience has been positive and also a blog post about the 18 reasons to love Virgin’s BLAH Airlines content marketing campaign has been written.

#4 Email Marketing Innovation

Email is the 21st century evolution of traditional direct marketing. It’s almost free and gets delivered almost instantaneously (they don’t call conventional mail snail mail for nothing). It retains the strengths of a push medium, while adding the potential for automated response loops and tracking via digital channels. (Ryan, n.d.)

Email Marketing is a digital marketing strategy frequently used by Airlines in which the messages which are sent often contains broad content and do not provide personalised experience that today’s customers expect, especially for first-class travellers. However, as that every traveler experiences elements of travel differently, Delta Airlines found the way to take its SkyMiles frequent flier emails to new heights by using data to deliver segmented, relevant messages. Together with its agency DigitasLBi and marketing technology provider Experian Marketing Services, in May 2015, Delta launched a Flight Cycle Program sends targeted, triggered emails during the four key stages of their travel experience: plan, prep, fly, and home. As result customer engagement has increased. Along with cutting back on email clutter, the Flight Cycle emails produced open rates of 60% (doubling Delta’s 30% benchmark) and a 17.4% click-through rate—up from 4%.

Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012). Digital marketing. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Ryan, D. (n.d.). Understanding digital marketing.

How Airlines can benefit from offering in-flight Wi-Fi service?

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Daniela Gallimberti

In-Flight Wi-Fi have been great news to customers as its allow them to stay connected during the journey. Airlines know that passengers expect a wireless connection, and they are eager to offer it. Furthermore, the Airlines also benefit by offering this service. There are two main benefits to an airline.

1. In-flight advertising and shopping promotions.

One of the best ways to advertise to people is through in-flight advertising where flight passengers are a captive audience and cannot just get up and walk away. Some of the ads are more traditional whereas some of them are involves high technology such as touch screens and interactive ads. This is very convenient for advertisers as they can target specific audiences and reach millions of people on thousands of flights everyday. However, passengers can get tired and annoyed of the constant in flight ads and announcements.

According to Chaffey and Smith (2008) a key success factor to achieve main digital marketing objectives is to provide customer satisfaction through the electronic channel. Mike Flores, president of U.S. Airways, states, “A lot of passengers complain about it because they don’t want to listen to ads in flight”.

The growing availability and popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi, it is attracting significant attention from marketers, who are looking to reach this captive audience with shopping promotions and advertising.

The negative attitude towards advertising in-flight could be reduced by offering in-flight wifi service for free. By offering these service marketers can sneak in advertising whereas maintaining customers happy with the free service. During the 2009 holiday season Delta Airlines partnered with Ebay and gave passengers on nearly 300 airplanes free access to wifi during their flights for seven days beginning November 24. Passengers were given a promotional code that takes them directly to Ebay’s Holiday homepage which featured daily deals and advertisements for various brands and partners of Ebay.

This was a great way for not only Delta and Ebay to advertise, but also for all the other brands featured on the Ebay homepage. This idea was especially successful because it was implemented during the holiday season, which is one of the busiest travel periods and shopping times of the year. In addition, some airlines use Wireless Networks to Replace the Seat-Back Catalog

2. Data mining.

Data mining and other forms of analysis are the key to a firm’s ability to target its customers and prospects based on their lifetime value to the firm as well as the basis for identifying and meeting the customer’s needs and wants.

The technology benefits marketing by making tacit knowledge more accessible. Some of the most important knowledge about customers is tacit knowledge, such as their shopping patterns, interest and activities profiles, payment transactions and chatroom discussions. (Wind and Mahajan, 2002)

The opportunities created by mobile data mining can change the way airlines market and advertise their services. Airlines could install and exploit WiFi infrastructure for customer insight that helps to personalize the flying experience and develop better target promotions. For example, on some airlines, flight attendants carrying tablet computers will soon have far more data on fliers at their fingertips, including their allergies, seat preferences and whether the carrier lost both their bags last trip.

Furthermore, airlines’ marketing pitches are also becoming more relevant, in part based on customers’ online-browsing history, their likes on Facebook and their income. Thomas Davenport, a Babson College professor who has studied how airlines use data, says such systems will help carriers make strides in onboard revenue, an area where they have long missed the opportunity presented by bored, typically affluent buyers trapped in one place for several hours.

As it can be seen, Wi-Fi in-flight can benefit not only the passengers but also the company. However, is important to take into account that offering WIFI for free could be costly, According to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, these cost involves expensive roaming charges and a physical weight cost which adds to the airline fuel bill (Read More).

On an interview to it was asked to Tony Tyler, Director General and CEO of IATA, whether he believed airlines should offer free Wi-Fi on board to passengers, and that was when Tyler’s forward-thinking moment passed. “No,” he replied (Read More). Furthermore, Infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi on aircraft, is much more complicated than infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi in airport terminals.

References

Chaffey, D. and Smith, P. (2008). EMarketing eXcellence. Amsterdam: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Wind, J. and Mahajan, V. (2002). Digital Marketing. Symphonya. Emerging Issues in Management, (1).

Forever 21: Permission-based e-mail

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Daniela Gallimberti

Nowadays, permission-based e-mails is an increasing and important medium of marketing communications that enables companies to establish and build closer relationships with customers. E-mail marketing campaigns include benefits for the company such as low cost distribution of promotional messages, targeted distribution of promotions (discounts, coupons, events invitations and so on). Furthermore, e-mail marketing is a affordable form of marketing used by small and medium-sized businesses. According to Pavlov, Melville, and Plice (2008), e-mail marketing campaigns produce approximately twice the return on investment of the other main forms of online marketing such as Web banners and online directory adverts. Another advantage is that e-mail marketing is highly targeted and focused. Marketers can customise and personalise each email message.

Beside all these benefits for the company, on the other hand, there have been widespread consumer complaints about unsolicited e-mails (known as “spam”). Now, in most cases, the recipient provides explicit consent to receive direct e-mails and, in some countries, this is a legal requirement (Worthy and Graham, 2002). The most significant encouragement for users to “opt in” to a firm’s e- mailing list is the opportunity to receive information that matches their interests as receivers are more likely to open and read such messages. (Grunert, 1996; Gengler and Thomas, 1995).

There are different types of emails marketing that a company should consider such as Conversion / life cycle, E-newsletter, House-list campaign and Event triggered. A critical examination of one of these type of email is detailed next.

As an example I took the emails that Forever 21 sends me periodically. These emails can be classified as part of a House-in campaign, where Forever 21 have obtained my email address and is sending me promotional campaigns of launch of products or special offers. However in the case of this particular email (#HolidaysReady) it can be said that is a Event Trigger strategy.

Personally I would not open any of Forever 21 emails because I do not find them relevant, I might open it if I feel in the mood to do it, but there is something that i find annoying and is the frequency of which I am receiving these emails and this is one of the reasons of why I lost interested in opening them, it is just too invasive. However, I did not cancel the subscription, I just ignore them. Besides my personal case, the design of the illustrations are very attractive, the brand logo position is prominent, hyperlinks are well identified and message content is aligned with its subject and headline. No personalisation has been identified. The calls-to-action is also attractive, obvious and easy to find to access the landing page. The use of images reflects the purpose of the campaign by showing some clothing outfits included in the promotion.

It can be said that Forever 21 campaigns can work for people who is loyal to this brand or is looking for some seasonal offers, but I don not think they work for general customers, especially because of the frequency of the emails which I found them very invasive an as result unattractive. The subject of the email could also be more precise, direct and engaging.

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 15.07.32

The Landing page looks like a extended version of the messagel but offering more features, discounts, and options. Also the theme used (Christmas) is more related to the promotional seasonal campaign.

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 15.10.12

To conclude,in my opinion, Forever 21 should implement a deeper tracking of customers response to their campaigns in order to check who are responding positively and who are not and reduce the frequency of emails.

Argos, Leading a high street revolution. (case of study)

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Daniela Gallimberti

Argos, the UKs leading digital retailer serves around 123 million customers a year through its network of 758 stores. Being a aware of the importance of the digital age, Argos has as goal to transform the traditional in-store experience by opening more online stores. The challenge faced by Argos is to take into account every customer feedback and opinions of digital stores shared in different social media channels but with stores across the length of the UK and an estimated 123 million customers a year, managing, dissecting and digesting the volume of response would be a challenge. To accomplish this, Argos is using a social listening platform called Brandwatch Analytics helping it to understand consumers reactions and feelings front of the new concept stores. Brandwatch gathers millions of online conversations every day providing users the tools to analyse them empowering brands to make smarter, data-driving business decision. Using Brandwatch Argos is able to segment social data by creating categories for each store including some criteria such as location data, names of the shops and streets. Argos can also set up Rules to segment the data even more, filtering data into pre-set categories and helping Argos to identify the performance of all the stores by feedbacks filtered in social networkings like Twitter. Argos can also identify who was talking and where the social conversation originated by using demographics and location functionality helping it to identify consumer behaviour. By knowing customers sentiment and feedbacks Argos can give a response and make changes fasters by using this real-time information on customer satisfaction. Argos has exploit social analytics to its advantage, helping prove with supporting data, that its new digital concepts stores deliver the exact experience that its customers want.

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