How An Airline Used Personalization To Boost Engagement

• By Lisa Furgison
• March 9, 2017

Are you personalizing your emails? Statistics show personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, according to Experian. And, yet, many businesses are hesitant to implement personalization strategies that go beyond adding a first name to the subject line.

Today’s customers expect tailored content that’s unique to their interests. Customers are setting the bar high, and it’s up to brands to meet it.

To do so, brands must up their personalization game. Take a page from Air New Zealand’s playbook to see just how powerful email personalization can be.

The Campaign
Air New Zealand prides itself on top-notch customer service and wanted to create an email campaign to support its efforts in the air. The airline wanted to go beyond sending an email with a passenger’s name in the subject line, and so the ‘Personality Allowed’ campaign was born.

Air New Zealand sent personalized pre-flight and post-flight emails to its passengers. The pre-flight email included pictures of their destination, weather details and a short bio of a flight attendant on the passenger’s flight.

The post-flight email encouraged passengers to call Air New Zealand’s preference center to provide feedback about the flight and update their preferences for exceptional customer service.

Here’s a look at what the post-flight emails looked like. Notice the email welcomes the passenger back from his or her specific location, shows a picture of someone from the flight crew and encourages the customer to provide feedback.

The Results
The pre-flight emails had a unique open rate of 69 percent and an average click-through rate of 38 percent, which is well above industry standard. The post-flight emails faired well too, with 62 percent open rates and 40 percent click-throughs.

In addition to impressive metrics, the brand also received positive feedback on its social channels, and passengers praised the emails to the flight crew.

Tips you can learn from this campaign
Your brand can increase customer engagement with emails like this too. Here are some tips to follow to do so:

• Segment your email list
  Forget sending mass emails, and break your list into smaller, specific groups based on similarities like age, job title, past purchasing history or location. By breaking your list up, you can send tailored content to each group.
• Collect more data
  To personalize emails, you have to know your customers. Increase your efforts to collect data. When customers sign up for your email, add an extra field that collects one more piece of information or send a survey to learn more about each customer.
• Put the data to use
  Many companies make efforts to collect customer data, but don’t do anything with it. If you don’t use the information you collect, it can’t help you. As you collect information, build customer profiles and work to truly understand your customer base.
• Use email automation
  Sending tailored content doesn’t mean creating individual emails and sending them one at a time. You can set triggers to automate emails so when a customer takes a certain action, an email is automatically sent to his or her inbox.

For instance, when a customer makes a purchase, it can trigger an email confirmation and a follow up email that suggests similar products. Here are some email automation tips to get started.

Personalization can take your email marketing campaigns to the next level. While the Air New Zealand campaign is a great example, you don’t have to get this advanced on your first try. If you’re new to personalization, start small and work toward this kind of campaign.

To learn more, check out this post that showcases great examples of email personalization.