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Brief
As the national airline carrier of Iceland, Icelandair connects Iceland with the U.S. and Canada, and offers connecting flights to 17 other European destinations. The airline consistently looks for a better way to connect with its global customers. Icelandair uses interactive marketing and email marketing leader, ExactTarget, to deliver a variety of personalised marketing campaigns in multiple languages from a single platform.
In April 2010, a volcanic eruption in Iceland resulted in the unprecedented closure of some of the world’s busiest airports. Since the travel plans of its customers were heavily impacted, Icelandair needed a deliberate communications plan to give customers imperative news and updates in a convenient and timely fashion. In response, Icelandair took action through social media and launched a communications campaign via Twitter business platform, CoTweet.
ExactTarget and CoTweet have worked together to provide Icelandair with a multi-channel marketing strategy that is flexible. Routine company news and offers are delivered to the airline’s email subscribers, while crisis communications are incorporated into social media channels like Twitter.
Strategy
Since summer 2009, Icelandair has built customer loyalty through a series of personalised email campaigns. “Email provides an unparalleled channel to build loyalty with our guests and create buzz around our products that drive repeat purchases,” explains Icelandair’s web marketing project manager Katrin Erna Gunnarsdottir. “ExactTarget provides us a flexible platform to power all of our communications- both external guest communications and internal communications to agents.” Working with ExactTarget, Icelandair created an online marketing strategy, including an email marketing programme that consists of six targeted email campaigns. The campaigns range from newsletters and frequent flyer updates to pre-flight information messages and post-flight surveys.
Powered by ExactTarget’s interactive marketing software, Icelandair automatically sends its suite of email communications to clients in 10 countries throughout Europe and North America. Exact Target’s international sending technology allows the airline to send its messages in the appropriate format for each country and displays the content in a host of languages including German, Dutch, English, Icelandic, French, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
While email remains a consistent channel to communicate with guests, Icelandair needed a more timely way to communicate following the volcanic eruption in spring 2010. Email communication would only be received by Icelandair subscribers who may or may not have been impacted by the travel delays. Social media seemed to be a better channel to communicate with the thousands of holiday makers and business travelers that found themselves unable to board planes.
A conscious decision was made by the airline to refrain from utilising Facebook. Kjartan Sverrisson managed Icelandair’s Twitter outreach during the crisis and explained that people will hide your updates if a company posts too often on Facebook, whereas Twitter is designed to allow for a constant stream of information. Twitter allows companies to more frequently send comprehensive updates to enable two-way customer interaction. Thus Twitter was to be a more acceptable tool for this type of communication.
Execution
Since Twitter was selected as the medium to communicate its crisis response, Icelandair chose to use the Twitter business platform CoTweet. CoTweet helped the airline organise large amounts of communication following the volcanic eruption. CoTweet enables Icelandair to report relevant travel information and monitor any tweets that reference the airline. With CoTweet, Icelandair was able to quickly respond to questions and comments by assigning tweets to specific employees. By using the #ashtag and #ashcloud hashtags, Icelandair achieved greater distribution.
To provide further information to its customers, Icelandair also established a ‘Volcano News’ page on its website. The page was publicised primarily through Twitter. By directing customers to this news site, Icelandair was able to send out updates to a larger number of travelers simultaneously, which eliminated the need for individuals to wait in the queue line for the call center.
Results
As a result of Icelandair’s targeted email programme, the airline has seen an increase in sales and a boost in customer satisfaction. These targeted messages allow the airline to construct more relevant messages and offers to its customers.
The airline’s social media strategy will also be integrated into its email efforts. Using ExactTarget’s Social Forward technology, Icelandair will enable customers to share email content with up to 50 social network sites including Twitter and Facebook.
During a time of crisis, Icelandair kept its customers and others who follow the airline on Twitter up to date. By having a well-defined strategy and adopting CoTweet, Icelandair ensured that the airline’s reputation wasn’t tarnished by the fallout from the Volcanic ash cloud. The airlines quick response resulted in over 2,000 clicks on the links that they distributed, approximately half from users on Twitter and the remainder from users using registered applications, such as CoTweet or affiliated websites. Additionally, Icelandair’s tweet volume was nearly tripled in the immediate aftermath of the eruption. #ashtag then became a trending topic after Icelandair started using it on its tweets, resulting in even greater distribution of tweets and links. In just several days, the ‘Volcano News’ page on the Icelandair website had more than 1,200 views from people in more than 20 different countries.
Many companies have been criticised in the past for their ineffective use of social media when communicating with customers, particularly during times of crisis. Yet Icelandair managed to generate additional bookings from the increased traffic following the volcano’s eruption, a sign that the airline’s communication was well received and a demonstration of just how powerful Twitter and email can be when used correctly.
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