THE CHALLENGE

Air New Zealand wanted a closer relationship with its customers. This required a re-think from the foundations up on data, platforms, processes, and content. After a review of who its customers are, how they interact with the airline, and how they want to be communicated with, Air New Zealand undertook a program rededicated to delivering best-in-class customer communications with a more personalised, always-on customer experience.

This led Air New Zealand to a comprehensive and ambitious goal with four key focus areas: to “consolidate, experiment, optimise, and personalise our communications.”

When it came time to make a decision on its new customer communication solution, Air New Zealand chose an email delivery platform that enabled it to deliver highly personalised communications at scale with insightful and usable A/B testing.

THE SOLUTION

With Acoustic Campaign, Air New Zealand began experimenting with helpful communications, A/B testing, and always-on communication triggers.

Now, sending communications is easy, but the airline doesn’t just set it and forget it. The team introduced continuous optimisation as part of the campaign process. This means continually looking for how best to personalise messages using data-driven targeting across the customer lifecycle.

“The result that surprised us most was personalisation through dynamic content. We expected a good uplift, but not to the extent we saw.” The airline uses the Acoustic suite for all marketing and some transactional email messages, with several direct marketing teams being the main users.

The goal for “helpful communications” was also met. “We now have communications that are triggered based on customer behavior at a time that is relevant for the customer.”

“For example, we send notifications to use Airpoints Dollars that are about to expire — or information about a new tier status and the associated benefits that a customer might have reached.”

And what are some of Air New Zealand’s most successful always-on communication triggers? “We have a series of highly successful post-booking and pre-travel advisory emails, informing customers of relevant information, products, and services either after they book or before they fly.”

THE RESULT

Along with the ability to quickly deploy new, highly personalised content and setting always-on triggers, some campaigns saw significant uplifts in key engagement metrics. This included an uplift of up to 80% in open rates, up to 38% in click-through rates and up to 5% in reading time.

The Acoustic suite of products helped them achieve success “by allowing ease-of-use and the deployment of personalisation at scale across Air New Zealand email communications.”

“Our priorities of consolidation, experimentation, optimisation and personalisation will never be ‘done,’ so we are on a continuing journey of finding new possibilities and opportunities all the time.”

Air New Zealand partnered with Datamine, a leading data and analytics consultancy and the Acoustic ANZ Marketing Automation Partner of the Year, to support the delivery of its best-in-class marketing communications.

In addition to providing technical expertise and campaign support, Datamine worked with Air New Zealand’s internal teams to maximise their use of the Acoustic platform. From onboarding and training sessions to providing marketing automation and reporting best practices, it is a truly collaborative approach to ensure the successful use of the platform.

To read more about the success of Air New Zealand's customer communications platform using Acoustic Campaign, read the full case study here. 

THE CHALLENGE

One of Datamine’s travel and tourism clients wanted to perform a customer base analysis in an effort to understand how variables such as season, gender, timing and location affect ticket sales. 

The client had a number of strategic priorities for the coming years - in an effort to better capture and utilise their customer data to achieve these goals, they contacted Datamine about doing a data mining Knowledge Discovery project.

THE SOLUTION

Datamine’s objectives for the Knowledge Discovery were to:

• Report on data quality for marketing purposes
• Increase the client’s shared understanding of customers
• Better target retention activity – identify advocates to keep and reward
• Inform targeting of acquisition and up-sell initiatives

Our team combined many data sources and took a deep dive into the data to deliver these objectives and help the client gain a better sense for customer behaviour – the insights from which would highlight what variables to change in order to reach their strategic goals.

THE RESULT

The data mining project uncovered a number of valuable data points for the team to take into consideration, specifically related to booking habits, food and beverage performance, ticket sale location and customer growth.  We also determined areas where the client outperformed the competition. 

The organisation has plans to use these insights so they can make more informed decisions and achieve their marketing and sales goals over the coming years.

THE CHALLENGE

A large New Zealand travel organisation had a huge amount of data and wanted to ensure they were leveraging this to guide customer and marketing strategy.  The biggest challenge in this was that they had customers engaging with them at different times through different channels, such as their website, call centre and social media profiles.  They approached Datamine to help them build a repository to deliver a single view of customers so they could understand potential value across the base and better target their communications.

THE SOLUTION

Datamine built a Datamart that cleans and merges customer information on an ongoing basis from over 150 stores, a central booking and reservation system, website enquiries and data collected from expos.  Once in a central location, the information was matched and deduped to achieve a single customer view and unify records of their travel patterns, spend and store visits.  This centralised database can be used to predict future behaviour and drive specialty brand growth.

THE RESULT

The organisation is now able to understand each customer’s real value and glean valuable insights that were previously unavailable to them.  The single customer view across brands, stores, websites and regions allows for better permission management across various channels.  The client has also improved their marketing campaigns, which can be carried out in less time, at a reduced cost and with an increased ROI.