Aerann airline marketing

Aerann airline marketing

Aerann airline marketing

Marketing environmental challenges

Online Marketing can be extremely effective if the offer is strong enough, as regional airline Aer Arann proved last week with a campaign which resulted in a 320 per cent spike in flight bookings for the day, the highest sales achieved by the airline in one day this year. Aer Arann also recorded its highest ever number of sales in one hour as consumers responded to a “Happy Hour” offer. The offer was 50 per cent off all flights booked between 1pm and 3pm on the day. Customers were notified about the sale the previous day via the Aer Arann e-zine, which informed the database that a major offer was on the way, without disclosing exactly what that offer would turn out to be. (Tiernan, S. O'Dwyer, M, and C. Carroll 2005, 626-89)

Customers only learned about the discount at 1pm when they logged onto the Aer Arann website. E-mail marketing is a very effective method of one-to-one communication with potential customers. But it is fraught with peril. Send out e-mails too often and you will alienate your customers, who consider you to be spamming them. Then there's the question of the best way to compile your database. It is vital to make sure it is “clean”, and then you have to worry about how to comply with the often onerous data protection rules. According to Andrew Kelly, Aer Arann's corporate affairs director, few people book travel at home, and increasingly consumers are using their work e-mail, rather than personal accounts, to receive promotions. The peak booking period is between midday and 2pm. (Tiernan, S. O'Dwyer, M, and C. Carroll 2005, 626-89)

He says: “We are careful how we manage our e-mail marketing. If we do any sort of a sale, we will send an e-mail to the database. We also break out the database into regions for more specific promotions. We also make sure it is a genuine offer. On average, we do two e-mail promotions a month.” Building an opt-in list is the most important part of online marketing. Since 2003, Aer Arann has built up a list of names that is now edging towards the 500,000 mark, according to Kelly. “For online marketing to work, it's all about the offer, and how you target the audience on your database. We could have done an online offer with some service provider who would give us access to a million e-mail addresses. But those recipients would never respond, because they haven't signed up to receive our e-mails and they might not even know who we are.” (Tiernan, S. O'Dwyer, M, and C. Carroll 2005, 626-89)

He adds: “The reason that the Happy Hour campaign worked so well was that it was exclusive to our online database and wasn't advertised anywhere else. Word of the promotion spread onto Twitter, which helped enormously because it was friends recommending the promotion to each other - so they believed it ...