Guest Post: How Transavia is changing the rules of customer relevance, using intelligent technology

Customer behaviour has changed forever, and marketing has reached what seems like an impossible double standard, says Nick Brandts, lead direct campaigning and online sales, Transavia Continue reading →

Nick Brandts, lead direct campaigning and online sales, Transavia

Customer behaviour has changed forever, and marketing has reached what seems like an impossible double standard.

Complexity increases as customer channels, systems, screens – and the data they all carry – diversifies and fragments.

But the demand for marketing relevance also increases.

At Transavia, we believe in pioneering efficiency in line with our low cost ethos – but we also care greatly about our customer experience.

They want to be treated like people; they want to be understood; and as such, they want their next-best-action in booking their flight to be right at their fingertips when they need it.

How do we address this series of intent-driven moments, occurring across the separate pieces of the customer journey; from our own website and YouTube, to Skyscanner, to search and display ads. And then beyond digital – into real-world customer behavior?

Here, I’ll describe four steps on our journey towards greater relevance. We’re achieving this by using the Relay42 platform to become more efficient and personalised in our approach, by being smarter in our use of data regardless of where our customers choose to go.

A battle with competitors for hearts, minds, and money

Where there’s a need to fill a plane before take-off, there’s pressure to be right there in the peripheral vision of every potential passenger.

But we don’t have endless advertising budget, nor do we believe in a pay-and-spray approach in an effort to reach our audience.

This means we need to be smart and start small.

By finding synergies between our existing channels, and asking ourselves how we can optimise their effectiveness as greater than the sum of their parts, we began using technology to contextualise data across search, AdWords, display and email.

This means that we can be in the driving seat for our customers – but only when these separate islands within our business can talk to one another.

A platform built to mirror the customer context, and control our marketing message

We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all marketing approach.

Next to increasing customer value in this race for relevance – we are also looking for ways to increase the value of our marketing ecosystem which works seamlessly, by connecting the different systems we have.

The Relay42 platform plays a really valuable role in integrating our organisation as well as our customer communications.

We have the APIs ready, and so these components can be connected out-of-the-box, which means we can get started quickly in proving value.

Making customer loyalty a bottom line

We’ve already seen that applying someone’s booking history, clicking behavior, and interactions on different channels in combination with each other, is a perfect way to shape intent and deliver a next best message for them.

Our team understands that when a brand keeps throwing irrelevant or generic messages at you, it’s annoying, and our ambitions reflect this.

We’ve found that by using technology to organise our marketing centered around customer context rather than specific channels, we can automate dynamic relevant content.

For example, we serve different messages for someone who is browsing destinations- than for someone who’s visited our site three times and is much closer to a conversion.

Shifting our team from channel optimisation, to customer-centric success

Where the product is the right fit, the people using it need to be driven in a customer-centric direction too.

With much more autonomy to try new things, we see our marketing unit managing more of a cross-channel strategy and creating one-to-one messages which really work.

We find ourselves planning for more nuanced variables in our outreach – like determining whether we retarget an individual for a booking they’re interested in, based on the flight’s load factor and time to departure.

This can potentially increase efficiency on a huge scale, as well as making real-time relevance a reality for all our passengers.

For us, the ability to test and learn for the benefit of our customers – and the continual growth of our business – is what drives us.

We start small and demonstrate value, then we scale up; and that’s because we’re confident we have the right technology, and the right collective approach to reach new heights.