2016 Gold Best use of e-mail marketing

Agency Havas helia

Client easyJet

Campaign summary

You’ve flown enough kilometres to reach the moon

Campaign overview

To celebrate a 20th anniversary with each of their customers in a personal and relevant way, easyJet applied the sentiment of the campaign, ‘How 20 years have flown’, to CRM communications.

They used data to create emotional stories to not only bring customers’ travels to life, it would bring easyJet closer to them.

Strategy

Rather than being self-congratulatory, easyJet told a story to resonate personally and emotionally.

They found inspiring information about customers’ journeys with them over the past 20 years to show how customers’ histories were linked with easyJet’s.

‘How 20 Years Have Flown’ was the campaign idea, with the aim to explore the human side of travel and highlight easyJet’s evolution from low-cost airline to a marketleading airline brand.

It was in direct communications where easyJet brought to life every customer journey using data in personal and creative ways. These insights gave easyJet the chance to build specific stories by understanding long-term behaviours and trends.

Creativity

Stories had to be adaptable to customers who had flown once or hundreds of times, and inspire nostalgia and excitement for future plans.

Knowing that the amount of easyJet kilometers a customer has flown equates to the distance to the moon or the length of the River Nile is an insight worth talking about.

So easyJet made personal recommendations based on what they knew about customers: places they hadn’t been, all the places they have been or recommendations for where to go, based on similar profiles.

12 email modules combined graphic devices, destination imagery and emotive copy. The work brought to life 28 data points with more than 770 lines of variable text driven by 49 rules ranging from relatively simple, to a complex series of conditional logic. The extract that powered this campaign contained more than 1,000 lines of code, resulting in 12m+ unique emails.

Results

A total of 12,473,608 unique emails were sent, with open rates more than 163% higher than the average easyJet newsletter - with 121% higher clickthrough rates.

Within minutes of the first batch of sends easyJet saw an overwhelmingly positive response across social media with an estimated reach of 685k people and more than 1.1m impressions.

Engagement was considerably stronger with the emails that had the most personalisation - those customers who received personalised destination recommendations drove three times as many clicks.

Conversion rates increased across all recipients - by 30% in Switzerland, for example. The newsletters drove, on average, £38m in revenue for a comparable audience.

This 20th anniversary activity generated £103m in revenue, an uplift of £65m

Team

Jen Emerton (Managing Partner) • Alicea McKirdy (Senior Account Manager) • Jiknesh Patel (Senior Email Producer) • Sarah Wood (Associate Creative Director) • Will Kruger (Head of Design) • Alex Hess (Senior Copywriter) • Thomas Craig (Senior Art Director) • John St Ledger (Digital Designer) • Natalie Hutton (Senior CRM Strategy and Planning Manager) • Barbara Cant (Email Marketing Manager) • Ben O’Brien (Senior CRM Analyst)

Contributors

VCCP (Concept development for ATL 20th anniversary campaign)