flight centre

What Impact did the Pandemic have on Flight Centre's Marketing Operation?

With the dark days of lockdowns and border closures behind us in most places in the world, the tourism and travel industries are bouncing back. If I could take away anything good from the experience of executing marketing operations in the travel industry during the pandemic, it’s that necessity spurs innovation. Or, as Einstein hit the mark and said it so much better, “in the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity”.

The pandemic brought the travel industry to a near stand-still overnight. As Flight Centre kept the lights on, and our marketing pulled out all the stops to keep customers engaged during a protracted down-time when our product offering was minimal, two things dawned on us.

First, there were smarter ways we could be using the digital marketing tools and platforms at our disposal. Second, the travel hiatus would give us time and space to manoeuvre and make change, particularly around our need to standardise processes across our five multinational operations in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and Canada and facilitate greater collaboration between them.

Combining these opportunities, we're now building a globalised marketing team to enhance our use of various marketing technology tools.

How are you Harnessing First Party Data to Ensure you’re Reaching your Customers as we Move Into a Cookieless World?

Email journeys now play a crucial role in the acquisition of first party data now that third-party cookies are becoming obsolete.

Until recently we used Salesforce for email marketing in Australia only. Each of our five regions were using a different email platform, which meant we were all facilitating the customer journey but replicating it five times over in various shades of the Flight Centre brand from start to finish.

“Tools and platforms are only as good as the people driving them. As the impact of the pandemic recedes and we extend the use of our marketing technical capabilities, we're mindful of the important role our experienced people play in using tech to produce better outcomes”

Now that we've rolled out Salesforce in all five regions our emails are consistently on-brand, allowing us to build customer journeys once and share them globally across our regions.

Our global approach is also a godsend for split testing. Not content with simply A/B testing our sends, we can now build and test five different iterations of them at once (one in each region) to then validate and roll out the most effective option across all regions.

To get more out of Salesforce, we've integrated our EDM customer journeys with the Flight Centre app using Swrve better to deliver hyper-personalised push notifications. For example, a customer may look at a page featuring fly and stay packages to Phuket. They then get an email. But if they didn’t open it, two days later they get an app push with content related to our Thailand products to encourage them to continue the consideration journey. This allows us to build on first-party data we collect about the customer's habits and choices. No cookies, no fuss.

What are you Doing to Reach Customers in New Markets and Deliver the Right Content on your Site?

As we move to bringing our five multinational websites under one global "super-site" umbrella, we're also deploying Wisepops to improve customer data acquisition. Customers will be invited to engage with consistently branded, user- friendly pop-ups whether they land on our site in Vancouver, Manchester, Cape Town, Queenstown or Broome.

With Google set to phase-out third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, we're banking on our development of first-party data pop-ups to produce a cleaner, safer and more manageable data gathering tool.

How Important is Understanding your Customer’s Pain Points and Being Able to Speak to Them One-On-One Across Platforms?

We've broadened the scope of how we use this platform to include scheduling content on social media, employee advocacy, community management and social monitoring as well as being a listening post for brand mentions and competitor behaviour.

As we've found with our expansion of Salesforce, rolling out Sprinklr globally has made scheduling our content on our social accounts five times more efficient by allowing us to share it seamlessly across all five regions. It’s made reporting more efficient too, letting us compare apples to apples across all regions by aligning reporting dashboards in one platform.

Sprinklr now gives us a holistic view of the brand in all five regions, allowing us to track against competitors with global social listening reporting.

It’s also allowed us to build and roll out an employee advocacy platform, on which we can share content with our employees to share on their own social accounts. This not only allows our travel agents to use social media as a personal marketing tool, but also allows us as a brand to reach a greater audience through the personal connections of our employee advocates.

What's One Piece of Advice You'd Give Anyone Looking to take their Use of Martech to the Next Level?

Tools and platforms are only as good as the people driving them. As the impact of the pandemic recedes and we extend the use of our marketing technical capabilities, we're mindful of the important role our experienced people play in using tech to produce better outcomes. With hard-wired resolve, we're committed to using martech to meet our customers wherever they are, be that instore, over the phone or online.

Our teams are based around the world with technical experts sitting in each country adapting and working within the global framework, their passion and delivery is outstanding and could only be done with a single global platform strategy.

But it’s not just about booking travel, our people are experts because they’ve travelled far and wide, are increasingly tech-savvy, and crazy about opening up the world for those who want to see.