July - 2023MARTECHOUTLOOK.COM19CXO I N S IGHTSWHAT 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, GOING GLOBAL IS ABOUT MELDING PEOPLE AND TECH An interview with Darren "Daz" Wright, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Flight Centre 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. 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 Darren "Daz" Wright
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