Free, Mobile Flight Information for FlyMonarch.com Gatwick Passengers

Yesterday, we announced the launch of Monarch Mobile: a new, hassle free way for FlyMonarch.com passengers to access all the information they need about their flight from the convenience of their mobile phone. Monarch Mobile is powered by StreamThru.

By working closely with BAA, the company that runs Gatwick Airport, we're able to send passengers the same live flight information that is displayed on the airport departure boards.

With Monarch Mobile, passengers opt-in to receive the following updates by SMS text message:

- 4 hours before scheduled departure time, we send a passenger their booking reference, check-in location, and let them know if their flight is on time

- 2 hours before departure, we send up to 2 relevant offers from airport retailers and Monarch. These offers include discounts on foreign currency conversion, duty free, electrical goods, and much more

- Shortly before boarding, we send a reminder text with flight status and boarding details.

At any time, if a passenger's flight is delayed by more than 15 minutes, we notify them immediately by text message. Unless there is a delay with a passenger's flight, they'll receive no more than 4 text messages before flying.

Setting-up a mobile campaign for airline passengers (Part IV)

Following the recent news that we've launched easyJetText, a white-label version of StreamThru for easyJet passengers, this is the fourth in a series of postings looking at how advertisers (including airport retailers) can target passengers in the terminal building at the time when they're most receptive.

Earlier posts discussed:

- Defining your offer
- Selecting your target audience and measuring the response rate to your campaign
- Refining your campaign to increase conversion rates

In these previous posts, we saw how you can analyse redemption data from your campaigns to determine the best routes, best days of the week, and best times of the day to target your offer. This approach works well for generic offers (e.g. 10% off all purchases, £5 off when you spend over £30), but for more specific offers you can achieve higher redemption rates if you the more advanced targeting options discussed below.

Note: StreamThru and its white-label airline variants, allow a maximum of 2 offers to be sent to each opted-in passenger. So, where there is competition from advertisers to communicate with these passengers, StreamThru favours those offers that are most targeted (on the basis that a more targeted offer is likely to be a more relevant offer). So, it pays to spend some time refining your campaigns.

FINE GRAINED TARGETING
One way to improve the effectiveness of your offer is to go beyond targeting based on time and route by introducing gender, reason for travel (business, leisure, or visiting friends and family), and postcode (e.g. selecting those postcodes that underpin your target geo-demographic segments).

To measure the effectiveness of this type of targeting, we suggest you initially run your campaign with no targeting for a short period (e.g. 1-2 weeks) to capture some baseline performance data.

Once you have this baseline data, you can apply your preferred targeting and run the campaign for a similar period. By comparing the redemption rate to your baseline data, you can see how effectively your targeting has influenced your campaign. Then, by making small refinements to this targeting, you can optimise campaign performance.

Note: When collecting baseline data, you may want to limit the number of offers you send, to control your budget. StreamThru enables you to do this.

SPLIT TESTING
Another way to improve campaign performance is to use some form of split testing.

For example, to test if gender influences redemptions for a particular offer, you could start by setting up 2 promotional codes on your POS system. Then, within StreamThru you could set up one variant of your offer for males and one for females, allocating a promotional code to each. By comparing redemption data for the 2 promotional codes, you'll quickly see if gender is a factor in the campaign's performance, and if so, you can tune the targeting of your offer accordingly.

SERIALISATION
If your POS system supports serialised promotional codes, you can gain much deeper insight into who is redeeming your offers.

To set this up with StreamThru, you first need to allocate a range of promotional codes within your POS system that are either unique within a day or unique within the life of the offer. Next, tell StreamThru about this range of codes, so when we send out your offer we can include a unique offer code for each recipient.

Note: Since each promotional code is tied to an individual passenger, you only need to collect this promotional code and the date and time of the transaction at the point-of-sale to completely close the redemption loop.

With StreamThru, we provide blind-access to passengers, so we never reveal who the specific individuals are who receive your offer ... but with serialisation, you can now analyse redemptions by gender, reason for travel, and postcode (to tie back to your geo-demographic segments), as well as by flight, day of week, and time of day.

With serialisation, the quickest way to refine the targeting of your campaign is to run an offer for a short period of time with no targeting, and then analyse the redemption data to determine the types of passenger who are most receptive to your offer (e.g. male business travellers flying to Rome, Milan, or Madrid from Monday to Thursday). Use this information to target your offer for maximum effectiveness.

NEXT STEPS
In the final posting in this series, I'll look at how you can set-up limited availability offers and how you can fulfil non-retail offers. In the meantime, if you're interested in advertising with us, please email us to request more details.

Lessons for the travel industry from Northern Rock

What can the travel industry learn from the recent debacle at Northern Rock in the UK?

Essentially, Northern Rock's management team have provided a master-class in how not to treat your customers during a crisis.

For those who haven't been following the story, Northern Rock, a UK mortgage lender, has been caught up in the recent credit crunch afflicting the global financial markets.

Quick overview of Northern Rock's problems
Northern Rock borrows most of the money to fund its mortgages from the markets. When the banks stopped lending to each other on August 9th, because of fears over exposure to US sub-prime mortgage risk, Northern Rock was unable to raise money to finance £6bn of newly written mortgages.

This crisis of liquidity, caused Northern Rock to ask the Bank of England for a loan to enable it to continue trading. Since Northern Rock's business was solvent, the Bank of England, as the UK's lender of last resort, offered them what is effectively an unlimited overdraft facility. However, the media quickly picked up on this story, panic ensued, and savers rushed to withdraw their life savings from the bank.

However, this is only part of the story, because it has to be said that from the moment the story broke, Northern Rock's management (who could hardly be accused of being caught on the hop) handled the whole situation very badly.

The web-site fiasco
On the 14th September, the day after the story broke, on-line savers were unable to access their accounts. Yet, Northern Rock's web-site made no mention of the Bank of England loan, nor did they warn on-line savers that their servers couldn't handle the volume of customer's trying to access the site. In fact, the focus of their homepage was offering more loans!

By Saturday 15th, and after customer's had withdrawn £2bn of savings, Northern Rock managed to add a link on their homepage to a trading statement ... just above the loan offer. The impression from the web-site was that Northern Rock were very blase about the situation facing them.

Northern Rock's Homepage

It took until Tuesday 18th, before Northern Rock issued a statement of apology and attempted to reassure visitors to their web-site (they also took out ad space in most of the UK daily newspapers reprinting this same statement).

"We can still repair the brand"
When interviewed in the media their CEO, Adam Applegarth, seemed more interested in reassuring shareholders than customers. From Friday until Sunday, he repeatedly used variations of the phrase: "we can still repair the brand".

Repair the brand? In a crisis of customer confidence, surely the focus should be on reassuring your customers? It took until the Monday, before he started using the line "the focus is on our customers".

Maybe if the focus had been on their customers from the start, Northern Rock could have stemmed some of the tide and come out of this with at least a modicum of their reputation in tact.

What can travel companies learn from Northern Rock?
For travel companies faced with a crisis lessons to be learnt from this are:

- Be honest and open about what is happening (across all communication channels)
- Be humble, apologise to your customers for any anxiety caused (even if you're not at fault)
- Be reassuring, explain clearly what you are doing to resolve the situation

If only Northern Rock had taken this approach from the outset.

Setting up a mobile campaign for airline passengers (Part III)

Following the recent news that we've launched easyJetText, a white-label version of StreamThru, for easyJet passengers, this is the third in a series of postings looking at how advertisers (including airport retailers) can target passengers in the terminal building at the time when they're most receptive.

Earlier posts discussed defining your offer and selecting your target audience and measuring the response rate to your campaign. This post focuses on refining your campaign to increase conversion rates.

REFINE YOUR CAMPAIGN TO INCREASE CONVERSION RATES
You'll need to let your campaign run for a couple of weeks to capture some meaningful performance data. Then you can start to use the reports we provide to analyse the effectiveness of your campaign. You should look for those areas where your offer is having the greatest impact, as well as those areas where the offer is not performing so well.

You can start by looking at the headline numbers: the number of offers sent, the number redeemed, and the conversion rate. However, this high level view often masks what's happening underneath.

The typical way to drill into performance data is to analyse performance over time, but for our purposes a more useful starting point is to drill down by route. This way you can start to see if there are any significant variations in conversion rates for different destinations.

The next step is to further analyse each route by day of the week and time-period. Day of the week will enable you to see if your campaign fares better at weekends or on weekdays. Time period categorises the time the offers were sent into: early morning, morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Analysing by time period allows you to see if the offer performs better at certain times of day.

By understanding these patterns, you can start to think about refining your campaign. For example:

- Are certain routes consistently under performing? If so, should you drop those routes? Or, do the under performing routes have something in common? If so, should you create a new version of the offer, with a different offer message?

- Are certain routes under performing on certain days or at certain times of the day? For example, does your offer perform better on Monday to Thursday, perhaps because its more attractive to a business audience? If so, should you drop the offer on this route over the weekend?

If you refine your campaign in this way, you'll soon see a significant increase in your conversion rates as you target those who are most receptive to your offer.

NEXT STEPS
In the next posting in this series, I'll look at how advanced targeting options can increase conversion rates. In the meantime, if you're interested in advertising with us, please email us to request more details.

Setting up a mobile campaign for airline passengers (Part II)

Following the recent news that we've launched easyJetText, a white-label version of StreamThru, for easyJet passengers, I've started a series of postings looking at how advertisers (including airport retailers) can target passengers in the terminal building at the time when they're most receptive.

In an earlier post I looked at defining your offer. This post focuses on selecting your target audience and measuring the response rate to your campaign.

SELECT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
In a future article, I'll explore some of the more advanced targeting options, but a simple way to get started is to target your offer by selecting a number of routes.

The choice of routes can be driven by a number of factors:

- Your experience of running previous traditional campaigns
- The level of business or leisure traffic on a route (if your offer is biased towards one of these audiences)
- The suitability of your offer for a given route (e.g. you probably wouldn't promote a currency conversion offer on a domestic route, or you may have certain duty free offers that are only available to passengers travelling outside the EU).

However, perfection is not essential at this stage. Compared to traditional channels and paper-based voucher schemes, you'll enjoy near instant feedback on your campaign performance ... so, you can refine your targeting as you go along based on real-world data ... ensuring you achieve the best possible response for each campaign.

HOW DO YOU MEASURE RESPONSE RATES?
For airport retailers, the first step is to create a voucher code to track the campaign through your POS system in the usual way.

You may choose to quote this voucher code in your offer message. Although, for speed, some retailers print a bar code containing the voucher code to place by each till. The sales assistant simply has to scan the bar code when a customer redeems the offer.

To enable the best possible analysis of your campaign performance, you need to capture as much data as possible at the point of sale. You may already scan the passengers boarding pass ... but if not, you should aim to capture the flight number (or destination) and date and time of the transaction.

We ask that you provide this redemption data to us on a daily or weekly basis, so we can integrate it with the offer data, to provide your campaign analysis. The more often you provide this data, the better control you gain over your campaign.

Note: StreamThru offers don't have to be one way. You can also include a call to action in your offer, which requires the passenger to respond to accept. To respond, passengers reply to your offer quoting a keyword that you specify. We use this response to trigger one of a number of fulfillment mechanisms (e.g. posting data to a web-service on your system).

NEXT STEPS
In the next posting in this series, I'll look at how you can use performance data to refine your campaign to increase conversion rates.

In the meantime, if you're interested in advertising with us, please email us to request more details.

Orbitz mobile: a virtual travel concierge?

Yesterday, Russell from Mobhappy reviewed Orbitz mobile travel site.

It's a free to use, well thought out site providing information about flights, traffic, weather, and airport parking, with user-generated data capturing queue times for security, taxis, etc.

As an aside, user-generated data is something we're giving a lot of thought to ourselves. The mobile web is the obvious way to capture simple, real-time information about queue times at different airports. But, the question we keep asking is: are there currently enough mobile web users in our demographic to allow us to capture and aggregate any meaningful data?

What is a virtual travel concierge?
A virtual travel concierge provides travellers with timely and relevant, information, advice, and assistance on their day of travel. The idea is to make a travellers end to end journey less stressful.

How does Orbitz site rate
Certainly, Orbitz hits the right buttons for useful information and advice.

But, to become a full concierge service, Orbitz needs to address personalisation. Today, you have to enter your flight details in their site and separately select your airport (U.S. only at the moment). A true concierge service would understand the travellers itinerary and filter the information displayed to ensure it is relevant.

To be fair to Orbitz, the user experience may be different if you booked with them ... they provide a log-in area for customers, which I couldn't access because I haven't booked a trip with them.

A nice example of customer service
An important element of any virtual concierge is providing assistance ... predicting a person's needs and responding to these needs in a timely manner.

Russell mentions Orbitz emailed him to tell him about the tube strike in London on his recent trip to the UK. A nice touch.

Imagine if they'd married this with their mobile service ... so, Russell receives a text message warning him of the London Underground issues and the text contains a WAP Push pointing him to a page on the mobile-site offering to help him beat the queues if he pre-books tickets on the Heathrow Express (a more civilised way of getting into Central London!).

The result would be a less stressful travel experience for the traveller and by offering relevant, timely assistance the travel company, in this case Orbitz, earns extra commission by selling train tickets.


All in all, Orbitz has developed a useful travel aid for anyone travelling within the US. And, this is an example of how mobile technology is going to enhance the travel experience over the coming years.

Setting-up a mobile campaign for airline passengers

Following last week's news that we've launched easyJetText, a white-label version of StreamThru, for easyJet passengers, what does this mean for advertisers and particularly airport retailers?

Target people who are about to fly
Advertisers can now create targeted SMS (text message) campaigns which are sent to opted-in passengers around 2 hours before their departure ... enabling airport retailers to target passengers in the terminal building at the time when they're most receptive to offers.

The process for setting up and managing campaigns is:

- Define your offer
- Select your target audience
- Measure the response rate
- Refine your campaign

Define your offer
Defining the text for your offer is a little like setting up a Google AdWords: you want to create a short, sharp message that drives a call to action ... and you need to do this within 130 characters (the other 30 characters of the SMS are reserved for flight updates).

To help you personalise the offer and make it more relevant for the recipient, you can include a number of tokens in your message. Tokens include the passengers name, departure airport, destination, flight number, departure date, airline, and many more.

For example, using a mixture of tokens and plain text, you could define your message as:

AIRLINE DESTINATION passengers - Get £5 off when you spend £50+ on sunglasses at Travel Traders.

If a passenger flying with Uno Air to Malaga received this offer they would see:

Uno Air Malaga passengers - Get £5 off when you spend £50+ on sunglasses at Travel Traders.

Note:You may also want to include a voucher code with your offer for your sales team to enter into your point of sales system.

For other advertisers looking for new ways to promote their brand or enable fulfillment, offer messages can also be used to initiate a WAP push by including a URL within the message which takes the recipient to a mobile web-site.

Next Steps
In future postings, I'll look at selecting your target audience and measuring response rates.

In the meantime, if you're interested in advertising to airline passengers, please email us to request more details.