Everyone loves a loyalty program. That promise of a little extra for nothing must be why the average American household has over 15 loyalty club memberships. But that number doesn’t tell the whole story.
In reality, the average consumer may only actively engage with a handful of those clubs. The rest languish unused in wallets or on apps — points unspent and brands unremembered.
The airline sector isn’t immune. Loyalty points or added miles were meant to keep customers coming back, time and again, to the same airline. But engagement has dropped. Travelers are buying their airfare through aggregators and see points or miles as too time-consuming to acquire for all but the most frequent flyer.
And price still has a huge impact on airline booking — even when it comes down to just a few dollars.
The Branding Difference
Brand engagement matters if operators are going to keep a slice of the $10.9 trillion that’s spent globally each year on travel and tourism.
The challenge in such a highly competitive market is in keeping consumers interested and engaged after an initial booking. So if points and prizes aren’t attractive, and differentiation sometimes comes down to a question of dollars and cents, how do airlines maintain loyalty?
Here’s a tip: Let your fans brag about their brand experience on social media. Just as fitness friends post the steps they’ve walked or miles they’ve cycled, travel fans love to quantify the miles they’ve flown and places they’ve seen.
Delta cottoned onto this idea early. In 2016, it began to use its SkyMiles Medallion loyalty program data to share with members a personalized recap of their year with Delta. While this was clearly a cool idea (as Spotify will doubtless agree), it unfortunately was an email with static content and a limited amount of information. Read — maybe — and delete.
Leveling Up With Personalized Video
Working with Idomoo, Delta put some spice into its yearly recap campaign by using Idomoo’s Personalized Video platform to create dynamic videos personalized for each Medallion member.
The videos used frequent flyer data to create hundreds of thousands of unique videos that included shareable stats like the number of upgrades they’d managed to swing, their favorite destination, how they compared with other members and more.
Each member received their own unique jet-setting Personalized Video, created just for them.
Take a look.
Now, Make It Viral
Of course, what’s the value of a great story if there’s no one to tell it to? So the latest iteration of Delta’s year-in-review campaign has embedded share buttons. This has generated more than 400,000 video views and inspired a new campaign hashtag — #deltamedallionlife.
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It’s not just the popularity of the campaign, nor its success in driving viewers to its website (a mere 5x over its benchmark).
It was the speed of engagement. Delta saw social mentions and sharing within minutes of distributing the videos. The Personalized Videos hit the sweet spot of customer loyalty. They’re not just bringing customers back — they’re drawing in their friends and family, too.
All told, the campaign earned over 3 million impressions.
Personalized Recap Tips for the Pros
So how do you get Personalized Video recaps to work for you? We wrote a whole blog with tips for a great year in review if you really want to get the most out of your campaign, but here’s a good place to start.
- Make your customer the star: Boost your customers’ social clout and help them celebrate their travel milestones with shareable, braggable content.
- Be strategic with your timing: Delta used the end of the calendar year to create its year in review videos, but we’ve had other clients use big anniversaries, the end of the month or quarter, or even customer birthdays. Other appealing points in time to engage travelers include the start of a loyalty membership, a tier upgrade, an upcoming trip or a peak (or hey, off-peak) travel season.
- Expand your reach: While engaging existing customers can help acquire new ones through social sharing, as it did for Delta, why stop there? Video ads can be hyper-targeted based on customer profiles, boosting CTR by 5x, and even generated with AI to save time and cut costs.
- Sell smarter: Use Personalized Video to cross-sell and upsell contextually, turning an ineffective direct sales pitch into a conversational and engaging pitch that translates directly to your bottom line.
What to know more about giving loyalty that boastful boost? We’ve got a demo we’d really love to show you.
