Email marketing optimization for one of the largest airlines in the US

One of the largest airlines in the United States had an email marketing algorithm which bombarded their customers with an endless stream of e-mails.
As a result, relevant e-mails were being ignored and overall effectiveness of their marketing campaigns was reportedly very low.
Mu Sigma developed an analytical framework for email marketing using a test and learn approach. This helped the client roll out an org-wide marketing campaign design module for use in different regions, which led to improved targeting and ROI.
The Problem
The Loyalty Team, catering to Customer Relationship Management, wanted to optimize its email targeting framework through an extensive focus on customer behavior and preferences.
The existing marketing campaign management framework was not suitable for designing relevant offers for different types of customers.
The airline was looking for a framework that could help improve effectiveness of its campaign creation process across design and execution for ad-hoc campaigns as well as Business as usual (BAU) campaigns
The Mu Sigma Approach
Mu Sigma took a 3-pronged approach to build an email marketing framework for the client.
Laying the foundation
• We evaluated multiple KPI’s around customer preferences, purchase patterns, key products, offer types, etc. to identify for an effective e-mail campaign, and created numerous hypothesis around them
• Historical campaigns were analyzed to understand the issues across the existing campaign management cycle. The areas analyzed included offer design, audience building approach, and measurement modules
Test and Learn
• Post the foundational exercise, multiple scenarios were developed to map offers and audience characteristics
• Multiple statistical techniques were leveraged and depending on the KPI type and intensity of the campaign, significance levels were varied to achieve better precision
Execute and Scale
• Mu Sigma collaborated with the client’s Loyalty Management Team to roll out nationwide marketing campaigns based on the new design
• Under first phase of rollout, the design was leveraged across all possible offer types
• The analytical framework leveraged continuous inputs from the campaigns which were then fed into the test and learn engine to account for newer patterns
The Outcome
• The developed email marketing mechanism helped the client run targeted marketing campaigns with increase in both response and conversion rates by approximately 20%
• Value added content as well as social shares were added to e-mails for improved engagement with the audience
• To account for evolving audience preferences and enable better campaign design and measurement, a superior, more statistically robust engine was deployed.
Click here to know about how Mu Sigma helped one of the largest Pharmacy retailer optimize their loyalty program using advanced analytics, while providing 360⁰ support.