Bristol Airport is a major international airport located in the southwest of England. It’s the eighth largest airport in the UK in terms of passenger traffic, having facilitated 9 million passengers in 2019. The airport offers flights to over 110 destinations, both domestic and international, including Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America.

Interestingly, Bristol Airport earns more than 30% of its revenue from on-site car parking. The airport’s website allows travelers to book parking spaces and this additional income helps the airport offset its operational costs. By generating revenue from ancillary services such as car parking, Bristol Airport can offset the costs of running the airport and keep ticket prices competitive for travelers.

Stuck in a data silo

Bristol Airport faced a challenge as it was stuck in a data silo where each airline held all the passenger data. Due to this, the airport was unable to cross-sell on-site airport parking and other airport offerings.

To address this challenge, the team recognized the need for better passenger communication pre-flight to decrease customer uncertainty around airports during the COVID-19 pandemic. Improving passenger communication would not only benefit the customers but also help the airport to increase its revenue and improve customer satisfaction.

Building customer relationships and driving revenue

Bristol Airport took a strategic approach to boost revenue and enhance the passenger experience. Here’s how it achieved success:

Capturing new leads with a compelling offer

• Eye-catching on-site popups: The team employed an animated Wisepops popup on the airport’s website to capture attention. This popup offered a significant welcome discount of 15%, incentivizing visitors to sign up for the airport’s email marketing list. This tactic effectively expanded its reach and brought in potential customers.

Personalized email campaigns and nurturing leads

Once users subscribed, Bristol Airport leveraged email automation to deliver targeted campaigns:

• Triggered emails for parking interest: Dotdigital’s platform enabled Bristol Airport to set up automated email triggers based on user behavior. By tracking user behavior within emails, the system identified those who clicked on parking links categorized as “parking” in regular email campaigns. This triggered a purchase intent alert, indicating a potential parking booking.
• Automated follow-ups with booking verification: An integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 allowed for automated follow-up emails. These emails checked the subscriber’s “Last Booking Date” data field. If no parking booking was made after clicking the link, the subscriber received two personalized emails reminding them of their interest and the available discount.
• Personalized reminders and booking incentives: These follow-up emails went beyond generic reminders. Bristol Airport personalized the message by referencing the subscriber’s previous behavior (clicking the parking link). The emails reminded them of the exclusive email discount and the benefits of booking directly with the airport. This personalized approach enticed them to complete their parking reservation, effectively capturing potential revenue that might have otherwise been lost through abandoned carts.

Enhancing the customer journey

After the booking was made, the team served the customer with a three-step post-purchase journey designed to maximize all cross-sell revenue opportunities while also prioritizing a smooth travel experience. This journey included targeted offers for additional services like airport lounges or travel insurance.

Additionally, Bristol Airport provided important travel information to reduce terminal queue times and ensure a hassle-free experience for the passengers. This approach not only increased revenue but also improved customer satisfaction, leading to positive word-of-mouth and repeat business.

By implementing this comprehensive strategy, Bristol Airport addressed multiple goals: attracting new customers, personalizing communication, maximizing revenue opportunities, and ultimately fostering a positive customer experience.

Thanks to Dotdigital, Bristol Airport was able to capture more bookings and provide customers with exclusive discounts and reminders, all while streamlining its marketing efforts. This successful partnership is a great example for businesses looking to enhance their email marketing.

High sales and happy customers

Bristol Airport saw an impressive boost in results from its new marketing strategy. The discount code offered during the campaign was used by customers in 48% of all future transactions. Emails played a significant role in generating revenue, accounting for 22% of all sales.

But that’s not all. A customer survey revealed even better news. A staggering 71% of respondents rated the quality of the information provided during the campaign as excellent, very good, or good. This strong indicator shows that the campaign was not only successful in driving sales but also delivered clear and valuable information to customers.

Need to enhance customer communications to maintain a competitive edge

Changes to the education industry saw a greater focus was being placed on cost-efficacy, improving pass rates, providing real work experience, and real employment opportunities.

In the smaller but highly competitive Awarding Organization (AO) space, City & Guilds found themselves fighting to remain prominent. Alongside major players such as EdExcel and OCR, it was now contending with niche providers focused on specific industries. All the while, it was also growing awareness and take-up of its wider services, supporting centres with their broader challenges.

To continue to provide this vast range of services, City & Guilds realized it needed to improve the quality of its customer communications. This would ensure that it would be the AO colleges, schools, businesses, and centres continued to turn to provide qualifications.

Integrating with Dotdigital smart marketing automation

Realizing the need to tailor its marketing communications, City & Guilds decided to put in place a four-year program to automate its marketing and management of customer feedback. Its goal was to ensure all customers receive relevant communications in the most cost-effective way.

In order to do this, it needed to understand customer behavior across different touchpoints, and offer relevant content at each one. As a result, it needed to build a fully integrated infrastructure which would could provide a 360-degree customer view. This was possible by integrating Dotdigital with its CRM and web application. By syncing these systems it’s able to track web behavior and purchase history to deliver relevant and timely content.

Thanks to this, it’s been able to set up a wide range of highly refined triggered programs. Once an existing customer logs onto the site, it will immediately know who they are, what their job title is, and which qualifications they’re interested in. Triggered messages are set up to send to visitors when they visit pages related to their field of interest. For instance, if a Head of Hairdressing visited a page on beauty qualifications, they’d receive an automated follow-up offering them a download, or discussion with a support team member.

Automated messaging delivers high open rates and increased ROI

When compared to single email follow-ups, the success of automating triggered messaging was evident. It’s now able to deliver specific, personalized content at scale. As a result, its achieved open rates of 51%, and boosted the number of opportunities from this campaign by 32%. It also delivered a return of investment of 15:1.

Harnessing Dotdigital for targeted content and enhanced membership engagement

The RAeS has a vast amount of data at its fingertips: 24,000 members, 400 events per year, and almost 300 corporate partners. Members include engineers, astronauts, entrepreneurs, designers, and students from across the globe – each with their own interests and preferences. The society’s business model relies heavily on membership revenue, so delivering targeted content and relevant communications that inspire members to renew is key.

Before moving to Dotdigital, the team would download lists from Dynamics 365 and manually import them into their then email platform. The society’s systems were disjointed, resulting in time-consuming processes.

Dynamic Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration for enhanced targeted communications

The RAeS liaised with Dotdigital partner Trillium to implement Dotdigital for Microsoft Dynamics 365, along with an integrated preference center. The integration empowers the RAeS with faster, smarter marketing tools; the team is now able to sync its member database automatically, view key email analytics against contact records, and send valuable communications to relevant audiences. What’s more, targeted mailing lists can be created in CRM and synchronized across to Dotdigital – putting internal resources to better use.

Throughout the entire onboarding process and beyond, Trillium provided steadfast support – from automation program queries to marketing advice on how to utilize the platform in the best way possible.

As a result of Dotdigital, Trillium, and the RAeS working together, the society now has a single view of its members, is able to deliver relevant communications for each persona, and has successfully improved levels of engagement

Dotdigital collaboration leads to personalized campaigns, higher engagement, and impressive metrics

Besides the optimization of internal resources, the move to Dotdigital has helped the RAeS create and deliver more personalized event communications to its members. The increased relevancy of these messages has led to a healthy uplift in engagement. For example, the newly branded campaign templates have tripled click-through rates and increased event landing page traffic by 7%.

The RAeS now sees open rates of 35% vs. a 22% average for the non-profit sector. Click-through rates are also up from 2.5% to 4%.

As a result of Dotdigital, Trillium, and the RAeS working together, the society now has a single view of its members, is able to deliver relevant communications for each persona, and has successfully improved levels of engagement, both in- and externally.