Low-cost air carrier Spirit Airlines’ email marketing programme “is experiencing soaring open rates and generating increased revenues.”

Published: 11 Jul 2007

Low-cost air carrier Spirit Airlines’ email marketing programme “is experiencing soaring open rates and generating increased revenues.”

The airline, which powers its email marketing programme with Silverpop, claimed since Spirit Airlines carrier began working with the on-demand software provider in October 2006, its email open rates regularly top 50 percent and have reached as high as 81 percent. Monthly revenue generated by Spirit Airlines’ email programme has also taken off—from just nine percent last year to 15 to 20 percent contribution to the bottom line.

“Prior to teaming with Silverpop, we struggled with limited email marketing capabilities, and segmenting our massive database was time-consuming and difficult,” said Bobby Schroeter, Spirit Airlines’ Senior Director of Consumer Marketing.

“The lack of a true, customisable template meant we had to create emails for each subscriber group from scratch. Then, one-by-one, we had to manually assign each recipient on the list a specific email message to receive,” said Schroeter.

To get Spirit Airlines’ email marketing campaign off the ground, the first step was to segment the airline’s massive list of two million subscribers into six groups based on information obtained at opt-in. Segments included frequent flyer members, those with branded credit cards, passengers who had indicated a preferred airport and those recipients for whom Spirit Airlines had little more than an email address.

“We focus on learning more about each segment and creating exciting email campaigns that connect with them,” Schroeter said. “We programme and deploy a new campaign specifically targeting each segment. Messages are created with dynamic content that includes unique destination and fare information as well as special promotional offers from advertising partners.”

To continually fine-tune the programme, Spirit Airlines tests static and dynamic content against subsets of all groups and against particular segments.

Elaine O’Gorman, VP-strategy for Silverpop, said the solid improvements in results that Spirit Airlines achieved is a testament to the power and importance of testing.

For example, the airline’s marketers run a subject line test for frequent flyer members and, within that test, run a sub-test evaluating static content with all fares and dynamic content with specific locations.

“With the right tools, setting up tests can be very easy and extremely valuable,” she said. “But many marketers fail to take advantage of the wealth of actionable data available to them. The fact is, if you don’t continually test and refine your segmentation rules, relevancy will falter and recipients will ignore you.”