Email marketing examples: KLM uses email marketing in a loyalty programme
Context
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is a global airline based in the Netherlands. Together with Air France, it forms the Air France KLM Group, Europe's largest airline group. KLM currently maintains two loyalty programmesone for private customers called Flying Blue and another for companies, the BlueBiz loyalty programme.
The BLueBiz loyalty programme
When a company joins the programme, it can start earning Blue Credits on flights flown by its employees with AIR FRANCE, KLM, Alitalia, Delta Air Lines and other airline partners. Every time a business trip is booked with one of these airlines, the company earns Blue Credits. One Blue Credit is equivalent to one unit of your local currency. This means that, for example, each Blue Credit is equivalent to one Euro for most European airlines. Blue Credits are like cash and can be used to buy tickets. When booking a business flight, the user only has to mention his BlueBiz number and his company automatically earns Blue Credits. The BlueBiz programme is currently available in 63 countries.
BlueBiz was launched in 2003, and after 2 years it was decided to exploit the information collected to date and to make communication with users more relevant and effective. To this end, a relationship marketing strategy based, in the first instance, on the exploitation of a database with fine segmentations, and secondly, on the development of a email marketing programme throughout the user lifecycle.
In this programme, the relational strategy revolved around the following ideas:
- Profiling: it is about achieving a more contextualised communication with the user's reality.
- Behavioural segmentation to make communications more relevant.
- Facilitating the notion of dialogue through a wider deployment of interactive elements
The User Lifecycle (or how to achieve long-lasting and profitable relationships through relevant user communications)
The BlueBiz life cycle has two flows: one that determines the "stages of relationship" that the user occupies with the company, and a second that does so on the user's own personal data.
For each of the "stages" in which each user is, there is a series of email communications with personalised and relevant information. For example, since one of the data collected was the date of birth, it is possible to send birthday greetings.
In this other example, the email announcing the allocation of a new membership number after the programme update is shown.
Results
One of the most visible effects of the programme after its implementation was to the conversion of a 11% from inactive to active users and the increase in the level of satisfaction of users in this segment by 13%. In addition, the programme managed to increase the turnover of active members by 2%. For the reactivation of inactive members, a combined email and telephone action was carried out.
Examples of emails based on the propensity to reactivate.
In 2009, this email marketing programme won the Golden Emma Award, which is awarded by the European Media Management Education Association
You can see an explanatory video of the case at this link
The full case can be found in ppt at the following link
