Personalised from booking to arrival

How LOT uses digital marketing technology to enable individualised air travel.

Founded:

1928

Headquarters: Warsaw, Poland
https://www.lot.com

With the Adobe solutions LOT was able to improve an eight times higher growth for cross-sell campaigns compared to 2019.

Products:

Adobe Analytics ›

Adobe Campaign ›

Adobe Target ›

Goals

Delivering personalised, real-time information with a focus on additional offers.

Manage campaign orchestration in a simple and structured way.

Preparing for the cookieless-era with new ways of data management.

Results

E-mail templates in Adobe Target enable personalised offers.

With Adobe Analytics, the airline can extract detailed analytics and predictive data.

Unified customer data for over 50 LOT sales markets with Adobe Campaign.

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One of the oldest trailblazers in the airline industry

LOT Polish Airlines, which has existed for 95 years, is one of the twelve longest-running airlines in the world. In the pre-pandemic age, the company offered more than 120 regular connections to nearly 100 airports worldwide, with more than 10 million passengers choosing to fly with LOT in 2019 alone. The company, headquartered in Warsaw, also serves as one of the 26 members of the “Star Alliance”, the largest aviation alliance in the world.

Auto publishing was a hot topic for the airline long before the pandemic, as they managed customer data manually for over 50 markets and twelve languages. With more than 16,000 potential travel combinations of origin and destination, manual data coordination had long been not impossible. LOT therefore decided to incorporate digital technologies to optimise their business processes and, most importantly, the customer experience. This allowed them to provide a truly seamless travel experience. With the help of Adobe Campaign and Adobe Target, LOT was able to gain valuable insights and deliver the right message to the right passenger at the right time.

Knowing when information is important

Generating revenue from additional services, including extra luggage or travel insurance, is one of LOT’s most important KPIs. It is not uncommon to realise, when packing your suitcase, that your hiking gear takes up more space than you thought. Customers receive these offers only when they become relevant – for example, shortly before the start of a trip. The trick is to send every piece of information at the right time. LOT used the time of pandemic wisely and re-developed their main cross-sell campaign to Adobe Campaign Standard. This resulted in a four times better campaign performance for LOT. The airline was from then on able to do the send out automatically on each day and can capture customers that have booked shortly before the flight. E-mails with helpful information’s or additional offers are sent before each flight and not only once before the whole trip, with this LOT accompanies their passengers during their whole trip. Moreover, the deliverability rates are extremally high with 99,8 percent, so the Adobe tool works well with the Polish email service providers. LOT conducted a lot of tests and improvements in order to be able to select the best message and send out time. These optimizations boosted the campaign result by additional 82 percent. Additionally, the airline implemented, among other things, new communication channels like SMS and push notifications for their app. Also new language options, more personalized output and reminders for passengers which haven’t open their e-mails to a certain point. With deep linking mechanism recipients get logged directly to their reservation details so they can change their reservation or choose additional services. The application assists with customer data management and provides insight into passenger interest, which LOT can then respond to with personalised messaging.

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L Spacing, center

“Adobe Analytics is the heart of the system that feeds our e-commerce blood system with the relevant data. Thinking about measurement at every implementation step allows LOT to be data-driven organization,” explains Katarzyna Żołnowska, Head of Analytics and Data Management Unit in E-Commerce Department, LOT. The company uses five different email templates and several dozen content versions for their communication. These are adjusted to particular recipients thanks to machine learning algorithms and Adobe Target. In combination with Adobe Analytics, the airline can also extract detailed analytics and predictive data. These new insights can be directly applied for even better customer experiences. Compared to 2019, this enabled LOT to add eight times more value to their cross-sell campaigns sent via marketing automation channels.

Katarzyna Żołnowska,

Head of Analytics and Data Management Unit, E-Commerce Department, LOT

Orchestrating customer data as a recipe for success

The imminent end of the third-party cookie also motivated the company to further modernise their communication strategy. “We were aware that we needed to start integrating a solid first-party data strategy now to ensure long-term, forward-looking business success,” says Justyna Bednarska, Head of Online Customer Acquisition in E-Commerce Department, LOT. The Adobe solutions currently in use provide detailed insights into data. This enables LOT to respond to these insights with automated workflows and implement new marketing and information campaigns much faster than before. In these fast-moving times, this is a huge competitive advantage.

“We were aware that we needed to start integrating a solid first-party data strategy now to ensure long-term, forward-looking business success.”

Justyna Bednarska,

Head of Online Customer Acquisition, E-Commerce Department, LOT

What happens next?

In the upcoming months, LOT wants to use its newly-gained experience to further expand the adoption of these tools within its teams. In addition, the company wants to focus more on cross-sell and upsell campaigns as well as activities supporting lead generation.