Elevating hospitality in-flight and online.
Malaysia Airlines welcomes more customers with tailored digital marketing and curated online shopping.
400%
Improvement in customer engagement with data-driven, contextual customer journeys
Objectives
Challenge the status quo to increase web stickiness and online bookings
Standardise and automate digital marketing activities to increase efficiency of lean team
Supplement team to achieve higher solution adoption and use to drive greater online value
Create new online marketplace to increase revenues and brand engagement
Results
Drove significant incremental revenue from 1,500+ additional booking confirmations and a 400% increase in customer engagement
Realized time savings of up to 40 hours per week using automations and standardization
Increased reporting use by 70%, personalization campaigns by 3x, and email and push volume by 2.5x
Drove millions of dollars (MYR) in revenue in first year of Journify sales for travel and lifestyle merchandise
A lift in Malaysian air travel
Renowned for elevated hospitality, Malaysia Airlines was eager to welcome traveller when Malaysia re-opened its borders in April 2022. From its home base at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL), the airline serves destinations across the nation and around the world, including Australia, India, China, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Qatar.
As part of the Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG), the airline continually advances its digitalisation strategies to facilitate better traveller experiences. As a long-time customer of Adobe Experience Cloud - including Adobe Experience Manager, Target, Analytics, Audience Manager and Campaign - Malaysia Airlines enjoys powerful flexibility as it seeks to improve customer journeys and drive higher traffic through remarketing and retargeting on its website and mobile app.
Waikuan Wong, Global Head of Marketing for Malaysia Airlines, oversees strategic branding and marketing initiatives. She is proud of her team’s efforts to deliver more personalised traveller experiences as the company looks to enhance services, while increasing revenues and marketing efficiencies.
Wong regularly collaborates with Clarence Lee, Head of Digital for Malaysia Airlines, who has executed several programmes with his team to improve stickiness and drive bookings across the airline’s digital touchpoints.
Maximising platform and workforce potential
Working with Adobe Professional Services, Lee’s team creates and executes email campaigns, conducts personalisation campaigns on websites and builds customised dashboards to improve data-driven decision making. In addition to ongoing execution, Professional Services works with Malaysia Airlines on a range of implementation and readiness projects. For example, a health check audit of the booking website provided information on both page performance and readiness to migrate to the latest functionality.
Similarly, work associated with Journify, MAG’s online marketplace, focused on KPI reporting across desktop and mobile, as well as improving attribution. Consultants also supported tagging on the Malaysia Airlines check-in site to better track when passengers complete web check-ins, as well as capture any other useful page statistics.
“Adobe Professional Services gives us subject matter experts who can plug right into our team so we can execute campaigns and monitor performance more seamlessly,” says Wong. “Our goal is to develop our own subject matter experts over time and eventually do this in-house.”
“Customers are our centre of gravity. We continue to look for ways to ensure that our efforts will provide them with an enhanced, seamless and curated experience from the moment that they decide to fly with us. Adobe Experience Cloud solutions enables us to do just that by presenting products and services to distinct passenger types at the right moment.”
Waikuan Wong
Global Head of Marketing, Malaysia Airlines
Personalising and improving traveller experiences
On the Malaysia Airlines website, built on Experience Manager, the team’s continual focus is on optimisation to improve conversion and deliver incremental revenue. One example being the testing of a sticky page footer that is active as someone scrolls and provides clarity on next steps, which showed a measurable uplift in bookings and resulted in the experience being pushed live on the site.
Malaysia Airlines has also seen positive results from re-targeting personalisation. With 47% of total revenue from return visits, which account for 21% of all visits, the company saw an opportunity to drive incremental bookings from return customers who didn’t complete a purchase on their last visit.
For example, a customer that previously explored flights to Alor Setar would see a message at the top of the page asking if they are still interested in booking flights to Alor Setar. Clicking the associated link auto-fills the flight details, making it easy for the customer to complete the booking. Regularly testing enhancements and personalising experiences for traveller resulted in more than 1,500 incremental booking confirmations in three months. Malaysia Airlines also tripled the number of web and app personalisation campaigns in six months.
Similarly, targeted emails - including coupon offers, remarketing campaigns and monthly product awareness messages - have also driven higher website traffic and subsequent bookings. In one recent initiative, the team used Campaign to develop emails customised for segments of customers created in Audience Manager, such as solo, family and business traveller. Customising emails based on different personas increased customer engagement, delivering a 145% increase in open rates and a 400% jump in click-through rates compared to more generic campaign emails. Over a six-month period, the company successfully increased the email and push volume by 250%.
“Customers are our centre of gravity. We continue to look for ways to ensure that our efforts will provide them with an enhanced, seamless and curated experience from the moment that they decide to fly with us. Adobe Experience Cloud solutions enables us to do just that by presenting the right products and services to distinct passenger types at the right moment," says Wong.
“Fast turnaround time is essential for my team. Real-time reporting gives us visibility into the performance of our marketing activities and also helps us quickly identify and resolve any issues.”
Clarence Lee
Head of Digital, Malaysia Airlines
Gaining insights and efficiencies
Analytics dashboards showing site performance, campaign performance and outcomes of other tests and personalisation activities allow stakeholders to easily monitor and report on digital marketing results in detail. Predictive analytics capabilities enable greater marketing agility, improved projections and better data-driven decision-making for Malaysia Airlines. Overall, dashboards resulted in a 70% increase in reporting use in six months.
“Fast turnaround time is essential for my team,” says Lee. “Real-time reporting gives us visibility into the performance of our marketing activities and also helps us quickly identify and resolve any issues.”
Standardising and automating digital marketing also enables ongoing efficiency benefits for Malaysia Airlines, including time savings of up to 40 hours per week for its lean marketing team. For the MATTA Fair, a large travel and tourism expo attracting 100,000 visitors to Kuala Lumpur, the team standardised Target activities for the recurring campaign to be reuse across multiple campaigns and customer experiences. In addition, enabling automated profile exchanges between Campaign and Audience Manager accelerated the marketing team’s data management processes.
Travel and lifestyle merchandise synergies
During the pandemic slowdown in air travel, the company implemented Adobe Commerce to ramp up non-airline revenues with online sales of travel and lifestyle merchandise. Journify, available on the company website and via mobile app, features more than 100 merchants and 5,000 products.
Customers can explore information about destinations to discover new places of interest, access details about routes and travel times to better plan their trips, shop for items that can be delivered to their boarding or arrival gates and earn or redeem points as a members of Enrich, Malaysia Airlines’ Travel and Lifestyle Loyalty Programme.
The digital marketing team now applies its expertise with the same applications used to optimise flight bookings to Journify. In its first year, the e-commerce platform saw significant sales. “We have a ‘make it happen’ approach to curating and enhancing customer experiences across channels,” says Wong. “It’s exciting to collaborate across our lines of business as we achieve goals to personalise traveller experiences at scale.”
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