Budget prices, luxury service.
WestJet reaches more traveller with high-flying campaigns created with Adobe solutions.
Tailored content and retargeting boost conversion
Objectives
Gain a clear view of how customers react to marketing across channels
Increase revenue by encouraging more bookings through the website and app
Get more teams using data for forecasting and decision making
Results
Provides insights to know what customers want with cross-channel data
Tailored content and retargeting boost conversion
Less time required to support SEM
Reduces weekend campaign costs
The sky’s the limit
Traveller looking for a high-touch, low-fare airline need to go no further than WestJet. The travel leader was founded by people who believe that just because you pay less for your flight, you shouldn’t get less. Even as other airlines cut services and charge more, WestJet still aims to delight passengers with fun, relaxing experiences that exceed expectations. It’s no wonder WestJet quickly rose to become Canada’s second-largest airline.
Over the past several years, WestJet has elevated its reputation for outstanding service and a community focus to reach global audiences with wildly creative campaigns, including annual Christmas videos. These heartwarming videos have become viral hits, logging tens of millions of views worldwide and helping WestJet reach record sales in December and beyond. For WestJet marketers, successful campaigns like these send a clear message: meaningful and creative digital experiences have a major impact on the brand and the bottom line.
“With Adobe solutions, WestJet is reaching customers with relevant and compelling campaigns that help drive better conversion and improve the online guest experience.”
Jason Wiegand
Manager of Digital Analytics and Optimisation, WestJet
Always ready for take off
WestJet wanted to take its digital marketing higher and allow traveller to experience the outstanding service for which the airline is known, whether it’s their first time dealing with WestJet or their hundredth. Creative and digital marketing solutions from Adobe are integral to helping the company meet its ambitious customer service goals. With Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, WestJet gains an edge in reaching existing and new customers with campaigns filled with stunning visuals and tailored experiences.
The WestJet team relies on Adobe Creative Cloud for easy access to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to develop rich media used in emails, banners and websites. The creative assets are part of campaigns supported by several Adobe Experience Cloud solutions—including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Advertising Cloud Search—to help ensure the highest-quality customer experiences and strongest returns. With the integrated Adobe digital marketing stack, WestJet teams have a complete view of actionable data.
WestJet has long used market-leading Analytics for audience discovery and to understand performance across channels. After realising it also needed to better understand audiences and offer more personalised experiences, the company adopted Target, Audience Manager and Advertising Cloud Search. With integrated Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, WestJet can take advantage of in-depth analysis and automated processes to transform marketing strategies.
“Analysing customer behaviours is like studying a living process—it’s constantly changing,” explains Jason Wiegand, Manager of Digital Analytics and Optimisation at WestJet. “There’s tremendous value in the integrated Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. Using a unified Adobe platform, we have the tools to capture data streams and devise strategies to share our message of service and savings across channels.”
“Using a unified Adobe platform, we have the tools to capture data streams and devise strategies to share our message of service and savings across channels.”
Jason Wiegand
Manager of Digital Analytics and Optimisation, WestJet
Driving self-service bookings
The best travel deals can be found directly on WestJet’s website. Not only is self-service online booking fast and easy for customers, it’s also less costly for WestJet as it eliminates the expense of call centres or commissions to third-party agents. In addition, over time it provides WestJet with a wealth of first-party data.
Adobe Analytics and the Data Workbench capability bring together all of WestJet’s cross-channel marketing campaign data so marketers can gauge how the different experiences they provide impact their customers. From email and display to search and social media, every campaign is tagged to measure its success at driving online bookings.
“Because we can see how successful our campaigns are, we know which ones are best at encouraging customers to book on our website instead of other channels,” says Ahmed Elemam, Senior Digital Analyst at WestJet. “Increasing online bookings can help us to achieve greater savings that we can also pass on to customers.”
An advantage of standardising on Adobe Analytics has been the ability to democratise analytical decision making by creating easy-to-use dashboards that provide managers with rapid insights into how specific site areas and campaigns are performing. “Our approach is to give teams faster, simpler access to data and eliminate barriers to making data-driven decisions,” adds Ahmed Eleman.
“Because we can see how successful our campaigns are, we know which ones are best at encouraging customers to book on our website instead of other channels.”
Ahmed Elemam
Senior Digital Analyst, WestJet
Knowing your customers
For the creative marketing team at WestJet, just getting customers to the website isn’t enough. Making it easy for people to book flights or find the information they want is the key to bringing them back again and again. Using Adobe Experience Cloud, WestJet is getting a better idea of what customers want, whether they’re on the website or using the WestJet mobile app.
These insights are used to create and deliver more personalised messages, depending on who and where a customer is. Adobe Audience Manager combines behavioural data from Analytics with audience profiles to power the delivery of more effective experiences, such as retargeting messages. For example, if someone looks at a flight to Las Vegas, WestJet can display a banner ad for a Las Vegas hotel package the next time the customer visits the site. Once a flight is booked, WestJet can suggest that passengers with Econo or Flex fare tickets upgrade their flight with advanced seat selection or send an email detailing the benefits of the rewards programme.
WestJet further tailors online experiences to give customers ads based on their locations. The digital team first creates multiple banners using Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop. With the geotargeting feature in Adobe, the team can then automatically identify a customer’s location and display the proper ad. Customers in Toronto may see a special promotional code for travel, while customers in Vancouver see holiday packages to California.
“We have limited space on our web pages and personalising ads lets us get the best offer in front of every customer,” says Wiegand. “Using Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud, we can quickly create and deliver banner ads for new campaigns.”
Adds Socrates Alvarez, Digital Analyst for WestJet, “In past tests, we found that relevant offers lead to increased conversions. We use Adobe Audience Manager and Target to automatically personalise the content we deliver to get the most out of every customer interaction.”
Savings on the radar
Search engines like Google are still one of the primary ways that customers find WestJet online. An advanced learning algorithm in Advertising Cloud Search allows WestJet to maximise its investment in search terms and help customers find WestJet easier. Combined with data from Analytics, WestJet has a clear view of search campaign performance.
“Campaign reports often don’t tell the whole story,” says Karim Elemam, Senior Digital Analyst at WestJet. “If someone clicks a link for flights to Toronto but books a flight to New York, we can’t really attribute that booking to the marketing campaign. Adobe Advertising Cloud Search and Adobe Analytics work together to give us true cross-channel data so we know how our campaigns are performing and what we can change for even better returns. We reduced the time to support search engine marketing efforts by 40% and overall costs dropped for our weekend campaigns by 14%.”
Using Advertising Cloud Search and Analytics to determine accurate campaign performance, there is far less debate between WestJet and the agencies running its campaigns over results. WestJet can look at results every day, eliminating the need for weekly meetings with agencies, while clarifying which agencies are delivering campaigns with superior performance. As a result, WestJet has renegotiated terms with its agencies and reconfigured campaigns to deliver savings of one million dollars annually.
Across the WestJet team, the use of reliable data is informing every strategy, as managers and executives alike see the value of accurate data in their work. “With Adobe solutions, WestJet is reaching customers with relevant and compelling campaigns that help us to drive better conversion, improve online guest experiences and shift business directly to us from higher cost distribution channels and competitors,” says Wiegand.
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