NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Leading American airline carrier, Copa Airlines, has boosted online revenues and improved customer interaction with a digital marketing and personalization solution from dotdigital, the leading marketing automation and customer engagement platform.
Founded over 70 years ago as a regional airline connecting two cities in Panama, Copa Airlines has grown into one of the most important airlines in The Americas. It now flies to a total of 75 destinations in 31 countries in North, Central, and South America as well as the Caribbean.
With travel one of the sectors hardest hit by the covid-19 pandemic, airlines industry revenues as a whole tumbled in 2020, totaling $328 billion – or just 40% percent of 2019 levels – as international travel restrictions drove down business and tourist traveler numbers alike.
However, with domestic travel now reopened and international travel also underway, especially in the U.S. where the vaccination program has been rolled out at speed helping to improve customers’ confidence to fly, recent trends point towards recovery.
The American Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently announced the two million threshold for travelers screened to travel on airplanes in one day was surpassed in June for the first time since March 2020. This milestone represents 74% of travel volume versus the same day in 2019 and 1.5 million more travelers than the same day in 2020.
As part of its recovery strategy, Copa Airlines was on a mission to improve customer interaction and engagement. Having analyzed its extensive customer databases, it found it had a large proportion of inactive users on its marketable lists. These lapsed customers were not only skewing the results of email sends in terms of customer engagement, but also meant Copa bore a higher cost per send, with inactive contacts adding costs without contributing to performance.
Copa also wanted to streamline the operational processes associated with their email sends – previously, it had to create more than 10 campaigns each week in order to target its most important markets, with fare updates inserted manually, which not only took up time but contributed to accuracy errors. It also wanted to become more agile in its outbound email marketing by joining the dots between website visits and email triggers, so customers who had visited or searched on the site would be followed up with in a timely fashion, allowing the airline to actively capitalize on demand.
Partnering with dotdigital, the leading marketing automation and customer engagement platform, Copa was able to implement an ongoing clean-up program, which removed inactive users from its lists, helping it to more accurately understand campaign performance. It also implemented dynamic content capabilities to automate email copy variations to streamline efficiencies in the email send process as well as advanced personalization features, tailoring emails to customer’s destination preferences via liquid script and retargeting capabilities linking email automation to web visits.
As a result, Copa improved open rates, which boosted conversions by 2% and led to a 14% increase in revenues, all while reducing the volume of email sends by 10%, improving ROI. Through its automation and personalization program, Copa also saw an 11% drop in the number of unsubscribes, pointing to the increased engagement and targeting of the content to its customers.
“dotdigital has been an outstanding marketing automation platform. It’s easy to use, fast, secure and reliable. It has allowed us to create highly customized marketing emails with powerful automations. dotdigital not only makes things easier, but also better than any other platform we have tested, saving us enormous amounts of time. It keeps getting better and its our main tool for us to do the same,” commented Andre Lopez, email marketing specialist and designer, Copa Airlines.
Tink Taylor, Founder and President of dotdigital Group, said: “Forward thinking airline brands, like Copa, understand that key to driving recovery will be agility and the ability to quickly adapt to changing customer needs and demands, as consumers get ready to take to the skies again. Building in customer-centricity, a personalized offer and repeatedly reassuring customers of onboard safety protocols in marketing campaigns will support that moving forwards.”
-ENDS-
Notes to editors
About dotdigital
dotdigital is a leader in omnichannel marketing automation technology. dotdigital Engagement Cloud is the platform of choice for businesses seeking to engage customers across all touchpoints. The platform’s features empower 4,000+ brands across 150 countries to acquire, convert, and retain customers. Users can connect customer data, surface powerful insights, and automate intelligent messages across email, SMS, social, and more. dotdigital is a global company with over 350 employees, serving companies of all sizes and in all verticals for over 20 years. We are the world’s first carbon neutral, ISO14001 & ISO27001 certified marketing automation platform and we see sustainability, privacy & security as key tenets to our long-term growth.
