Analytics and Optimization Lead at Heathrow Airport, Stuart Irvine, says that email is still the key driver for them in marketing and personalizing the customer experience. Irvine said that Heathrow sends over 6 million emails monthly and that working with Adobe Campain has enabled them to move their opening rates to over 20 percent with 25 percent click-through.

Stuart Irvine, Analytics and Optimization Lead at Heathrow Airport, recently talked about their use of Adobe products and services and how they have driven their evolution in digital marketing:

Engaging 80 Percent of Our Customers Digitally

We have 78 million customers a year and we are targeted with engaging 80 percent of our customers digitally. Certainly, we need to raise pre-awareness of our products and services before someone arrives at the airport.

We have strong commercial targets that we need to hit and the Adobe Experience Cloud allows us to get from acquisition through to activity to after the trip activity. This allows us to tailor messages as someone moves through the airport experience to make sure that we deliver relevant push messages or relevant content throughout their journey.

Email is Still the Key Driver for Us

We work a lot with geolocation where we have over 11,000 beacons around the airport. Tools like Adobe Campaign allow us to move through that journey and keep that contact regular. We implemented Adobe Campaign three years ago with integration partner Acxiom, a long-term data partner. Adobe Campaign, as a truly omnichannel tool, has allowed us to really ramp up activity across channels.

Certainly, email is still the key driver for us. We send over 6 million emails every month and Adobe Campaign has allowed us to personalize a lot more emails and make sure we get the right offers to the customers. We’ve worked with Adobe Analytics for 8 years and we now capture all of our online data. That’s all passed to Adobe Audience Manager which allows us to drive personalization at scale and deliver relevant and contextual experiences.

Adobe Professional Services Has Been a Key Advantage

I think the Adobe DAM, obviously with the integrations with Creative Cloud, can offer us huge process improvements. Working with Adobe professional services has actually been one of the key advantages for us. They have the knowledge to make the best value of the integrations between all of the solutions to really deliver experiences at scale we need to have automated processes.

Moving More Towards Personalization

We have a lot of faith in the Adobe Sensei platform and the machine learning there. We’re just opening up our homepage to automated personalization to try and bring through some subcategories of products that we’ll get a much better cut through with our customers. Now we’re moving more and more towards personalization, recommendations being the key focus areas for target.

Adobe Audience Manager has been a key driver behind that. It is really a game changer for Heathrow Airport given our investment in the rest of our tech stack. Audience Manager really brings that all together and allows us to deliver an omnichannel experience.

Open Rates Are Now Above 20 Percent

We’ve seen open rates go from the low teens to above 20 percent, some great results there. We have over 25 percent click-through rates on some of our emails, which is a fantastic number to achieve. We’ve been able to increase average retail spend per passenger from £5 ($6.48) to £8 ($10.38). With our rewards customers, we see that they travel at least five times a year they have an average spend of £140 ($182) per visit. Adobe Campaign has been key to building that relationship.

Our journey with Adobe has been a great experience. We’ve moved through from basically analytics eight years ago, but actually, the development of Adobe’s roadmap has continually evolved and that has driven our evolution in digital marketing as well.