Virgin Atlantic’s Marketing Team Delivers Value

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

James Heimers

Role:

Manager, CRM Planning and Insight

Collaborators:

Nick Pashley & Phil Peacock

Overview of Use Case

Virgin Atlantic is a British airline that serves 33 destinations. Their Marketing Department uses Alteryx to create deeper insights about their customers and deliver target e-mail campaigns that resulted in at least a 10% uplift in response.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

In 2017, our marketing department took the decision to move away from a full service agency model and insource our CRM Marketing activity. This decision was built upon a business case that promised significant returns to the business in terms of incremental revenue, net savings, speed to market and customer engagement. At the forefront of this was the promise of a data driven marketing revolution. Our consultants mapped a clear path to achieving our goals, but we had to find a way to achieve them. Alteryx had their own clear path to success but I had a team of two, and neither had used the tool before.  

Describe your working solution

We took text files to produce reporting:

• This created some initial insights to help evolve our email designs
• We found our customers creating the most value were those who clicked on emails, so wanted to drive more interaction
• Data showed that volume of emails sent to customers did not impact on clicks, so we did not seem to be creating “email fatigue”

We tested e-mail campaigns to see which one would drive more clicks:

• We tested two email designs – one with limited copy to focus on clicks and another with more information. The limited copy email drove 50% more clicks and a 15% increase in conversions

We knew that people who were engaged with our communications were delivering the most purchases. We had to use our data to increase the relevancy of our communications. We did spatial analysis and discovered that:

• Utilising customer and airport post code data we were able to determine the most appropriate airport to include in our communications
• This delivered a 10% increase in interaction and a 15% increase in conversion

We had 14 workflows to keep our data up to date and it was not feasible to run them daily, but our stakeholders expected daily reporting. Alteryx Scheduler was the ideal solution for us as we had workflows that were going to remain static, but the outputs were required daily. To come up with an achievable schedule, we executed each workflow through the scheduler as a “one-off” to time how long they took to run.

Despite having a solution in Alteryx Scheduler, our IT department were not happy about the license cost. We proofed that Alteryx was worth it:

• We used stats based on the uplift in our marketing from using Alteryx and proposed some use cases of our next steps with the tool, to convince them to give us a 1 year trial to prove the value
• We supported this with our diagram to highlight the demands on our team and how this has a negative impact on our ability to deliver
• Our proposal was to close the capability gap through automation of workflows, freeing up time for more advanced analytics

Our next step was to extend our capability to predictive analytics, but we needed to prove the effectiveness of our models. We built a model to find people who were likely to use one of our Flying Club partners. To test the model we communicated to customers who had a high propensity to use the partner and contacted 20% of customers who had no propensity to convert. Our modelled audience was three times more likely to convert and the overall conversion rate was 20% higher than our previous partner campaign

Describe the benefits you have achieved

With Alteryx, I can see the wood through the trees. When I use Alteryx, I feel like I have the keys to unlock my data.

Alteryx is an easy tool to learn yourself, but if you need to move quickly then find an experienced partner to help you. We worked together with Alteryx’s partner The Information Lab.

Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here. Additionally, visit this link to watch the entire recorded session. 

[adrianloong]

Absolutely love this story!