How personalised banners tempted near-bookers for Singapore Airlines

Background and objective

With the travel booking category seeing unprecedented competition, Singapore Airlines (SIA) is focusing on precision and smart targeting, with every digital campaign using data insights and putting cross-channel remarketing theories to the test. Yet reflecting precise pricing on-the-fly remains challenging due to technological dependencies.

In a recent campaign, SIA set out to:

1. Significantly shorten potential customers’ consideration phase, which has lengthened with the growing number of online travel agents.
2. Improve the turn-out time of manual pricing updates to manage conversion drop-off.
3. Cut through the cluttered landscape of standard travel remarketing ads to reach consumers and close conversion.

Media strategy and execution

Working with Zenith, SIA became the first airline in APAC to launch Echo Remarketing, a customised near-booking remarketing technology solution developed through partnership with DoubleClick.

In alignment with SIA’s brand direction of “The lengths we go to”, the Echo journey echoes the precise details of shopping carts in display banners, delivered programmatically.

Customers were served unique banners with the exact origin, destination, departure and return flights that they had previously selected, with the last price they saw serving as a highly personalised reminder to complete their booking.

Crucially, the banner was also deep-linked to the flight search page, so the respective fields would already be populated, making it convenient for the customer to proceed with the booking. A DCM (DoubleClick Campaign Manager) Floodlight script enabled the customised banners and deep links.

Results

Based on conversion-path insights, the campaign targeted near-booking customers and initially remarketed those who landed on the shopping cart page in the past 14 days, 10 days or seven days. The activity eventually optimised toward the seven-day recency as it proved to garner the highest conversion rate at the lowest cost.

The dynamic banners tightened the gap between banner and website prices, recapturing 25 percent of users who started the booking journey through direct and organic search traffic but did not complete the booking. The banners were also the last touchpoint for 12 percent of buyers who clicked on paid search ads but did not complete the booking.

As a result of this new dynamic approach, SIA achieved a local market CPA 15 times lower than the benchmark, and the campaign has now been rolled out on a global scale. 

CREDITS

Win Zolkipli, Director, Zenith
Michelle Chia, Associate Manager, Zenith
Linus Yeo, Planner, Zenith
Lijie Kor, Executive, Zenith