Brief
iCrossing have worked with airport operator Heathrow for seven years and are their Digital Agency of Record, managing all SEO, PPC, social, display and affiliate activity, as well as providing digital strategy support for all marketing campaigns.
In November 2012 Heathrow launched Heathrow Boutiquehttp://boutique.heathrow.com, a luxury brand ecommerce layer on top of their already successful reserve and collect function to allow passengers to shop for and reserve online luxury goods ahead of their travel out of the UK.
The online promotion campaign, launched in time for the busy Christmas period, was designed to attract the high numbers of passengers who travel through the airport over the festive season, with the goal to increase awareness, footfall and overall spend in terminal stores. The emphasis was to create experiences that help ‘make every journey better’ to encourage customers to return to the online portal.
Strategy
iCrossing incorporated display, PPC, SEO, social media advertising and sentiment monitoring to create a multi-channel integrated campaign for maximum impact. They managed the digital planning and execution, working collaboratively with Saatchi Masius (Creative) and Carat (above the line) to ensure full integration and a seamless user experience across all channels. This campaign focused on UK departing passengers, with plans to target overseas passengers travelling to, and transferring from Heathrow, in future campaigns.
Execution
Optimisation recommendations were provided for the Heathrow Boutique portal http://boutique.heathrow.com along with inter-linking guidance to leverage the equity of the www.heathrowairport.com site.
PPC was used to target users searching for both generic ‘Heathrow shopping’ related terms, as well as terms related to the specific retailers within the airport. The Google Display Network (GDN) was utilised to focus on specific sites and interests relevant to the target audiences.
Advanced audience buying allowed consumers ‘in the market’ for travel to be targeted with display banners through iCrossing’s in-house trading desk. They leveraged 1st party data to retarget users who had already booked airport parking and were committed to travelling through Heathrow.
Twitter was used to drive awareness of the Heathrow Boutique beyond Heathrow’s existing follower base, at 113,000 before the campaign. The Tweets were a mix of promotional and conversational, and were targeted at users with a similar profile to Heathrow’s current followers (lookalikes), as well as those searching for related keywords within Twitter and an overall interest in travel.
The campaign length was very short, at only four weeks, so various channels were used in conjunction to reach as many potential customers as possible. Creative strategies were employed using display, retargeting, social advertising, PPC and SEO, to deliver the message to consumers and increase awareness of the new shopping experience.
Despite the short time frame, excellent results were achieved, increasing sales by 68 per cent year-on-year. These results are being used to structure future planned campaigns.
Results
Paid media activity drove 40 per cent of all traffic to the Boutique portal during the campaign period. Daily traffic to the Heathrow reserve & collect service was up 103 per cent versus the same period in 2011.
Requests to reserve retail goods were up 188 per cent year-on-year, reservations up 97 per cent, collections up 96 per cent, and sales up 68 per cent (compared with the reserve-and-collect figures for the previous year).
Promotional tweets delivered 5,500 engagements, were retweeted to 71,000 users and increased Heathrow’s follower base by six per cent over the campaign period.
