Airline app
Product design・How I set a new course for the design of a companion app for an airline.
The value of design isn't only in graphics. In this project we proved that less visual design can both improve the customer experience and provide a step change in ROI.
Products that were once a value-add to airline fares, like reserved seats, extra luggage, and food, are now optional extras. In the airline industry, these are called ancillaries. Margins are higher on ancillaries than on the ticket itself.
Email is a crucial inbound marketing channel. After booking a flight, emails must engage customers, and draw them to ecommerce sites and apps where ancillaries are sold. Thomas Cook had neglected design thinking in it’s post-booking email strategy. I saw an opportunity and took it.
+40%
Click conversion over existing design
5×
open rate
+315%
channel revenue YOY
£1.7m
incremental revenue in 10 months
The existing campaign had low open rates averaging less than 9% and sales conversion below 0.35%. With such a low open rate, there was a fear from the marketing team that a customer might miss a promotion if it was only included in one or two emails. The accepted design solution to this problem was to send identical emails with every ancillary product promotion included. The kitchen sink approach.
We saw disappointing figures across the whole campaign. Customers had learned that the emails were virtually identical, and full of sales messages instead of useful information. Trust dropped to zero—and they junked future emails.
They emails were taking a lot of resource from designers, developers, copywriters, and translators. A poor return on investment
I hypothesised that the graphics weren’t adding much value for customers, and may even be reducing comprehension. The marketing team required proof that a low-graphics solution might be more effective.
To test the two extremes, I removed all graphical promotions from the email that promoted seat reservations. The text-only approach gave us the opportunity to introduce a more strict hierarchy in the content — allowing us to front-load the messaging in an inverted-pyramid hierarchy.
The copy became the primary content in the text-only design. We paid a lot more attention to it. From our research we knew that our customers often get confused about seating policies.
Sales messages have been proven to be less credible. And the the existing seating policy copy was impersonal:
All passengers who have not prebooked seats will be allocated seat numbers at check in.
I defined a more personal approach more consistent with the brand:
You can reserve seats up to 24hrs before flying. If you decide not to reserve seats then we’ll assign them on the day.
Thomas Cook customers are infrequent flyers. The informational needs of holidaymakers are greater than with regular airlines. With the unbundled nature of the product, there were plenty of opportunities to clarify policies around ancillaries. The strategy—combining helpful content with calls to action—could be repeated across the whole campaign; for seat reservations, baggage allowance upgrades, in-flight meals and more.
By consistently offering value, the emails create a feedback loop of positive sentiment which could reverse the trend in open rates.
The marketing team were migrating to a platform with A / B testing capability. It wasn't ready in time for this test. I had to get creative with the implementation. I split the test cohorts based on whether the booking number was even or odd and partnered with a data analyst to extract the results from the bookings database.
We discovered the channel click conversion rate had leapt by 40% on the text-only email and had continued rising. The test performed so well that the marketing team immediately switched strategy to converting all the emails to the text-led design. 10 months later, we saw overall ancillary revenue from emails quadruple.
An unexpected effect was that we saw an increase in cross-sales. When I restricted each email to one subject, I expected sales of individual ancillaries to become more focused. Counter-intuitively, customers were reacting to all emails to book all ancillaries.
This showed that the emails should never be designed in isolation. Trust works broadly across a customer experience. Emails are part of a continuous conversation with customers in a variety of channels. Building trust with valuable content is key to engaging customers.
One message might seed the intention to buy, but it might be the next message that reminds them to act.
The 200-year old Thomas Cook Group ceased trading in 2019. The package holiday business struggled to recover from debt generated by a controversial acquisition a decade earlier. To the end, the airline remained one of Thomas Cook's only profitable subsidiaries. I feel proud to have contributed to it's success.
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Product design・How I set a new course for the design of a companion app for an airline.
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