Spirit Airlines^® Finds Blue Skies with Silverpop

Company Profile
Fort Lauderdale-based Spirit Airlines is the leading low-cost carrier to the Caribbean, the Bahamas and Latin America, with service from 17 U.S. cities. Not only does the airline strive to offer low fares, it also puts a premium on friendly service.

The Challenge
Spirit Airlines struggled with limited email marketing capabilities. Segmenting was time-consuming and difficult. The lack of a true customizable template meant marketers had to create emails for each group from scratch. Then, one-by-one, they manually assigned each recipient on the list a specific email campaign. Without real segmenting capabilities, testing was also a tedious process.

These challenges kept Spirit Airlines’ email program from meeting expectations. With email promotions accounting for an average of just 9 percent of monthly revenue, Spirit Airlines set out to identify a new solution to invigorate its program.

The Solution
The airline teamed with Silverpop and quickly took advantage of its top-rated, on-demand email marketing solution. The first step was to segment the airline’s massive list into six groups based on information obtained at opt-in. Segments included frequent flyer members, those with branded credit cards, passengers who had indicated a preferred airport and those recipients for whom Spirit Airlines had little more than an email address.

With a database of millions of records, the airline's marketers particularly valued Silverpop's powerful list management capabilities. It enables users to focus campaigns on a wide variety of parameters to consistently match recipient lists to message content.

Silverpop's detailed reporting allows marketers to track response action down to the individual recipient to determine popular calls-to-action and relevant, personalized content for future mailings. Additionally, Spirit Airlines takes advantage of Silverpop’s sophisticated yet easy-to-use dynamic content capabilities to create campaigns specifically targeting each segment with appropriate fare and destination content, as well as promotional offers from advertising partners.

Spirit Airlines also tests messages for subsets of all six segments. The company says that with Silverpop, testing is so simple that they can run a subject line test for frequent flyer members and, within that test, run a sub-test evaluating static content with all fares and dynamic content with specific locations.

The Results
Prior to working with Silverpop, open rates were commonly in the 18-25 percent range. Now open rates run as high as 50 percent. The company even enjoyed an 81 percent open rate with a highly targeted frequent flyer email.

More importantly, following adding Silverpop to its crew, Spirit Airlines saw the percent of total revenue generated from email marketing jumped from just 9 percent a month to averaging between 15-20 percent.

Spirit Airlines
http://www.spiritair.com

Silverpop
www.silverpop.com