Believing air travel should be for everyone, Frontier Airlines is an American low-cost carrier operating flights to over 100 destinations throughout the United States and six international destinations.
CHALLENGE
Frontier Airlines continuously faces the challenge of driving bookings in a short target window and email is a great way of accomplishing this task. Because email is so effective in this space, several other airline companies also employ this same strategy. For that reason, audience fatigue with travel offers is something Frontier is constantly aware of, so they knew they needed a way to stand out from their competition in the inbox.
During the weeks leading up to Mother’s Day, Frontier Airlines had the goal to generate last minute bookings for Mother’s Day travel and future travel bookings. In order to do this, they had to grab the attention of subscribers who are inundated with offers and “thumb-stopping” headlines. As always, the first step was simply making sure their emails were getting to the inbox.
SOLUTION
Frontier Airlines is a member of the Return Path Certification Program, the industry’s most powerful and unique whitelist, which provides benefits at major mailbox providers and filtering companies to ensure emails reach the intended subscribers. For these crucial emails that have such a short window of conversion, Frontier relied heavily on Certification for high inbox placement on a highly competitive day for email offers.
Knowing their messages would reach the inbox, the team at Frontier moved on to the creative side of their Mother’s Day campaign. They used Inbox Preview to test their content and optimize the email design for each mailbox provider and device type, ensuring the deal appeared correctly for each subscriber.
The next step was focusing on the subject line, the first thing a potential customer sees in their inbox among the flurry of other deals. Using Subject Line Optimizer, Frontier was able to focus on topical and witty subject lines to introduce the timeliness and value of their offers.
“With Return Path Certification getting us to the inbox, we’re able to focus on our mobile display and performance using Inbox Preview and the Return Path Platform seed lists. Our subject lines can entice subscribers to open the right email with the right content for them, but if it doesn’t even make it to their inbox our imaginative and playful writing can’t do its job.”
Mattes Hannigan
Marketing Coordinator
RESULTS
Using the unique subject line: “You bet GIRAFFE I’ll be home for Mother’s Day! Surprise Mom for as low as $34,” this fun campaign achieved the goal of engaging customers and driving bookings for the desired time period. The subject line, in particular, was successful in engaging customers and provided a 31 percent open rate—a full 10 percent increase over Frontier’s average open rate of 21 percent.
As Mattes Hannigan, Marketing Coordinator at Frontier, stated, “With Return Path Certification getting us to the inbox, we’re able to focus on our mobile display and performance using Inbox Preview and the Return Path Platform seed lists. Our subject lines can entice subscribers to open the right email with the right content for them, but if it doesn’t even make it to their inbox our imaginative and playful writing can’t do its job.”