One San Francisco-based new entrant called OtherLevels is currently creating customized marketing platforms for Sega and Australian retail grocery chain Coles, among others. OtherLevels is next poised to enter #PaxEx by leveraging optimized messaging analytics to send customized advertising both on the ground and in the air.
Company VP of strategic services Scollay Petry believes airlines are already doing a good job of incorporating push notifications into their apps to keep passengers abreast of flight delays and the status of upgrade requests. “I can speak to United. They’ve done a really good job in the past year giving me flight updates via email, keeping me on top of things which, I think, is really interesting and useful. What maybe they haven’t done is sort of told me about new services,” he says.
To this end, says Petry, airlines could advertise onboard amenities via push notifications to connected passengers.
Shashank Nigam, CEO of airline marketing company SimpliFlying, notes that Dutch low-cost carrier Transavia recently launched a WhatsApp customer service app, allowing it to “reach their customers through a channel that customers are already on … they keep using the app they are already familiar with”.
This type of connection could set the scene for eventual revenue generation across #PaxEx touchpoints, and especially as more of the world fleet is fitted with Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity (one or the other would be required to facilitate the notification).
When it comes to the delicate topic of sending customized messages to different types of passengers (advertising a ham sandwich to vegans, for instance), Petry says OtherLevels has a lot of experience in handling customer attention with the utmost respect. “We don’t just send one message to all people. We might have a segment of users and then try basing a test on moms, and say ‘Hey 10% off Apple products for moms.’ And then [we do] a 50/50-split test, and at the end of campaign, you understand which message really worked.”
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