How Air France boosts performance with cross-channel customer journeys

Founded in 1933, Air France is the leading French airline and, together with KLM, one of the world's largest air carriers, operating to over 300 destinations and transporting more than 100 million passengers annually.

Air France's digital ecommerce team is driven by the ambition to provide the best possible service to their customers and prospects. This means that they need to know what their passengers expect from them at any moment and be able to provide them with the right service.

In 2016, Air France onboarded Supermetrics (formerly Relay42) and started its journey to building a 360-degree view of the customer. By gaining a deeper understanding of their customers, the team aimed to personalize their offerings and services to better suit the needs of each individual customer.

Identifying the audience

To get started, the team began capturing all flight searches that occurred on the Air France website. A customer journey would be activated when a website visitor searched for a flight but didn't book.

With the help of the built-in identity management, the team could already recognize whether a search was being made by a prospect or an existing customer. From there, customers were placed into one of two audiences, based on whether they had a travel voucher for a destination that had been canceled due to the pandemic.

Connected channels

The team chose to orchestrate this journey across three channels:

• push messaging
• display advertising
• social media.

Jad Naciri, Cross-Channel Data Manager in the Acquisition team at Air France, explains how they're using the Data Activation platform to turn customer data into omnichannel journeys and break down silos in the process.

Highly personalized messaging

The e-acquisition team tailored the messaging on all channels for each of the three target groups, based on the last flight search of every visitor and whether they had a flying voucher.

Here's what an orchestrated customer journey looks like:

Results and next steps

The marketing team conducted an A/B test to optimize the customer journey's performance. The test compared the old method of single-channel retargeting with the new orchestrated journey, featuring sequenced, timely-activated channels.

Following the first testing period, the marketing team observed a significant performance increase: the  new journey resulted in a 25.7% increase in conversions. The team learned that channel sequencing works: start with push messaging, then follow up with display and/or social to encourage conversion.

The time-based rules also showed a positive effect, as customers were not overly exposed to advertising.

Following the successful experiment with the journey orchestration module, the marketing team will focus on fine-tuning the customer journey and implementing it on a larger scale.