Being a frequent flier on Southwest Airlines, I naturally wanted to re-join their email list. I was a subscriber in the past but with new addresses I fell off the list at some point.
The big win for Southwest is with their focus on email preferences. As we’ve discussed many times before, allowing your subscribers to select from a range of email options will be a win-win for everyone. Bronto had a good rundown of Do’s and Don’ts in this post.
Southwest started getting it right by having a very simple email sign-up and then making additional preference options available later. In the confirmation email they had the following call-out that was right to the point with great architecture and design.
On the landing page they had detailed preference options as follows:
Several nice things going on here:
1. They start off by giving you a great reason to fill out your preferences — so you can help them send you more relevant offers. Relevancy is key and becoming increasingly important.
2. Rapid Rewards: By asking for this, they should have access to detailed data on past purchase behavior which can be gold for segmentation.
3. Trip Related Preferences: They ask for items such as home airport and favorite destination, along with types of trips such as last minute vacations, business travel etc. This will provide Southwest with great information to further segment and provide relevant content.
4. Activity Related Preferences: Finally, they ask about activities you enjoy while traveling. This potentially takes their email program into another category by being able to provide partner offers, destination activity recommendations, and engaging content. I’ve seen Hotels.com and a few other related sites to this pretty well.
This is a great example of a company going the extra step to not only provide an email preference center, but one that is fairly detailed. Keep in mind though that this model would not be realistic for some smaller companies. By collecting these preferences they have the ability to provide some extremely targeted and relevant blow-dart like communications, but it creates the need for a more robust technical infrastructure and time-consuming content development. If done right, it can be gold — but make sure your foundation is ready to execute before implementing a detailed preference center. When in doubt, start smaller and scale up accordingly.
It has been a few weeks and nothing extremely targeted has come my way, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Southwest puts out and am excited to see how well they execute here.
Thoughts or questions? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.
Cheers,
Forest
Great post, Forest! I would also add that travel prices fluctuate so much that you could potentially get hit with a ton of email, depending on your destination preferences… so it would be great for Southwest to ask a frequency question to give subscribers the option to receive only 1 email per day, week, etc. Otherwise this is a nice, clean and easy-to-use form and should provide excellent data to Southwest for segmentation and better targeting.
Thanks Julie! — Excellent point regarding frequency spikes and the need for that preference. They also left out some basic options such as preferred format/device.
Forest