This Black Friday Sale campaign is the perfect example of an innovative approach that leverages consumer behaviour and market trends to drive sales in a highly competitive environment and disrupt the conventional way of targeting ads. By understanding the shifting dynamics of Black Friday shopping and tailoring advertising strategies to intersect with consumer interests, Etihad Airways effectively transformed retail shoppers into passengers. This campaign showcases the power of creative thinking in commerce, utilizing personalized ads and strategic messaging to capture audience attention and drive unprecedented revenue growth, with conversion rates shattering all eCommerce records in the airline’s 20-year history.

The airline industry is generally a highly competitive one. Therefore, airlines need to find smart and intelligent ways to stand out and communicate with consumers. Black Friday is an occasion where consumers are prepared and willing to purchase items, but airline tickets do not see the increase in sales that other industries enjoy during this period.

Black Friday has become synonymous with consumerism and is characterized by doorbuster deals and intense advertising campaigns. Embraced as a major shopping day, brands vigorously compete for attention and share of voice on all platforms, and rightfully so: enthusiastic shoppers actively seek out the most enticing deals to make a purchase.

Etihad Airways, the UAE’s national airline, wanted to build on the momentum of its 2022 Black Friday Sale. For 2023, the task was to increase Pre-sale Subscriptions to 12K, Bookings by 15% and Digital Revenue by 15%.

For this global sale, Etihad Airways found itself facing an unconventional challenge: how do you turn shoppers into passengers in a period heavily dominated by retail?

Imagine a customer searching for a special Black Friday sale on an iPhone, which is what a very large number of people tend to do before Black Friday.

That customer’s search would be taken over by us, and we would infiltrate their search results by presenting to them a more attractive option: with our incredibly low fares, why not just fly to New York, and with the money you’ve saved, buy that iPhone you were looking for?

That was our big idea. Send people to places where they could buy the things they were searching for. Turning shoppers into passengers.

According to Google, 70% of shopping-related search volume containing “black friday” happened in October and in the days leading up to the day itself. These are deliberate deal-seekers who do their research and are ready to pounce when the price is right. So-much-so that 85% of shoppers who plan to shop online typically have tabs open when waiting for sales to begin.

To turn shoppers into passengers in a period heavily dominated by retail, we nudged them when they were actively searching with purchase intent.

We leveraged categories that shoppers were in-market for, like smartphones, gaming, gadgets, electronics, appliances, fashion, shoes and beauty products, to create a customisable ad for each product and destination; one can only imagine the level of targeting we achieved, in a short amount of time.

Additionally, every combination was presented in 4 different languages, for a total of 2400 hyper-personalised versions.

Within our two-phased campaign architecture, we addressed Black Friday shoppers, pre-sale and during sale. For 3 weeks, we used a multi-layered campaign approach across 34 markets and 11 channels (like YouTube, Google Ads, Paid Search, Meta, TikTok and Snapchat) to create an impactful user journey. Especially across digital channels, we used the capability of InMarket Audiences in order to serve the right offer to the right consumer at the right time of their Black Friday journey. YouTube for Action tools drove consumers to Etihad’s landing page to view fares.

We also ran a Subscription campaign on Meta, in which interested users had the opportunity to subscribe and learn more about the deals being offered, get notified when the sale starts and reminded when it ends. This would not only increase engagement and conversion, but seamlessly bring in valuable data to our CRM database in a cookie-less world.

The campaign overperformed on every metric.

Campaign CTR soared at 219% above benchmark (Google).

24K new pre-sale subscriptions led to a 33% increase in the CRM database for future campaigns, and 1.8M website visits resulted in a 56% increase YOY in bookings.

Furthermore, Digital Revenue was up by 35% YOY and Digital Share of Revenue increased from 34% to 46% YOY.

We also achieved the highest-ever revenue coming from Paid Search in a single day, +60% YOY.

ROAS was +69% YOY but the biggest achievement was the highest revenue from a digital sale in the airline’s 20-year history, which surpassed the previous record by 48%

Even though this was a tactical campaign, it created a spill-over effect; Etihad Airways brand lift increased in key markets: Canada +53% | US +37% | UK +16% | Australia +41%