Black Friday is dominated by electronics and appliances. Airline tickets just aren’t a part of the consideration set, despite being a high value item. In this challenging scenario, Etihad wanted to target a multi-faceted audience for their global sale. By tapping into pre-sale consumer behaviour, we found a smart way to take over the conversation by making hyper-personalised travel suggestions to the relevant In-Market Audiences. The conversion rates shattered 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.

Etihad wanted to own Black Friday and use the momentum of high consumer purchase willingness to promote their offer. In comparison to previous years, Etihad built a holistic campaign mechanism, already starting to prime consumers 3 weeks ahead of the Black Friday Event (24 Nov).

We had to implement a two-phased approach to support the challenging objective – to increase Digital Revenue by +15%.

To achieve this, we used a multi-layered campaign approach across 34 markets and 11 channels (such as YouTube, Google Ads, Paid Search, Meta, TikTok and Snapchat).

The challenge was that the most popular shopping categories were smartphones, TVs, laptops, refrigerators, gadgets and appliances. Airline tickets just weren’t a part of the consideration set, despite being a high value item and travel being a key event for consumers. Etihad turned this into an advantage through smart data-driven usage.

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

With the help of data, we first analysed when the ideal start date for the campaign should be. As research indicated, consumers start researching deals as early as October. According to Google US data, in 2022, 70% of shopping-related search volume containing “black friday” happened in that period. This indication informed our media planning framework to reach our users while they are still open minded to ideas. 85% of shoppers who plan to shop online typically have tabs open just waiting for the sales to begin.

Additionally, the data informed the audience approach as we targeted primarily users who were actively searching for highly popular products, such as smartphones, appliances, apparel, handbags and beauty products. These in-market profiles were then served ads that offered them the alternative to find these products directly at a corresponding destination. The whole media and creative strategy was highly data and insights driven.

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%

Google data showed that shoppers were using search to look for Black Friday deals. Our goal was to increase digital revenue through our global sale. To achieve this, 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 seamlessly took consumers to Etihad’s landing page to view fares.

To increase engagement and expand our CRM database, we ran a Subscribe and Save campaign on Meta, in which interested users signed up and learnt more about the low fares being offered, got notified when the sale started and reminded when it was about to end.