MEDIA & MARKETING:The airline's Happy Hour promotion proves how e-mail databases can be used to bring in big sales, writes SIOBHAN O'CONNELL

ONLINE MARKETING can be extremely effective if the offer is strong enough, as regional airline Aer Arann proved last week with a campaign which resulted in a 320 per cent spike in flight bookings for the day, the highest sales achieved by the airline in one day this year. Aer Arann also recorded its highest ever number of sales in one hour as consumers responded to a “Happy Hour” offer.

The offer was 50 per cent off all flights booked between 1pm and 3pm on the day. Customers were notified about the sale the previous day via the Aer Arann e-zine, which informed the database that a major offer was on the way, without disclosing exactly what that offer would turn out to be.

Customers only learned about the discount at 1pm when they logged onto the Aer Arann website.

E-mail marketing is a very effective method of one-to-one communication with potential customers. But it is fraught with peril. Send out e-mails too often and you will alienate your customers, who consider you to be spamming them.

Then there’s the question of the best way to compile your database. It is vital to make sure it is “clean”, and then you have to worry about how to comply with the often onerous data protection rules.

According to Andrew Kelly, Aer Arann’s corporate affairs director, few people book travel at home, and increasingly consumers are using their work e-mail, rather than personal accounts, to receive promotions. The peak booking period is between midday and 2pm.

He says: “We are careful how we manage our e-mail marketing. If we do any sort of a sale, we will send an e-mail to the database. We also break out the database into regions for more specific promotions. We also make sure it is a genuine offer. On average, we do two e-mail promotions a month.”

Building an opt-in list is the most important part of online marketing.

Since 2003, Aer Arann has built up a list of names that is now edging towards the 500,000 mark, according to Kelly. “For online marketing to work, it’s all about the offer, and how you target the audience on your database. We could have done an online offer with some service provider who would give us access to a million e-mail addresses. But those recipients would never respond, because they haven’t signed up to receive our e-mails and they might not even know who we are.”

He adds: “The reason that the Happy Hour campaign worked so well was that it was exclusive to our online database and wasn’t advertised anywhere else. Word of the promotion spread onto Twitter, which helped enormously because it was friends recommending the promotion to each other – so they believed it more.”

Aer Arann outsources the task of sending out the e-mails to Experian Cheetah Mail. For a set-up-account charge of between €2,000 and €4,000 and an additional cost per e-mail charge, which varies depending on volumes, Experian can give clients software to handle the campaign themselves, or alternatively Experian will manage the task.

Experian’s other Irish clients include A Wear, Budget Travel, Hughes Hughes and the Doyle Collection.

Experian advises marketing managers planning an e-mail campaign to check how the e-mail will appear across a range of e-mail hosts.

Says Experian spokesman Roy Jugessur: “An e-mail which looks good in Gmail can look very different in Yahoo! So you need to be careful.”

But the bigger challenge is complying with data protection rules.

Marketing e-mails cannot be sent unless the recipient has given their explicit consent within the last 12 months. However, recipients who fail to unsubscribe from marketing communications are deemed to exempt themselves from the 12-month rule.

Aer Arann operates its database collection process on the basis of opt-in rather that opt-out. Says Kelly: “If you follow the opt-in system, you have to include an unsubscribe option in every e-mail you send out. To build up our database, we attend trade events and run competitions to encourage people to sign up.

“At this year’s ploughing championships, we took a small stand for the first time and ran a free flights offer. This garnered thousands of new subscribers for our database.”

For marketers who wish to learn more about this form of direct marketing, the Marketing Institute of Ireland, based in Dublin, is organising a workshop on integrating e-mail into the marketing mix on November 17th. For full details and booking information go to mii.ie.