Grow revenue from the customers you already have.

I was Global Advertising Manager at Emirates, working with the Emirates Skywards business unit on every integrated part of its campaigns, with a team of 5, a dotted line to more than 12 colleagues and 5 external agencies. This campaign started as my own idea.

Nobody briefed this one. I spoke regularly with the Lead for Data and Insights, and when I learnt that every member’s data was moving into a single customer view, I went through the numbers to test a hypothesis: that members within 2 flights of the next tier, given the right incentives, would fly more to reach it. Thousands of Blue, Silver and Gold members were that close, and most of them didn’t know it.

I counted the members in each tier who were a maximum of 2 flights from the next one, then split them by where they lived, because how close a member was to Dubai changed how many Emirates flights they would need to take. Status mattered to all of them, and they were already likely to book; what they couldn’t see was how close they were.

The right incentive, and the exact distance.

Each member was told how many Miles stood between them and the next tier, what that tier would give them, and which flights on the routes they already flew would close the gap.

I took the proposal to the Emirates Skywards business units with the numbers and the incremental revenue I projected from them, and once they had seen both, they approved it.

The writing was the hard part. Each message depended on the member’s current tier, their preferred airport, whether they were married or travelled as a family, and a range of other details, so the content matrix grew extensive. It had to, because the idea only worked if every member read their own situation, down to the Miles and the routes. When a member who needed 2 flights took 1, they heard from us again with exactly what was left.

More than 1,500 members moved up a tier, and the flights they booked to get there brought in more than USD 2 million in incremental revenue.

We measured both against the same members’ flights and revenue over the previous 2 years, which also showed us how they had reached their tier in the first place. Once it had worked, it became an annual campaign.