B2C Marketing: How Skyjet developed an app to increase leads through cost transparency
With a lot of disruption due to the evolution of mobile marketing habits in the charter marketplace in Q4 of 2014, said Jonathan Levey, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Flexjet, his company began experimenting as well.
Jonathan oversees the company’s digital marketing, analytics and advertising as well as covering those same areas for its sister brand, Skyjet. In his MarketingSherpa Summit session, he focused on the development of Skyjet’s mobile app, which he also spoke about with me in the Media Center.
Jonathan and his team had a mobile website and began doing Google advertising for it as well, specifically with mobile-only campaigns. In Q1 of 2015, the team saw a 50% increase in mobile traffic to the site quarter-over-quarter and a 177% increase in quote requests from mobile from this strategy.
“That was really the key driver to end up getting the internal buy-in to do a mobile app,” he said.
In the development process, the team went through a rigorous process to find an agency to help in the creation of a Skyjet app and ended up choosing one with experience in the travel sector.
Once deciding to work with that company, Jonathan, as well as other key stakeholders, worked together with their vendor in a two-day concept workshop to develop the app.
“It allowed us to further define the scope of what we needed to do with the app. It also allowed our agency partner who developed the app and designed the app to have a better understanding of what our business goals were,” he said.
It also allowed his team to settle on what they wanted the key features of the app to be in order to distinguish it from others on the market. The Skyjet app, for example, allows users to have instant, ungated pricing shown to them as well as the ability to pay for airfare using Apple Pay.
“It’s as simple as downloading the app, entering your itinerary, reviewing options or instance prices, and booking your flight,” he said. “Doing all of that with the ease and seamlessness of Apple Pay allows you to do it between 30 to 60 seconds.”
Jonathan and his team have found that the app calculated 1,500 itinerary searches on a weekly basis.
“It has changed the way we do business,” he said. “It allowed us to become a true on-demand private jet provider by offering the instant pricing, instant booking and a great user experience … and has really been great for the brand and allowed it to compete in a really fragmented space.”
From his experience and effort with providing this app, Jonathan hopes that other marketers will understand that mobile marketing is all about providing a positive user experience.
“Mobile marketing is very broad, and if you’re going to do an app, you need to have a really clear focus on what you want to offer in it and have [provide] a great user experience. Because if you have a great user experience, people are going to gravitate towards using the app.”
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Categories: B2C Marketing apps, b2c marketing, flexjet, jonathan levey, MarketingSherpa Summit, Media Center, Mobile, responsive design, skyjet
