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Heathrow Airport: data-driven, connected customer experiences
Key objectives
To improve customer satisfaction, rewards membership and revenue growth for Heathrow and its retailers, Heathrow partnered with Acxiom to drive data-led personalisation across the customer journey.
Solution: A holistic customer data and personalisation approach
Heathrow partners with Acxiom for its CRM strategy, CRM database, campaign execution services, post-campaign analytics, and business and marketing intelligence to help the airport leverage its customer data for one-to-one, personalised communications for passengers.
The partnership enables Heathrow to react to customer events in real time and send personalised communications tailored to a variety of passenger behaviours and touchpoints. CRM data from Heathrow Rewards, car parking and Heathrow Express rail ticketing, airport Wi-Fi usage and a wide range of customer interactions all feed into a persistent, unified profile, enabling identity resolution and insight-driven segmentation.
“The airport, parking operations, train service, and retail are all separate business units. But customers see Heathrow as one entity. If they interact with one part of the business, they expect the other parts to know who they are and what they need.”
Simon Chatfield, Head of eBusiness and CRM at Heathrow
Heathrow’s customer-centric motto, “making every journey better”, goes well beyond flights to include travel to and from the airport, foot traffic inside terminals, digital engagement and the overall experience of passengers before, during and after travel.
Results: year-over-year business impact
With a highly personalised approach, Heathrow saw significant gains from CRM-related activity, including:
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in rewards retail spending
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in total membership
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in active membership
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in spending per visit
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in reactivated members
How it works: creating a single, connected customer view
Heathrow has partnered with Acxiom for more than a decade for customer insights, hosting and managing its marketing database, which contains more than 25 million records and continues to grow.
Acxiom collates and consolidates diverse customer data into a single customer view, enriches it with demographic, lifestyle and behavioural attributes, and then segments audiences to deliver personalised experiences across channels.
Touching 9 million customers every month
Enriched data populates Heathrow’s passenger engagement solution, allowing the airport to execute omnichannel marketing communications based on data-driven insights.
To support this, Acxiom provides Heathrow with Adobe Campaign, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, and strategically supports the airport in capitalising on its investment in the Adobe Marketing Cloud by planning and executing omnichannel communications. This includes connecting Adobe Campaign to other aspects of the Adobe tool set to deliver coordinated, personalised messaging across channels.
Data onboarding brings CRM, sales and other customer data into digital platforms, enabling Heathrow to activate customer insight across channels. Customer data is de-identified and securely matched to online devices and digital IDs through automated processes that protect consumer privacy. Data segments are then distributed to the airport’s preferred marketing and media platforms for measurement, targeting and one-to-one marketing, supporting personalised engagement at scale.
This approach enables Heathrow to deploy online display and CRM campaigns simultaneously, which has proven to yield a 25% uplift in overall campaign performance compared to a single channel alone.
The solution supports increased membership in Heathrow Rewards, as well as bookings for official Heathrow car parking and Heathrow Express trains. It also enables in-terminal service messaging to ensure a seamless experience when people pass through the airport.
Customer lifecycle activation
Every month, Heathrow reaches out to around 9 million customers with communications at every stage of the customer lifecycle:
Acquire
Onboard
Activate
Grow
Reactivate
The enterprise-wide marketing database, combined with Acxiom’s proprietary identity resolution technology, enables Heathrow to recognise both prospective and existing Rewards members and direct the most appropriate communications to passengers.
“Customer touchpoints include several websites, our mobile app, and email communications. We’re also developing SMS capabilities.”
— Simon Chatfield
Head of eBusiness and CRM at Heathrow
Putting data & personalisation at the heart of passenger experience
Join Heathrow’s Head of Technology, Commercial & Digital Platforms – Bob Stickland, and Acxiom’s Head of Customer Success – Nikul Amin to learn how Heathrow uses personalisation and MarTech to capture richer customer insight, simplify its technology stack and take a data-first approach to evolving its CRM and customer experience strategy.
Connected experiences across the journey
Acxiom’s approach enables Heathrow to:
- Understand customer behaviour across channels and touchpoints
- Deliver relevant, one-to-one communications tailored to passenger preferences
- Grow loyalty and commercial value through personalised experiences
This data-centric capability ensures passengers receive valuable, timely and relevant information throughout their journey, whether planning ahead online, navigating terminals or engaging with services in real time.
“We aim to offer our customers a rich and varied experience, tailored to their specific needs. By connecting our data with retailers, airlines, and other partners’ assets, we are able to recognise, better understand and creatively engage the growing number of customers who visit Heathrow each year.”
Simon Chatfield, Head of eBusiness and CRM at Heathrow
Looking ahead
Heathrow continues to build on this partnership, extending the reach of its CRM and personalisation strategy to drive further customer engagement and commercial growth as travel patterns evolve.