FlySafair’s vice president of sales and distribution, Kirby Gordon, spoke to media update’s Adam Wakefield about the sale concept, the rewards it offers FlySafair, and what the future may hold.

Founded in August 2013, FlySafair started operations in October of the following year, using two aircrafts to fly between Cape Town and Johannesburg.

“We started growing at what I think is fair to call a mediocre pace at first, and we extended a little bit and started flying to Port Elizabeth, George, and a few other places, and then our expansion really started to explode,” Gordon says.

Matching FlySafair’s marketing to its growth

The airlines’ expanded operations, however, outpaced its marketing efforts. To catch up, FlySafair internally discussed three different options to chart a new marketing path. TV and radio were the first two, conventional choices.

The third option was what Gordon terms “the wildcard”, the R1 online sale. Executed by both American and European carriers in the past, FlySafair knew such an exercise would garner “a whole lot of attention” and, critically, put bums in seats.

“It is the equivalent of ESKORT handing out sausage at the supermarket. It actually allows people to sample our product,” he says.

The R1 sale was given the green light, and while FlySafair did struggle with the technical side of executing the sale, the pick-up from the public was tremendous. Lessons were learned, and the R2 Sale returned a year later.

“Last year, we nailed it. We got the technology right and it’s worked every year, otherwise we wouldn’t have repeated it. It has created this massive step-chain, especially in its first year when the campaign hadn’t been done before,” Gordon says.

“For us, it was a market juncture – if you look back at our web traffic, our sales, our everything. There was a complete change of pace from that day forward. It’s been a great strategy for us thus far.”

FlySafair learned from history and got better

This year’s sale saw in excess of 510 000 people in the online Waiting Room at the sale’s peak. Setting up the technology and systems to support such a figure is, according to Kirby, one of the unseen benefits of the campaign.

“As much as it does a lot of good for us from a brand perspective, the exercise is also incredibly valuable in terms of refining our technology. It really scales us up from a customer service perspective,” Gordon says.

“There learnings make our systems faster, better, and easier to use, and the service faster, better, and easier to use.”

Getting the word out about the FlySafair sale

After the platform was laid by the R1 Sale in 2015, with each sale celebrating the airline’s birthday, all FlySafair had to do over the next two years was issue a press release to media and an emailer to their database of clients.

With the sale being such a point of discussion in the past, FlySafair knew the media would be interested, and by informing their own clients early, they are rewarded for their past business, which FlySafair appreciates.

“The long-term benefit manifests itself in a number of different ways. What is key for me is when I go out the weekend afterwards and anecdotally someone says, ‘That R3 sale you guys did, I looked around my whole office and every screen was pink’, that’s what we want to hear.”

The Sale’s rewards

Probed about what other benefits the R3 Sale and its predecessors have had for FlySafair, Gordon says “the one area it is just so phenomenal in is awareness”.

“To have the general awareness and the brand name on people’s lips, which is effectively the URL, is hugely valuable, and the exercise of getting people to navigate to the URL in the first place,” he says.

“A spin-off of that, because we get such an amazing amount of traffic and attention to the site plus being clever from a technical perspective, is it does wonders for us in terms of our SEO ranking. That gives us strength overall in a highly competitive space with Google, and that impacts the other marketing campaigns that we do along the way.”

Further, FlySafair have run promotions alongside the R2 and R3 Sales, with this year’s promotion being a car giveaway with partner First Car Rental. The combination of new customers buying sale tickets and entries into the competition provides a major boost to FlySafair’s database, a very valuable asset from a commercial perspective.

Running an integrated campaign, guided by analytics and insight

For a campaign that has captured the attention of online South Africans for three years, none of it would be possible without the value FlySafair places in analytics and the insights they draw from it.  

“We tend to be highly analytical, being an e-commerce player effectively. We’ve worked very hard to fine tune our media mix to insure we get maximum bang for our buck while minimising cost acquisition,” Gordon says.

Ultimately, it is less about making sure you tick each media box and more about really studying analytics at hand to understand the extent to which you need to turn each media’s dial up. There are some circumstances where FlySafair will not use certain media because it does not contribute to the greater whole.

Gordon says the airline will take stock after this year’s campaign, and where FlySafair is as a business, before deciding on what type of campaign they will run next year.

However, whatever decision is made, Gordon says FlySafair will ensure their customers have fun, because “it’s a big part of who we are”.

For more information, visit www.flysafair.co.za.

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