Air Partner

Expanding marketing horizons

A wide geographical market presents many lucrative opportunities but, as aircraft charter supplier Air Partner plc found, it can also throw up unforeseen technical and cultural difficulties when it comes to creating e-shots.

Sending an international message

When you’re targeting recipients in more than one language, using a system that’s only rigged for English text can cause delays and important promotional opportunities can be lost in translation.

These are the issues that Air Partner’s central UK marketing department face on a daily basis. As one of the world’s largest air charter companies, the UK marketing team creates promotional material on behalf of a number of European offices, including Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

Marketing on the fly

Working to a tight schedule to gain leads and increase brand awareness in this fast moving industry, Air Partner needs to be on the ball when it comes to creating and dispatching e-shots quickly and in a variety of languages.

Communicating information concisely and clearly is particularly important to their large database of commercial jet charter clients.

Air Partner is often called on to fly to far-flung destinations at the drop of a hat by event organisers keen to make an impression. Sarah Harris, Marketing Executive for Air Partner, gives an example: ‘For the UEFA cup we had to get capacity on an aircraft for the final, but we only received confirmation a few days prior to the event so we had to turn the e-shot around quickly.’

Lost in translation

Air Partner quickly found that their standard email system was holding them back. When they needed to create text in French, German and Spanish, the system lacked the native language sets required to accommodate accents in subject lines.

The marketing team was forced to compromise both design and content, dispatching French e-shots with subjects in capital letters, or spending valuable time translating subject lines using words without accents. Sacrifices of accuracy and efficiency had to be made and frustrating delays ensued.

Finding the right words

For their most recent campaign Air Partner decided to find a more convenient solution. Their five-part brand awareness campaign, targeted on a monthly basis to around 10,000 commercial charter recipients, required translation into several different languages.

They switched to a package that allowed unlimited language sets (in this case, Pure’s language module), ensuring special characters and accents were available for all text including German, Spanish and French.

The system was also able to translate unsubscribe and send to a friend options automatically into the correct language, reducing the risk of e-shots falling foul of spam filters.

No more compromises

The results were immediate. The built-in capability to accommodate multiple languages saved on time, increased deliverability and maintained a professional edge regardless of destination.

Air Partner was no longer forced to compromise their slick brand identity by finding makeshift solutions or compromising the look and feel of their campaign.

Sarah Harris explains more: ‘No longer trying to find ways around using accents made creating and delivering campaigns a lot easier and more manageable.

‘We’re now able to include plain text campaigns, which we never used previously, and we’re focusing a lot more on e-marketing. With an open rate of around 20% and click-throughs of around 10-15% - it’s bringing in some great leads.’

NB: Sarah Harris has requested the e-shot is accompanied by a credit to the designer: Andy Murgatroyd of Ber-tha, Creative Advertising and Design.