SAN FRANCISCO — Northwest Airlines has seen a 10 percent monthly conversion rate for its World Perks Mall after using Web analytics, Brian Ficek, manager of commerce sales and strategy at Northwest Airlines, told attendees at a pre-conference session Oct. 19 at the DMA Fall show here.
The World Perks Mall is an electronic storefront for more than WorldPerk's partners and their products and services. WorldPerks partners offer mile-based promotions exclusively for nwa.com customers, and all of the orders are fulfilled online. Members include FTD.com, AT&T Worldnet, Coldwater Creek National Car Rental, and LendingTree.
Fieck said key objectives of the mall are to create incentives for customers to visit nwa.com, complement the integrated travel planning functionality of nwa.com, drive referrals of WoldPerk's members motivated by miles, and reward brand-loyal customers.
Northwest is using HitBox Enterprise, a Web analytics service from WebSideStory, to relate Web and click through analysis to confirmed orders and offers.
The service provides detailed, real-time information about online visitor and customer behavior that can be used to increase sales and improve profitability. With it NWA analyzes customer page views and unique visitors to the site, and track where visitors went on the site and what they are interested in.
For example, the service helped the company learn that the top eight partners represent 81 percent of the program's revenue, so NWA decided to highlight those company's on the home page of the WorldPerk's Mall.
As a result, “we saw conversion rates increase from four percent on a monthly basis when we first started the mall to currently ten percent conversion rates on a monthly basis,” said Ficek.
Northwest also found that selling miles was a much stronger revenue stream than they had originally thought, prompting them to increase the number of strategically placed advertisements for miles around their site. As a result, NWA has increased the number of customers using its site, and increased the sale of air miles.
