What a year it has been for the airline industry when it comes to marketing. With healthier profits this year, we’ve seen many airlines push the envelop when it comes to marketing and social media innovation. So to sum up the year, we’re sharing the top 11 marketing innovations by airlines in 2011.

While going through these, you’ll also realize that most of those that made the list aren’t one-off campaigns, but mature strategies made up of tactics that drive very specific business goals. So gone are the days of fluffy, one-off social-media campaigns with questionable ROI. Hope these inspire you for 2012!

Estonian Air social loyalty program: AirScore, the airline’s groundbreaking, yet simple, loyalty program rewards travelers for online advocacy. You earn virtual points on Facebook for sharing a trip report or booking through the airline’s Facebook app. And these can be redeemed for simple privileges like fast-security lane access. In 10 days, the program generated over a million impressions on Facebook, more than the number of passengers carried by the airline in a year! It’s now won three global awards in three months. Read more… (airlinetrends.com)
SpiceJet Bombardier …

Note: This is Part 3 of a three-part series on low-cost carriers (LCCs) and loyalty. The first part offered five compelling reasons to start thinking about loyalty. The second part provided three easy ways to track loyal customers. This final part offers five nearly no-cost solutions to drive loyalty.

Update: The entire 3-part series is now available as a single, downloadable pdf here.

After last week’s article, you now have a fair idea of where to find your loyal customers. Hence, it’s time to actually set the virtuous cycle of loyalty in motion. Why cycle? The age of social can no longer bear the burden of two-way traffic not looking each other in the face – it’s no longer the age of broadcasts or pure need-based consumerism where a cold, dispassionate relationship develops between the customer and the airline. Instead, social interactions between the airline and customer can evolve into life-long virtuous cycles of buying and selling based on not just mutual needs but mutual respect based on the value each party brings to the other. At its very basic, this can be broken down to a couple of scenarios: “I will reward you because you spread goodwill about …

Note: This is Part 2 of a three-part series on LCCs and loyalty. The first part offered five compelling reasons to start thinking about loyalty. This article will provide three easy ways to track loyal customers. The final part will offer five no-cost (nearly!) solutions to driving loyalty.

Last week, when I presented to you five reasons why low cost airlines need to take loyalty seriously, a couple of thoughts must have crossed your mind. First, you must have thought about how, most importantly, LCCs (low-cost carriers) can track loyal customers before rewarding them. Understandably, you must have thought that effectively “tracking” loyal customers via  a dedicated CRM system would incur an IT headache and additional costs that might defeat the business model of an LCC. Second, you might have thought that taking loyalty seriously is no good if one can’t track loyal customers effectively and easily (read: within one’s means). In this article, I will offer three easy ways for socially savvy airlines to track their loyal customers.

Incidental Loyalty
Before I move on to the three solutions, allow me to introduce a particular kind of customer you might not …

Note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series on LCCs and loyalty. The first part offers five compelling reasons to start thinking about loyalty. The second provides three easy ways to track loyal customers. The final part will offer five no-cost (nearly!) solutions to driving loyalty.

Before you raise your eyebrows, let me declare that yes, I do know why you might be slightly surprised to read the title of this article. You might say that LCCs exist to carry customers cheaply from one point to another without offering peripheral services or caring about customer loyalty because everyone will come if your price is low, right? You might say that LCCs themselves couldn’t care less about cultivating loyalty or building loyalty programs because that would be an unnecessary investment of time and resources. Right? Wrong! This article will build on the premise that while LCCs have been doing one L (low-cost) well, they need to start thinking about an equally important L – loyalty!

Before I go on to my thesis, let me state upfront that I am not talking about creating loyalty programs. I’m only concerned with …

Yes, you read that correctly. I did not write Web 2.0. Of course, that’s not because it’s not relevant – it’s terribly relevant – but because this newer term encompasses Web 2.0 and then some. So what exactly do I mean by Mobile 2.0 and why is it important? Cutting to the chase, here are some things we all know: first, ordinary feature phones are dying a fast death and smartphone shipments are rising as iOS and Android become increasingly popular with others, such as Windows Phone 7, hot in pursuit. Second, people are increasingly using their phones to do tasks they earlier used their laptops or desktops for: hotel search, ticket bookings, banking, emails, etc. Third, smartphones are creating an all new category of the always connected traveler – a web-savvy, social-networking geek who isn’t afraid to declare to his virtual networks what he’s thinking or doing.
The future is mobile
Given the rapidly changing interactional/behavioural habits of the traveler, it has become important for airlines to target them where they can be found. Close your eyes and think for a moment about what the word mobile phone means to you: I’m quite certain that most of the readers here …

A couple of days ago we released an exclusive infographic on how The Future of Loyalty Programs will be powered by Social Media. Given the excellent response it has received on Twitter as well as the blogosphere, we thought we’d go ahead and offer some more detailed insights into the current loyalty game and how social platforms are becoming increasingly important to it. Before we move on to the presentation, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the state of social media with respect to loyalty programs and even vice-versa.

Navigating an increasingly connected world
The internet has ensured that the times we live in are constantly changing. Everything about the world, even the beacons we hold sacred on the internet are restless, dynamic, shape-shifting. At the heart of all this change lies the virtual socialization of human society: more than ever before we are interacting with each other and with businesses online. And the most important part of this change is the growth in two-way conversations instead of one-way advertisements; the instant and spontaneous back and forth between a company and its customers rather than force-feeding pre-determined messages; most of all, the ability of social networks to amplify …

Did you know that over 80% of members of an airline loyalty program never earn enough miles to redeem a flight? And most of the other 20% fly so much that the last thing they want to do is to step on another plane! Do you see why some loyalty program managers are worried?

For airlines, the future of frequent flyer programs programs is now a pressing question, given the growth of social technologies. As such, many airlines are now rushing to find ways of driving social loyalty. Some of these have been covered in our slide-deck on the Top 10 Social Loyalty Initiatives by Airlines.

To dig deeper, we partnered with Cranfield University in the UK to conduct a study on how frequent travelers (who travel at least five times a year) use social media. And here are some highlights of what we found:

There are more airlines on Twitter than there are airlines with frequent flyer programs (191 vs 179)
Almost 90% of frequent flyers use Facebook regularly, and over 65% “Like” at least one airline on Facebook
To frequent fliers cheapest fare is the least significant loyalty factor among customer service, earning loyalty points and onboard experience
72% of frequent …

I had the pleasure of presenting at the APEX 2011 Summit in Seattle this week. I was opening the social media Education Track with a presentation that aimed to set the tone for the rest of the day – and worthy speakers to follow. Hence, I focused on the road ahead for social media at airlines.

There were four key themes I highlighted on how social media will impact airlines in the coming months:

The availability of in-flight wifi to 200 million people this year would change customer engagement models
Loyalty programs would evolve to include social loyalty, where virtual actions lead to virtual rewards, like badges, rather than just free flights
Revenue and distribution would adapt to the social graph to skip the GDS, like the Malaysia Airlines Facebook booking app, or Alaska Airline’s FlyingSocial
Customer service will evolve where people expect to do all actions through social media, that they now do over the phone with an airline. Hence our partnership with InterGlobe Technologies to launch a social media call center

Check out these trends and more, in the presentation embedded below (Flash required)….

“It is much harder to acquire a new customer, than it is to retain one.” That’s an age-old loyalty marketing fact that is just as applicable to airlines as it is to other industries.

This becomes even more relevant on the 30th anniversary of loyalty programs – since American Airlines launched AAdvantage in1981. The irony is that today there are more airlines on Twitter, 191 in July 2011, than the number of airlines that have loyalty programs – approximately 179.

This reflects that not only are travelers taking to social media rapidly, airlines are responding by proactively engaging them through this medium. So what does this mean for loyalty programs, since airlines have traditionally been only good at driving buzz through social media.

Monetizing social media through loyalty
One of the readers at SimpliFlying wrote to me, “How can airlines monetise social media? Things like brand advocates are all well and nice but how do they add to the bottom line?”

I see a clear monetization. On average, 85% of frequent fliers program (FFP) members have …

Social technologies are gaining huge traction among airlines. There’s simply no denying it. A couple of months ago, we released an infographic that showed how airlines are dedicating resources to social media. Most major airlines, according to the infographic, already have social media teams in place – most are managing cross-departmental strategies. Some even have plans to expand their teams later this year. That infographic was deemed to be a truly important one as far as the topic of airlines in social media was concerned: it received over 100,000 views and was featured in a number of publications including twice on Mashable itself!
Make sense of the chaos
Now, to add to all the hullaballoo, it really doesn’t help that social technologies are not just adding newer features regularly, but new social technologies themselves are being launched a dime a dozen (any takers for Google+ in airlines?).

So if you’re an airline marketer and thinking really hard about which social technologies to adopt apart from the usual suspects, we have the perfect remedy for your troubles. In fact, even if you’ve figured out which social platforms to adopt, you might still be wondering how best to use them or …