Ryanair’s Kenny Jacobs Is ‘Looking At Things Through The Mobile Lens’

Instead of the classic route of launching new features and improvements on the website first, the CMO of Europe’s biggest airline gives first-class treatment to the app.

Ryanair is Europe’s biggest airline, but three years ago the low-cost operator acknowledged that basing its business on having the lowest fares had left the customer experience “a little rough around the edges,” according to CMO Kenny Jacobs.

The airline’s response was to hire Jacobs as its first-ever CMO, and to embark on a three-year programme of improvement under the banner “Always Getting Better.” Jacobs spoke to CMO.com in April last year, when he explained the five pillars of the Always Getting Better programme: fix the things the customers don’t like; improve the digital experience; improve the travel experience; improve the brand; and improve the product and its distribution. CMO.com caught up with him recently to see how the programme is progressing.

Jacobs: Half-way through year three of Always Getting Better, we’re seeing ongoing growth in traffic, load factor, and repeat customers, and a strong position overall in what’s certainly a tougher year for airlines.

We’re now guiding that we’ll do 7% profit growth for the year, while others are seeing profits going in the wrong direction. We’ve grown traffic from 80 million to 119 million in a three-year period, which is phenomenal. Our load factor over the three-year period has grown from 79% to where we’re now guiding 94% for the year that will end in March.

In terms of digital innovations this year, there are three that are key. One is the app. We’ve now got about 15 million customers who have installed our app, which is very significant given that three years ago we didn’t have an app.

The second is My Ryanair—about a third of our customers now have a My Ryanair account. That has more than doubled in the past 12 months. About a third of all unique bookers now have a My Ryanair account.

Then the third big digital innovation is the move towards personalisation, very much driven by the changes we’ve made in technology. We’re selling travel extras and ancillary products to customers in a targeted way under the mantra of “right product, right customer, right time, right device,” based on the segment they fall in and the type of trip they’re going on. We started doing that via CRM, and that’s working very well for us. We are now doing it in the app. And we’ll be doing it on the website from the end of October.

CMO.com: We talked 18 months ago about a “new Ryanair,” about those aspects of the brand you wanted to change and those you wanted to keep. How successful has that been?

Jacobs: I’m happy with how it’s progressed, but I’m a great believer that communicating that the experience is changing is not the smart thing to do. The right thing to do is to change the experience and then communicate that; even better is to let customers do the communication for you. We’ve fixed and improved the experience, and people are talking about that. We’re talking about that too, but mainly we’re talking about price.

In terms of how we’ve communicated new Ryanair, we’ve used our own media first and foremost: our website, our app, and our emails. Ryanair.com is the world’s most visited airline website; that’s a great medium to use. We’ve also scaled up to sending about 60 million emails across a thousand different varieties every month.

In addition to that, we continue to use earned media. We will court free coverage on what we’re changing, where we’re flying to and from, what we think about things like Brexit. On top of that we’re using a bit of paid media in key markets, essentially to communicate price and where we’re flying to and from at key periods.

CMO.com: Are all your metrics sales-related? Do you have satisfaction metrics?

Jacobs: We do. On the hard side, of course, we’re going to have visits to the website, conversion rate, sales, and load factor. On the softer side, we’re tracking Net Promotor Score. We also launched something this year called Rate My Trip, via the app and email. When a plane lands, we get customers to fill in a quick survey in the app about their flying experience. That’s great because you’re asking people who’ve just travelled with you.

Over the summer, for example, we would’ve asked over 100,000 people who’ve flown with us how they would rate their trip. Eighty nine per cent of them rated it good or very good. That, for me, is much more credible than things like Net Promoter Score. NPS, inevitably, is going to ask people who are and are not your customers, and it’s not necessarily asking them at a time near when they’ve engaged with your product. With any airline, you might have people using you three, four times a year, and asking someone “How was your trip with that airline that you used two months ago?” you’re not necessarily going to get very reliable feedback.

So Rate My Trip is a very good new tool to give us that information. You can almost see it down at an airport basis. If the average is 89, you can see which airports are above and below that, and we can then follow that up. We also do an annual survey in all our key markets. And we have a monthly pulse tracker of brand awareness and NPS that sit alongside the harder metrics.

What I say to my guys is we use these like the parking sensors on a car, just to make sure we’re doing things the right way. These things can be overused. In the airline business, if you ask customers what they’re looking for, you’ll get the A to Z. They’ll want Ryanair fares, and the best interiors and seats that go all the way back, and you can’t have everything. So you do need to use these things in the right way.

CMO.com: Digital was a huge part of the initiative when we spoke to you last. Has the structure of the organisation had to change as you’ve become more digital?

Jacobs: Yes it has. When we spoke, we were just starting up Ryanair Labs, which is our digital and tech teams. There are now about 200 people in Ryanair Labs, between Dublin and Ryanair Labs II, which is in Wroclaw, Poland. That’s essentially a reorganisation on the marketing side with the digital marketers, people like UX [user experience], UI [user interface] people, designers, and then on the tech side, our developers and our testers.

CMO.com: Where are you in your digital journey now?

Jacobs: We’ve caught up where we needed to catch up. We’ve gotten ahead in the areas of app and mobile, and we’re getting ahead in personalisation. And we’re probably the best I’ve seen of any airline in the world at how we use CRM. Then we’ve got a lot of new stuff coming in, how we’re going to be selling targeted ancillaries, how we’re going to use content and social.

CMO.com: You mentioned you’re personalising to segments. What does that look like?

Jacobs: We’re fairly advanced when it comes to personalisation via CRM, so via email. We are personalising to segments like business travellers, romantic city-breakers, and that’s changing the web experience for those particular segments.

If you’re a logged-in customer in that segment and it looks like you’re booking a certain type of trip, then we will reorganise the content and the products that are presented to you in the booking flow and in the post-booking flow. We’re getting very interesting results with that. That’s what we’ll be scaling up and rolling out across all markets.

CMO.com: You talked about your ambitions for the app as being this complete interface to Ryanair, not just in the journey, but in someone’s whole trip. How close have you got to that?

Jacobs: Mobile overtook desktop over the summer for us; now over 60% of our visits are coming from non-desktop. That’s been very significant.

We are now in the process of saying: “Well, there’s a new feature that we’re going to launch. Let’s launch it in the app first.” My Ryanair is more advanced in the app than it is on the website. There are still some things that are more advanced on the website, but we’re now not doing the classic route, which is doing everything in terms of new features and improvements on our website and then the app follows a year later. We’re looking at things through that mobile lens and saying: “Well, this is the way the customer base is going.” More and more we want customers to do things via the app.

At the moment, it’s browsing flights, it’s booking flights, it’s managing bookings. It’s boarding the aircraft. It’s managing your My Ryanair account. It’s buying ancillaries, so we’re loading up all the ancillary products, from Fast Track to Business Plus to car hire to Ryan Air Rooms. All of those are available on the app.

CMO.com: What about the content side?

Jacobs: Our content strategy, in a nutshell, is three things: mobile, video, and social. The vision there is to scale that up on desktop and then have a version that works on mobile, and also on CRM. I’m a great believer in video content first, because there’s a lot of written travel content, but not enough decent video travel content, and we want to make that available on mobile devices, and make it a big part of our social play.

CMO.com: What are your next steps?

Jacobs: The big things you’ll see us do next are more and more mobile. We’re looking at a few new, interesting adjacent ancillary products. We’ve launched Ryanair Rooms since we last spoke. We’ve launched Ryanair Car Hire. I could see us launching a few more things like package holidays, other types of travel products.

Another part would be doing more through My Ryanair, ultimately making it automatic for customers to have My Ryanair accounts to make a flight booking. We will do that to partly stop screen-scrapers. But we will also reward customers with bespoke offers and bespoke promotions.

Then we’ll just keep an open mind in terms of what the good innovations are that we see in the space—and outside it—that we’d like to implement. But it’s not about what’s the next big idea, it’s how quickly we can implement the ideas that we have.