Mr. King

Sales & Marketing

Integrating Direct Marketing and Web Marketing Efforts

By Robert King, General Manager, Travel & Hospitality, ClickSquared

The challenges confronting travel and hospitality marketers intensify with the ongoing economic softness, and marketing budgets (along with other functional areas) are under increasing pressure. More than ever, ROI is top of mind as marketers try to stretch their dollars for greater impact.

With this backdrop, interactive marketing becomes increasingly important. According to Forrester, 60% of marketers will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing (primarily direct mail, newspapers and magazine). Email marketing and search engine marketing is expected to grow at compounded annual growth rates of 11% and 15%, respectively, through 2014. The continued growth in interactive marketing is largely fueled by the marketer’s ability to take real-time actions, test and learn, and directly measure results.

Interestingly, marketing organizations have often not embraced direct email and web marketing. Many make the mistake of segregating inbound marketing efforts (usually online marketing such as search engine marketing (SEM) or search engine optimization (SEO)) from outbound marketing (better known as database marketing, with execution increasingly focused on email versus traditional “direct mail”). As a result, they miss out on the synergies afforded by an integrated marketing approach. Even if organizational integration isn’t practical, having the marketing teams work together can have a huge impact upon marketing effectiveness and ROI.

Integrating direct and online (aka, inbound and outbound) marketing involves the ability to capture information from web marketing efforts on prospects/guests that can be fed into the marketing database and then leveraged for direct marketing efforts,. Conversely, using the marketing database to derive insights means more targeted digital advertising and search marketing efforts.

Marketing “Evolution” vs. “Design”

In today’s travel and hospitality arena, there are varying degrees of marketing integration. On one end of the spectrum there are organizations that are “siloed”, with website development, web marketing and direct marketing functioning as independent disciplines and oftentimes organized as different departments.

Because these disciplines have evolved independently, it has taken awhile for some organizations to recognize the synergies of cooperation and coordination. Prior to the Internet, direct marketing primarily involved direct mail, with the call center as the call-to-action. Over the past ten years the definition has expanded to include email -- which is now the primary communication channel -- with the website ultimately becoming the preferred call-to-action.

Although the website evolved to be the primary inbound marketing channel, the ownership of the website was often the primary domain of IT. Since the website became the method by which guests, and potential guests, interact with the brand, there has been a natural transition to marketing ownership. However this isn’t always the case.

Many companies don’t have internal marketing resources, and have outsourced their outbound and inbound marketing to vendors. If different vendor relationships are owned by different parts of the organization, it can make cross-vendor cooperation difficult (or non-existent). Cross-vendor cooperation typically doesn’t happen on its own. It needs to be driven by the company. If your vendors aren’t promoting the integration of direct (outbound) and (inbound) web marketing efforts, you need to reconsider whom you’re working with.

A Few Travel & Hospitality Best Practices

Whether your marketing departments work together, are siloed or you’ve hired vendors to lead your inbound/outbound efforts, it’s not only important that each group know what the other is doing, but that they work together to leverage the information each department is gathering. There are a number of quick, simple and cost effective ways to get the ball rolling:

Make sure prospects have a convenient way to sign up for email.

This opportunity should be prominently displayed on all relevant pages, not buried within the “contact me” page. This small, but important, acquisition feature is often overlooked by companies of all sizes. In fact, large travel and hospitality organizations that rely on enrolling loyalty program members for prospect acquisition are missing out on an important source of prospect data. Many prospects are interested in receiving communications or hearing about special deals long before deciding to enroll in a loyalty program.

Are you consistently enabling email capture? How about including the ability for someone to forward a property page or special deal to a friend? This can also be an effective prospect acquisition tools (given the strength of the referral) if the friends also have the opportunity to opt into future communications. Can an email recipient or web visitor readily link to social networking sites? Sharing tools need to be prominently featured on all appropriate web pages and email communications.

Once you’ve ensured that you’re capturing email addresses, make sure that the prospect email addresses are making their way into your core marketing database and being properly “on-boarded’” with direct communications designed to build out the prospect’s profile. That way, future marketing communications can be further personalized.

An additional way to increase email address capture for prospect acquisition is by the use of sweepstakes offers on the website. For instance, a “Dream Vacation” can have substantial appeal as a sweepstakes prize, and for a travel and hospitality company, can be a relatively easy and cost-effective prize to offer.

Make sure email marketing communications are tracked

At the very least, email campaigns should be tracked so you can determine the number of bounce-backs, open and click-throughs and landing page visits attributed to that email campaign. Response tracking is critical in order to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Also, remember to consider the traffic or conversions that this campaign generated to the call center, even if it’s an estimate.

Are you already tracking email campaign performance? Take tracking to the next level by capturing the activity of individual recipients of that email. By integrating email tagging with web analytics, you will know who responded, what they did (or didn’t do) on the site, and whether they transacted. This is valuable information that can be used for immediate and ongoing direct marketing and should be imported into the marketing database.

Whether or not they purchased, you often know what they searched. Were they looking for solo travel, traveling as a couple, or were they traveling with children? Was golf or a spa package part of their search criteria? Search criteria can yield a huge amount of valuable customer preference and interest information that can be used to further personalize future messaging. This information should be incorporated into the customer profile within the marketing database.

If the visitor browsed but didn’t purchase, you have valuable and actionable insight into an upcoming sales opportunity. For instance, the individual searched for a beach property for two adults and two kids in two months, but didn’t purchase within 48 hours. Send a “thought you might like” triggered email highlighting the property they searched, as well as other options that might also fit their search criteria.

Utilize marketing database analytics to improve SEM/SEO effectiveness and return on investment

Direct marketers routinely leverage marketing databases to glean insights into customer patterns and behavior that can be used to make outbound direct marketing more targeted and relevant. Customer segmentation and “scoring” -- utilizing customer value and engagement metrics -- have provided the building blocks for direct marketers to create targeted, personalized communications and channel investments toward segments that generate the highest return on their marketing spend.

Many of these same analytical findings are just as applicable to SEM and other forms of online advertising. Just because the searcher is anonymous doesn’t mean you don’t know something about them that should influence messaging. For example, consider someone searching with the phrase “romantic spa getaway Hawaii”. It is clear that this searcher has different expected stay characteristics, considerations, and revenue potential, if that search originates from one of the islands versus the west coast versus east coast, or from a market with non-stop air service versus one without. If the term “deals” is in the search phrase, you might be targeting a different type of guest altogether. Just like with direct marketing, you can use this type of “segmentation” to optimize SEM and SEO investment.

There’s also an opportunity to “close the loop” with SEM by feeding back to the marketing database search terms that led to a transaction. If a person searched on “Family Ski Packages” that is valuable segmentation information that can be used in the future to market to that individual guest.

Empower your guests

Property websites can make great use of user-generated content, which can provide tremendous opportunities to augment direct marketing efforts.

Enabling guests to create and upload rich text, photos, and videos is a great way to build engagement. This information can yield a treasure trove of insights about the author in terms of preferences and interests. What did they share? Did they share their best “night life” experience at the resort, or did they talk about the relaxing pool or beach scene? What about the Kids Club? Once again, this information should be captured, and the inferred preference(s) fed back to the guest’s profile in the marketing database for use in future personalized communications.

Not only is the guest information valuable to the direct marketer, but often the content itself can be leveraged to improve the impact of online campaigns and advertising. For example, there is no better advertising tool than a reference and good review by a fellow traveler or guest. Encourage travelers to post their experiences. Use those testimonials in outgoing email campaigns, direct mail, and newsletters. A low-cost way to increase engagement and build community is to enable guests to post best pictures from a vacation on your website. As an extra bonus, photographs provided by users are often of superior quality and impact (not to mention lower cost) than stock images maintained in your digital library.

Start Breaking Down Walls

Not sure how to begin integrating your direct and web marketing functions? Don’t worry; but don’t hesitate, either. Bring the functional experts together and get them talking, and you’ll typically be surprised at the ideas generated and the traction gained with minimal effort.

1) Build Awareness: Make sure the owners of the website and the direct marketing functions (both inbound and outbound) understand the value of what the other has to offer.

2) Brainstorm: Tap into the creativity of your experts. Use the ideas discussed above as a catalyst, and remove the constraints. Once you have a list of solid opportunities, prioritize them based on potential impact and the time/resources required to implement. Ensure you have buy-in from all the powers that be, and if needed enlist an executive sponsor.

3) Align Inside and Out: If certain functions are outsourced, make sure your vendors (direct marketing, website, or web analytics) are included in the discussion. Set small goals and objectives and build from there. For example, maybe you just start with aggressively collecting email addresses by making sure visitors can sign-up easily at all appropriate places.

4) Test: Test all systems to make sure everything is working and the information you’re collecting is getting to the right place. If you’re collecting email addresses – ensure they’re getting into the database. If you’re using new phrases to increase SEO or refining pay-per-click criteria based on database insights, measure the response to see if you’re increasing results. This way you can continue to improve your programs and coordination for even more successful marketing results.

5) Communicate Continuously: Marketing integration isn’t a one-time event. Make sure all parties, departments and vendors are continuing to cooperate -- with the pace of change in both web marketing and direct marketing tools and practices, integration will never be “complete”.

Regardless of where you are on the functional integration spectrum, it’s safe to say that there are significant benefits to tying outbound/direct marketing efforts with inbound/website marketing. Even if complete organizational consolidation is not a possibility, it’s always worth partnering up in a tactical way for mutual benefit.

With more than 20 years of experience in the travel and hospitality industry, Robert King has held marketing, sales and senior management positions at a variety of organizations. Mr. King works with ClickSquared clients throughout North America, Asia and Europe to develop and implement highly targeted, timely, interactive customer relationship programs that result in increased ROI. Mr. King can be contacted at 480-603-9403 or bking@clicksquared.com Extended Bio...

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