Mr. King

Sales & Marketing

Hotel Housekeeping Tip: Don’t Ignore Your Email Database

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

Hospitality marketers are increasingly recognizing the importance of a cross-channel approach to guest communications –– orchestrating an ongoing guest dialogue across direct mail, email, mobile marketing and web. But in today’s economy, prioritization of scarce marketing resources continues to be the key challenge. If we can’t do everything right away (and all at once) what marketing channel offers the fastest and surest return on incremental marketing investment? Within a cross-channel framework, email is clearly the most effective guest communication tool in the hospitality marketers’ toolbox.

Your email marketing database is (or should be) one of your hotel’s most valuable assets. And just like maintaining the golf greens, beachfront, and guest rooms, thorough and ongoing maintenance of the marketing database is critical to a hotel’s success. Not only does it need to be designed and built correctly, but it needs regular attention to ensure it is capable of supporting the right guest “experience”.

In this article, I’ll focus on the foundational building blocks of effective email marketing - list building and “housekeeping” maintenance - and how they can have a direct impact on campaign effectiveness.

Email Address Capture

When I’m asked (often) what the number one thing a hospitality organization can do to improve its email marketing effectiveness, the answer is simple – capture email addresses. While this may sound a bit simple, consider that it is not unusual to see hotel guest email capture rates ranging between 20-30%. Capture rates can be particularly low for hotels that have a larger component of travel agent/GDS bookings or substantial group business, where individual guest email addresses are generally not provided to the hotel in the booking process.

But rather than cede these guests to marketing anonymity, hotels need to get more creative in their email capture efforts. The front desk is generally the least disruptive and most successful point in the guest lifecycle to capture the guest’s email. Email capture goal setting, reinforced by measurement, incentives and friendly inter-property competition (where applicable), can translate into meaningful improvement in email capture rates. Moreover, your marketing database can be easily be combined with basic look-up and reporting capabilities to equip the front desk team with the tools they need to focus, facilitate and measure email capture performance.

Transactional communications (e.g. reservation confirmation, pre-arrival (s), post-departure, cancellation confirmation) also represent excellent opportunities to seek the guest’s “opt-in” to receive future marketing communications. Since a guest receives these “operational” email communications regardless of their marketing opt-in status, secondary marketing messages (including marketing opt-in invitations) can be effectively piggy-backed without violating Can-Spam protocols. Many hotels dynamically (i.e., offered only to those not already opted in) incorporate a prominent “opt-in” invitation into these transactional communications to increase the size and reach of their email marketing database.

In general, if you can increase your opt-in email capture 20% to 40%, you can essentially double the effectiveness of your email marketing, providing an immediate pay off and a nice marketing annuity for the future.

Good List Hygiene

Regardless of how well an email is crafted, if it’s not making it to the inbox, it is worthless. Current statistics show that more than 25% of email addresses churn per year. Therefore, no matter how you capture and clean your marketing database, it is imperative that you have a process in place that manages and removes bounce-back emails and inactive addresses.

If the email addresses on your lists are not accurate, or customers have established new addresses, the result will be high bounce-back rates. Left unmanaged, this will have a negative impact on your organization's ability to deliver email to ANY customer inbox. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) interpret high bounce-back rates as probable spam, negatively effecting your sending reputation and likely resulting in a disproportionate number of your emails being delivered to “junk” folders rather than your guests’ inboxes. It goes without saying that if a significant percentage of your emails are not being delivered, your marketing ROI will suffer.

So before you even begin to write copy or focus on the creative elements of your email program, take these steps to ensure your list is clean and up-to-date:

• Take a close look at the results of your email campaigns – who is clicking, opening, and responding, and how many emails are bouncing or simply not being opened. This will give you a baseline for moving forward.
• Develop a process to remove addresses that bounce from your database, or at least flag them so they are not included in future email lists.
• Don’t assume they abandoned you intentionally. Consider auto-generating a postcard to the postal address requesting that the customer provide you with an updated email address so they don’t miss out on future communications
• If guests continuously do not open their emails, try something different – send to them on different days, change the subject lines, or reduce frequency. If still no success, establish a timeframe for removing email addresses from your lists. ISPs are increasingly measuring engagement (i.e., how many people open or click on your emails) as a factor for delivery. Removing inactive addresses keeps engagement measurements high.
• After acquiring a new email address, immediately send a triggered confirmation email that confirms that the address is valid. This also gives you the opportunity to explain what communications the recipient should expect to receive from you, and how frequently they should expect to receive them; if this is not what the recipient desires, enable them to share their preferences or immediately opt-out.

Customer Relevancy

Now that you have scrubbed your email lists and ensured they are accurate and up to date, focus on maintaining your database to capture information that can make your customer communications more individually relevant. Start by looking at the data you already have. You already know something about them, even if it’s just the basics like zip code or gender. Even these simple attributes can help you personalize the content of your marketing messages.

To take it to the next level, you need to have a more complete profile of your guest. For many travel and hospitality organizations, this data exists but is often trapped in “siloed” databases. The value of customer data emerges once it is extracted, aggregated and synthesized within your marketing database.

Capturing Customer Preferences

Preference Centers help you understand two key things: your customer’s specific interests and behaviors, and their preferred method(s) and frequency of receiving information. Your goal is to then leverage these “preferences” to align your messages to the topics each individual finds most important, and delivering those messages at the times, frequency and channels they prefer.

Provide them the ability to share this information with you in an online preference capture page. Once captured, build trust and engagement by tailoring your communications to align with stated preferences.

Preference information that a guest provides directly is invaluable, but you can’t rely exclusively on this source – many guests won’t take the time to provide it – or won’t provide it in full. Your guest preference information will need to be supplemented with the activity and behavior data you’re already compiling in your marketing database: who opened what, which links did they click, what reservations are they making, how often are they visiting, what activities do they schedule, and how much are they spending? Understanding these inferred preferences will enable you to further personalize your messaging and refine your content to drive even greater results.

For example, if your resort offers both golf and spa, you will likely have the information to determine if a past guest previously booked a tee time, a spa appointment, or both – and your offer messages should be personalized based upon this past behavior. Likewise, you may be able to easily determine if a guest is more likely to be interested in a “romantic getaway” or a “Kids Stay Free” promotion. Is a guest more likely to respond to the promise of a luxury, ocean-view experience, or discounted off-peak offer? Again, the beauty of email communications is that they can be dynamically personalized based on preference information to achieve greater relevancy, increase engagement and RevPAR.

Once again, the cardinal rule of Preference Center management is to use the information to tailor your communications…particularly the preferences that a guest shares with you directly. The only thing that is worse than communicating generically to customers is to ask them about their preferences and then ignore what they tell you. Incorporated correctly, the use of Preference Centers to understand your guests is one of the easiest ways to improve relevancy, engender guest engagement and, in turn, improve marketing ROI.

In Closing

Email continues to reign as the dominant component of an effective cross-channel marketing strategy, and is a highly measurable component of customer engagement. Executed correctly, email can make a powerful impact upon the health of guest relationships and the financial health of your business.

But if you’re not growing and maintaining your emailable database (scrubbing and updating it on a regular basis), and gathering your customers’ stated and demonstrated preferences, all of your hard work to devise attractive offers and compelling content won’t give you the results you’re looking for. So spend a little time before you get started and reap the benefits of a tidy and well maintained email database.

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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