"Boy, that trip to Aruba sure was great, wasn't it?" That's what a visitor to the Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort might easily say to herself after returning from the beach resort and casino. And those who run the hotel, United Kingdom-based InterContinental Hotels Group, would sure like it if she passed those thoughts along.
That's partly why, in November 2009, IHG started working with Redwood City, Calif.-based StrongMail Systems, a provider of online marketing solutions for e-mail and social media. In addition to being able to integrate data for a single view of the customer that allows the hotel group to personalize communications, IHG wanted its single e-mail service provider to enable sharing.
So in December 2009, IHG put its transactional e-mails on the new platform and by March 2010, the hotel group had a single ESP. That means IHG is ahead of many of its competitors, according to the report "Connected Marketing for Travel Providers" that Relevancy Group CEO David Daniels authored and StrongMail released on May 6. "Only 30 percent of travel e-mail marketers are using subscriber preferences or behaviors to target offers in pre- and post-stay e-mails," according to the announcement. Also, 42 percent of travel marketers plan to integrate social media into their e-mail platforms this year.
Integrating e-mail—especially with social media, given the viral nature of the content—is the hot new thing in travel marketing, says Kara Trivunovic, StrongMail's senior director of strategic services. "Just from a trend standpoint, we're seeing a lot of that. And it's the culmination of a lot of work, typically over the course of many years."
"Yes," exhales Kevin Hickey, IHG's global manager of lifecycle and e-mail marketing. "It is not a quick process."
Target Marketing: What direct marketing challenges did IHG encounter during e-mail integration?
Kevin Hickey: Honestly, there were a number. Primarily, we were looking to consolidate our e-mail messaging that was split up among two different e-mail platforms onto one. There were a lot of quick wins that we knew we'd get right off the bat. Between the data elements, we had a much tighter integration with our marketing efforts. We were on a CPM cost structure, so there were cost-saving components, as well. Speed and efficiency of the platform helped us out with speed to market.
TM: What prompted the migration to a single ESP?
KH: I think it was a number of things. I think with our overall emphasis on CRM enablement, as well as putting e-mail at the center of that conversation with the customer, there were a lot of opportunities—mostly due to technology that just highlighted the need to migrate to a different vendor, like StrongMail. The biggest thing, I think, [is that] with one platform and all of our e-mails being centralized, it really gave us more insight into the campaigns and access to the data. Just to help improve the consistency and control and just the efficiency, in general, that we have across our whole inventory.
TM: How did e-mail integration help solve this aspect of IHG's direct marketing challenges?
KH: From an e-mail point of view, obtaining a single view of the customer was really essential. All of the effort that went into the migration efforts. ... It's everything from optimization of the messaging; more personalized content delivered on a one-to-one basis; some greater control over list churn; optimization of deliverability; insight into frequency and cadence—so we could better manage that. All of it [rolls] up into a focus on extracting as much value as we could from every e-mail recipient that we have on our list.
TM: What other marketing improvements did IHG integrate into its e-mail switch?
KH: If we talk about consistency, control and efficiency across our e-mail workstreams, the movement to a modular template definitely helps facilitate that and that's exactly why we've tapped into utilizing Smith-Harmon for that modular template approach. It allows us to have a flexible template that uses dynamic content. And, depending on the data in the list, it might be relevant content displayed to one person that doesn't, necessarily, get displayed to another. So there's a lot of efficiency and personalization that goes into that.
TM: How is IHG measuring its results?
KH: We're really still trying to get our arms around a lot of the benefits, especially as it relates to measurement. For now, I want to make sure that we're maximizing every touchpoint and its e-mail effectiveness by some of the key metrics that we have in place—whether it's engagement like opens and clicks; how efficient the e-mail is in terms of things like revenue per e-mail; or conversion, in terms of, 'Are we actually converting customers to do what we're asking them to do?' But I think most of that is really just identifying all of the opportunities to automate a lot of the manual processes that are normally associated with e-mail creation, testing and development.
... Depending on the e-mail program, things are either increasing, as expected, or maintaining a constant year-over-year, in terms of where we'd expect the numbers to be ... There's over 40 million Priority Club members and 180 million guests stay with us each year. And obviously, there's a lot of overlap with that. We send out upwards of 30 million e-mails per month.
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