Marketing Automation and Lifecycle Campaign Improve Engagement

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The world’s second largest hotel and casino brought in the EverView strategy team to up the ante on its email marketing. This luxury hotel had some sizable goals in mind, and our experts took the challenge by the horns to help them create an even more engaging lifecycle program. With years of experience driving ROI for hospitality brands, our strategy team created a robust lifecycle campaign that netted impressive results.

Project Goals: Our Hospitality Client Already Had an Email Marketing Program in Place; However, They Were Looking For More Impressive Results.

In order to take it to the next level, we suggested the company build out a robust, automated customer journey. At the same time, we worked to improve their promotional email campaigns to increase direct bookings via email. The end goal: increase rooms booked, Average Daily Rate (ADR), and overall email engagement rates (opens and clicks).

Execution

The EverView team used a lifecycle marketing approach to boost room bookings, Average Daily Rate, and engagement rates, hitting each stage of the buyer’s journey—acquire, convert, grow, retain, and win back—with several integrated campaigns. The team also focused on creating modular, responsive branded templates to ensure emails were rendering correctly across the board.

Below is a rundown of all the campaigns the EverView team either implemented or consulted on. Marketing is partly the art of optimizing and our team is ready to continue to improve the results of the lifecycle marketing program by building out additional campaigns, including many listed on the next page.

What We Optimized

Acquire

The acquisition stage of the customer lifecycle is all about earning email addresses and, ultimately, bookings. Our goal for the client was to be visible everywhere with list-building initiatives. To that end, we implemented a social opt-in, and recommended implementing the following additional opt-in sources:   

  Website opt-in form •  Header/footer      Website pop-up form •  Referral campaign    Offline list growth initiatives

Convert

Converting subscribers into paying customers is every email marketer’s goal. It just takes a few sensible tactics to make it happen. As part of the conversion stage, we implemented a welcome series. We further consulted on, and recommended this particular client implement:   

  Abandoned booking campaign •  Website browsing behavior campaign      Never booked series

Grow

Upselling, cross-selling, and segmenting campaigns to your existing customers via email marketing has been proven to earn hospitality brands extra dollars. One of the best ways to earn loyalty is by creating personalized touchpoints. Our team created a branded preference center and a corresponding preference update campaign, as well as consulted on the following campaigns and initiatives:   

    Pre-stay series •  Post-stay series      Transactional email optimization

What We Optimized

Retain

Loyal customers who stay with you again and again are the real money-makers. That’s why retention email marketing campaigns are so important. Our team implemented a birthday campaign and recommended creating the following additional campaigns:       Social sharing    Anniversary       Survey

Win Back

There’s still potential for dormant or lost customers to purchase with your hospitality brand again. That’s why we executed a re-engagement campaign and completed an unsubscribe optimization project for this company. While not an immediate priority, we did recommend creating a lapsed booking campaign as well.

Sample Automation Flow

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Results

The metrics from the executed lifecycle campaigns were overwhelmingly positive. In fact, almost every number on every new campaign increased. We’ve outlined a few of the most significant.

Multiple graphs

Takeaways: Executing a Complete Customer Lifecycle Program Through Email Marketing Is a Significant Task

It takes time, teamwork, and knowledge of email strategy. But it can be done, and done well. Once created, marketing automations will run on their own and drive exceptional results.

Here’s the best part, you don’t have to do it all yourself. Like this hospitality company, you can lean on the experts from EverView to be an extra set of hands during the entire process. From brainstorming, to execution, to reporting and analyzing, our team has done it all. And we can help you do it, too.

After all, lifecycle marketing isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a gamechanger for the hospitality industry.