This is a case study illustrating how a hotel chain used email marketing combined with web 2.0 technologies to double the sale of their Christmas gift vouchers over the previous year.

“This year we sold twice as many Christmas gift vouchers as last year and it is all down to our new email marketing campaign.”
Joanne Harvey, Hastings Hotels Marketing Manager.

Video interview with Joanne Harvery, Marketing Manager Hastings Hotels. Length: 0.47

Background
With email newsletters hitting the inbox ever more frequently, the need to be different and stand out from the crowd becomes more important. Hastings Hotels are a group of six hotels with four and five star ratings. They offer a premium product and as a small regional hotel group have always innovated in their marketing efforts to ensure the customers keep coming back and buying on-line.

This case study is an example of a single strand of their yearly email marketing campaign designed to promote and sell gift vouchers over the Christmas period. The hotels are all full at Christmas, the advantage of selling gift vouchers is so they can be used to fulfil occupancy.

The Customer Journey
As with every other strand of the Hastings email marketing strategy, the customer experience needs to be mapped and fully understood. The message must change for the customer depending on where they are on the planned journey with the ultimate goal being that they purchase a gift voucher.
Below is a typical journey mapped out and an email created for each stage in the customer journey.

The Call To Action Triggers
Hastings Hotels understand that many of their customers may have questions about the gift vouchers that can not be answered on-line. To overcome the reluctance of some customers to book on-line, Hastings included a trigger based link in the email. When clicked a message was automatically sent to the Hastings central reservations call centre along with the customer data extracted from the contact list with an instruction to call the customer to talk about the options available. The use of email marketing to filter and promote hot leads for the call centre proved to be a major success for both the customer and the Hotel.

Email and Web 2.0 Work In Harmony
Web 2.0 and advanced email technologies have changed the way consumers engage on-line. Getting a good blend of both can enhance the customer experience and vastly improve sales.

Hastings Hotels and Ion created a customer testimonial video and put it on youtube.com. The video was then embedded into a landing page. The customer could then review the experience of a couple that had previously received the gift and could relate easily to the experience the gift voucher would bring the recipient.

For years, the Hastings Hotel brand has used a rubber duck as its mascot. All residents are given a rubber duck in their room and the little yellow fellow has sprouted an iconic following of his own. Those staying at the hotel often take the duck to exotic places and photograph it in weird and wonderful situations. Often the photos are published in the corporate quarterly magazine. In order to capitalise on the duck’s popularity we created a Facebook and Bebo page for the little fellow and started a “duck tails blog” telling the stories of the duck as he goes from country to country. The blog has taken on a life of it’s own with the Hastings loyal travellers sending photos and stories into the Hotel Group in order to embellish the story.

The result has been a massive click through rate on every email as everyone wants to see the new stage in the ducks heroic journey.

The Outcome
Hastings Hotels sold more than double the amount of gift vouchers sold in 2006 by the change of strategy, customer journey and merging of web 2.0 and email technologies.