As travel demand gradually returned post pandemic, it was critical for Accor Pacific to evaluate their customer engagement efforts, identifying opportunities to maximise sales in promising but still challenging times for their hotel network.
"In the very first test, bookings had increased by 300%. Partnering with Taguchi gives us a platform that has capability to iterate, test and learn at speed. What’s more, we have access to industry experts at Taguchi to help identify opportunities and work with us to implement new strategies. We look forward to continuing the optimisation of our communications across all our participating hotels."
Accor Pacific, Vice President Digital & Loyalty
Chris Mills
The Case Study
Participating Hotels - CapitalLand Portfolio
- Pullman Melbourne Albert Park
- Mercure Melbourne Albert Park
- Novotel Sydney Paramatta
Taguchi worked with Accor Pacific Head Office as well as the Marketing Director and team at CapitalLand Portfolio to run this case study.
Background
Like many hotels, the three participating hotels operate with a small marketing team, who are solely responsible for all marketing and promotional activities, including email marketing, across the local portfolio.
Prior to the trial, due primarily to resource constraints, the email marketer would create and send a “single shot” email offer, with basic personalisation to their database, approximately once per month.
Our Challenge:
To maximise the effectiveness of follow up communications using frequency, audience segmentation and personalization utilising only existing:
- Marketing resources
- Technology
- Integrations
- Data
- Creative assets
Key tactics:
- Add automation comms
- Leverage other segmentation capabilities
- Let content work harder
- Made it easier to purchase
Follow up messages were targeted by identifying segments based on interaction behaviour. E.g., did engage or did not engage and follow ups if did not convert.
Using existing purchase data within Taguchi, we created and tested simple segments. e.g., family vs. nonfamily bookers.
Re-purposing and adapting existing image creative to freshen content in follow up emails. For example, image assets sourced from the Accor’s website, internal asset libraries and previous email campaigns were resized to ‘full width’ and ‘half width’. This was quick and easy but provided the campaign creator greater flexibility of content and layout options.
Accor developed deep links within the email campaign which meant that the subscriber just needed to click on the offer and the booking system was pre-populated for that specific offer. This improved the customer conversion experience, by removing unnecessary clicks.
"We understand that our clients need to be able to quickly and easily target their audience according to customer profile attributes, click or purchase behaviour, or a combination of both. The Taguchi Smart Template combined with our Target Expression builder makes the sophisticated nature of this task feel simple."
General Manager
Matt Laverty
Execution
With the support of Taguchi Paths, a journey building functionality within the platforms user interface (UI), the CapitalLand marketing team were shown how to create, link and schedule a more sophisticated and timely communications journey. Rather than one email blast, it consisted of multiple touch points across a 5-week period at carefully pre-defined intervals.
The journey was automated to trigger messages at certain intervals according to key events and timings. Once the campaign was set up, the Taguchi system would deploy the personalised messages to the various segments accordingly.
"By participating in this case study we we’re able to successfully illustrate that email marketing can make a difference to our portfolio of hotels performance. It has inspired us to nurture our guests and tap into a new segment not actively used before to drive bookings for our need periods."
CapitaLand Portfolio, Portfolio Director of Marketing and Digital.
Alex Barnett
Creative
As multiple messages were being triggered within a short space of time, creative needed to appear fresh and engaging at each touchpoint. E.g. secondary messages were included in messages where the subscriber did not show interest in the launch offer.
Variations of creative were generated using:
Behavioural data – engaged vs not engaged
Transactional data – past booking behaviour to determine family vs non-family
Trial time frame - (lapsed time, not effort)
Planning, set up & training – ~2 weeks.
Trial execution duration - ~5 weeks
Future campaign re-creation – ~2 hours
Results = Bookings +300%
The overall sales impact of this email journey generated an uplift of 300% in bookings, compared to a previous campaign. What’s more, there were incremental email and website visits that the hotel would not have otherwise received. Plus, the inherent benefit of the customer satisfaction from seeing more relevant content.
Implementing similar journeys in future only adds 2 hours to the previous batch and blast process. Given the significant ROI, this additional effort is something the business can now easily justify.
The results of this case study have sparked a change in future campaign planning within Accor Pacific, not just to re-create this journey, but to use it as the basis for future ongoing expansion of data driven customer communications using Taguchi's distributed customer engagement platform.