The constant and relentless evolution of the technological landscape has given rise to a new generation of digitally-savvy consumers, who connect with brands via a variety of differing channels – and demand more personalized and multi-channel experience across channels. The race to consistently delight and thrill potential guests at every turn, has seen the hospitality industry rise to the challenge, of embracing digital transformation.
One example is iconic hotel chain Meritus Hotel and Resorts (Meritus), who took customer engagement to a whole new level last year, with Adobe Campaign.
“Adobe Campaign combines ease of use with valuable automation that allows our marketing teams to provide customers with consistent, high-quality communications,” says Ilias Chelidonis, E-Commerce Manager, Meritus Hotels & Resorts. |
Meritus integrated Adobe Campaign with its Opera booking system to create a centralized location to manage all customer data. In the past, handling email campaigns involved manual, time-intensive processes, with the team having to extract data into Microsoft Excel files and then upload files for further processing. It typically took about 2 hours per campaign—a process that the team can now handle in less than 15 minutes.
With as many as five new email campaigns initiated each month in four languages, the time and costs of the previous workflows quickly added up.
Today, dispersed Meritus marketing teams can work with data in a central location and build a more complete view of each customer’s interactions with company properties, such as noting preferences of customers who have stayed at more than one property.
At the same time, segmentation rules allow marketers to use a single interface to view data for each individual hotel and create, send, and manage email campaigns that drive greater bookings.
Using responsive HTML templates, marketers can reach customers with messages that are viewable across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices—an essential detail with growing mobile usage in Asia.
Since starting to work with Adobe Campaign, Meritus marketers have successfully sent almost 360,000 emails over 131 campaigns. “The efficiencies and insights we’ve gained through Adobe Campaign have transformed our returns,” explains Chelidonis. “With Campaign, we can track conversion rates and see which guests made bookings through our emails, including gaining a view into which touchpoints they encountered prior to booking.”
With data in a central location, Meritus marketing teams can better understand customer preferences –down to the type of room he/she prefers, and average spend per stay, even across properties.
The ability to break down audiences and emails into more targeted segments has meant smaller email batches. This has improved overall email deliverability, ensuring that emails arrive in customer s’ mailboxes, instead of spam folders.
With the help of Adobe Campaign specialized partner – Traction Digital, Meritus got all aspects of implementation coordinated and optimized, so that its marketing team could manage all campaigns independently.
Adobe Campaign has enabled Meritus to continue winning the hearts and minds of clients worldwide, and stay paces ahead of the competition. A “birthday campaign” which sends emails to customers whose birthdays are 45 days away, for example, saw open rates of close to 40% – impacts like these, coupled together with other benefits, are leading to a return of almost 1500% on Meritus’ investment.