Established in 1993, HotelConnect is a hotel booking agency, working both online and through their London based call centre. Customers can book hotels directly though the UK, Danish or Swedish websites. They also work directly with the trade, offering travel agents accommodation both through the call centre and via their UK and US agent websites. HotelConnect have a central marketing function, encompassing online and email marketing. Having seen the benefits of email marketing in recent years, they have become more strategic in this area to leverage the best results from a highly measurable marketing channel.

Advanced Email Marketing
The ongoing relationship with Emailvision at a basic level has provided HotelConnect with a good foundation for building a more advanced email marketing programme.

As their internal CRM system has developed, they have set up data synchronisation with Campaign Commander™ to ensure their email database is kept as up-to-date as possible. HotelConnect build their customer and prospect list through subscriptions on their websites and through their call centre and with currently around 100,000 members for the direct part of their business, they were keen to segment and target their list for higher response rates.

HotelConnect sets up fortnightly promotional and informative emails to their base in order to maintain regular contact. The information they have about each member of their database allows them to target them with a relevant email based on how often they book hotels or the regions and countries that they visit. They also use these bi-weekly promotional emails to reward loyal customers with discounts and exclusive offers and also to reactivate lapsed customers with reminders of the services they offer and price promotional messages.

Through testing various promotional tactics and messaging, HotelConnect have been able to effectively analyse which campaigns have the best results. Becky Elson, Campaign Manager explains, “As a team we report back to the business on our campaign results, so being able to use the reporting on Campaign Commander™ is vital. We receive much higher open rates when we have price promotional subject lines and higher click through rates when the content is more relevant to the individual receiving it.”