The Case Study

Participating Hotels - CapitalLand Portfolio

1. Pullman Melbourne Albert Park
2. Mercure Melbourne Albert Park
3. 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 case study properties operate with a small marketing team that is responsible for promotional tasks across the marketing spectrum, including email marketing.

Prior to the trial, due primarily to resource constraints, the marketer creating email campaigns would create and send a “single shot” email offer, with basic personalisation to their database. This occurred approximately once per month.

Our Challenge:

To maximise the effectiveness of follow up communications using frequency, audience segmentation and personalization utilising only existing:

1. Marketing resources
2. Technology
3. Integrations
4. Data
5. Creative assets

Key tactics:

1. Add automation comms

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.

2. Leverage other segmentation capabilities

Using existing purchase data within Taguchi, we created and tested simple segments. e.g., family vs. nonfamily bookers.

3. Let content work harder

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.

4. Made it easier to purchase

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."

Taguchi Client Success Director
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 the Taguchi marketing automation platform.

Taguchi, we specialise in doable.