SUMMARY:
“It felt like we had the opportunity to really do something that was much more really member-centric and really use all the data that we’ve got on our members and present it to them in an interesting, fun way that they might not expect from us,” Clark Cummings, Senior Manager of Member Marketing, Marriott International, said when describing Marriott’s Year in Review campaign.
Learn how, through member data and providing a customer-centric, non-transaction based email touchpoint, a single send from Marriott International contributed to a year-over-year 86% increase in revenue for the month of December.
Cummings and his team decided to create a “This Year in Review” campaign for their Marriott Rewards newsletter list. The team started working on the send in mid-September with a planned send date at the end of December.
Because there were several factors involved in this send, the team at Marriott International had to reach outside of Marriott International’s marketing department.
“It touched multiple departments within our organization, all of our agency vendors. There were a lot of hands involved,” Cummings said. “We wanted to do something that was much more light-hearted and had a more personal touch to it … It was really new and exciting territory for us to cover.”
The Year in Review send helped triple the December average of revenue per message delivered. Learn how this customer-centric send contributed to making Marriott’s Q4 of 2014 the most successful fourth quarter in three years.
Step #1. Develop email campaign idea
Marriott has several core campaigns in place for its Rewards newsletter, but Cummings and his team wanted the Year in Review campaign to be different than these sends. Instead of being offer-based or transactional in nature, the team wanted this send to be more informational.
Altogether there are five campaigns that make up 70-80% of Marriott’s monthly sends to its Rewards members, Cummings said. The first campaign is called “e-news” and serves as a monthly statement for members. This send contains information on new promotions and new company functions, such as mobile check-in.
Another campaign is a hotel specials campaign, which is offer-based. This send uses a propensity model that takes offers from different hotels and determines the 12 best matches for the specific Rewards member.
Then there is a credit card acquisition campaign with Marriott’s bank partner.
Read full article at: Marketing Sherpa
