CASE STUDY: How Meritus Hotels & Resorts transformed email engagement

Background

With customers coming from across Asia and around the world, Meritus Hotels & Resorts wanted to expand its reach through email marketing campaigns in multiple countries and languages. Although the company was determined to handle marketing in house for greater agility, it needed to adopt a campaign-management solution that would not only integrate with its complex systems and workflows but also be easy for marketers to use.

Handling email campaigns involved manual, time-intensive processes, with the team having to extract data into Microsoft Excel files before uploading files for further processing. This process typically took about two hours per campaign. 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.

Execution

Meritus integrated Adobe Campaign with its Opera booking system to create a centralised location to manage all customer data. Today, dispersed Meritus marketing teams can work with this data 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.

Enhanced segmentation also enables Meritus marketers to understand each customer interaction, right down to the type of room a customer prefers, where he or she stayed on a recent visit, and the average spend per stay.

To aid its campaign transformation, Meritus worked with Traction Digital to create one-to-one marketing campaigns. With added training offered by the company, Meritus was able to expand its use of Adobe Campaign so that small marketing teams at each hotel would be able to provide faster market response and more accurate information about the hotel’s features and deals.

Results

Since starting to work with Adobe Campaign, Meritus marketers have successfully sent almost 360,000 emails over 131 campaigns, cutting down the time spent on each campaign from 2 hours to under 15 minutes. They are able to track conversion rates and see which guests made bookings through Meritus’ marketing emails, including gaining a view into which touchpoints they encountered prior to booking.

Since the switch, Meritus' marketers have gained the ability to break down audiences and subsequent emails into more targeted segments and deliver more relevant offers to customers. By sending emails in smaller batches, overall email deliverability has improved, helping ensure that emails arrive in customer mailboxes, not spam folders.

With Meritus teams managing a wider variety of campaigns each month, the company is realizing solid returns on its investment. One campaign the team is particularly proud of is the “birthday” campaign, which involves sending emails to customers whose birthdays are 45 days away; the open rate on emails within this campaign is almost 40 percent.

Overall, Meritus has seen open rates on its campaigns jump by as much as 25 percent. Those impacts, coupled with the efficiencies the company is seeing in creating and executing campaigns, translate into a return on investment in the range of 1,500 percent.

CREDITS

Ilias Chelidonis, e-commerce manager, Meritus Hotels & Resorts
Josephine Park, customer success manager, Adobe Marketing Cloud – SEA, Adobe
Shashank Sharma, industry lead - travel & hospitality, South East Asia & Middle East, Adobe