2013 Silver Best use of Email

Client LateRooms.com

How did the campaign make a difference? The Personal Recommendation Programme turned around email channel performance for LateRooms.com, delivering a personalised recommendation service to 8.9 million LateRooms.com customers. Revenue increased by 66.2%, with open rates of 47%, click rates of 17% and action rates of 46%.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? The Personal Recommendation Programme kickstarts pipeline business, recognises and responds to observed behaviour and digitally manages a dialogue with prospective converters. The data strategy taps directly into live customer behaviour, increasing long-term engagement and advocacy. A weekly engagement generator is the main push for business and leisure customers. It's tailored with relevant available hotels, locations, prices, and offers. The database tunes into the customers' digital footprint, and drives 1-2-1 daily recommendations based on habitual bookings, star ratings, price category, geo-location, email and web engagement. Weekly content is constantly renewed for every individual based on their interaction, guided by business rules to safeguard against repetition. Online and email engagement is followed up in the conversion phase, focusing on engager-non-purchasers.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? Many email programmes in this sector feature one-time offer fixed HTML. Audience engagement soon diminishes through lack of relevance. This automated programme improves channel performance, providing the recipient with evolving relevant content, and timely 1-2-1 reminders, while satisfying the commercial needs of LateRooms.com to support its hotel base in a competitive sector. Design templates are rotated independently for business and leisure bookers, including different send times to coincide with their overall propensity to book. Timely, tailored content drives relevant engagement and supports hotel seekers in their pre-purchase decisions.

Results Revenue is 66.2% higher than with the previous flat HTML mass communications. With a sustained 17.6% increase in action rate, booking spend per delivered mailing is on average five times higher for dynamic mailings. Web click follow-ups to the previous day's web engagers have driven incredible results, achieving a 46.3% click conversion.