Hospitality Marketing Blog Has Moved!!!

Our Blog offering marketing advice and insights for small luxury hotels as moved.

Find us and solid marketing information at Hospitality Marketing Blog . com.

See you there.

Safe Travels – Madigan Pratt

 

Email – Double Opt-In or Don’t Bother

What happens when you don’t use a double opt-in process? Presidential candidate Barack Obama sure found out the hard way.  Pranksters signed up prominent anti-spammers to Mr. Obama’s email list and included derogatory first names.

Personalized emails that included these rather rude first names were then sent by the Obama campaign to these unfortunate individuals.

When setting up an email marketing program for small luxury hotels we always recommend using a double opt-in process for capturing email addresses.  This follows industry best practices.

Double opt-in increases the quality of your database and building relationships with customers and prospects for small luxury hotels is more about quality than it is about quantity.

Share your thoughts on double opt-in.   Safe travels – Madigan Pratt

 

Learning From Super Bowl Ads

Super Bowl ads are unique. These multi-million dollar production extravaganzas are so popular there are now web sites dedicated to them. People who normally use their DVD Recorders to Zap TV ads are actually flocking to sites to watch commercials. It is an amazing phenomenon.

As a small luxury hotelier, what can you learn from this? Simple – if your marketing messages are interesting enough, people will look forward to receiving them.

We subscribe to a host of email newsletters from small luxury hotels and an unusually large percentage of them are really not very interesting.

Many look nice, but just like spending a gazillion dollars producing a Super Bowl ad, good art direction is not the key to success. All contain information about the hotel, but the majority are written from the hotel’s perspective and fail to genuinely connect with consumers.

Successful Super Bowl ads connect with the consumer, make them laugh or perhaps bring tears to their eyes. Small luxury hotels need to create an emotional connection with past and potential guests. When you do, people will look forward to hearing from you and your marketing program will be much more effective.

What do you think?

 

Small Luxury Hotels Profit With Email

You’re a small luxury hotel with an equally small marketing budget. Where do you put your money?

The answer – spend it where it provides the greatest return on investment. So where’s that?

Most small luxury hotels don’t have good marketing ROI figures. Here’s some  figures from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) that might help. According to the DMA, on average, marketers should expect $45.65 in return for every dollar they spend on email marketing.

This is an average and includes retailers selling inexpensive items. Using your customer database and expert email marketing practices your hotel should generate significantly higher ROI. Best practices means avoiding “The 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing.”

Below are DMA figures for 2007 & 2008 ROI on email and for 2007 for Non-Email Related Internet Marketing. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind receiving $48+ for every dollar I invested in marketing. Sure beats the stock market!

 

Closing The Loyalty Gap

When travel agents jump on the Customer Relationship bandwagon you know CRM has reached the mainstream.

The cover story in the Jan 14th issue of Travel Weekly is titled, “Closing the Loyalty Gap.”  Some of the more interesting quotes from the article include:

• In the leisure category, a typical agency probably sees repeat business of around 25%
• Lalia Rach, dean of NYU Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism said , “To date there has been an absence of recognition of the importance of client retention.  The focus has been new clients, new clients, new clients.”
• Increasingly, agencies appear to be waking up to the benefits of improving client loyalty, starting with the understanding that far more business typically comes from repeat clients than from new ones.

As a small luxury hotel you no doubt have known the importance of building loyal customer relationships for years now.  Your percentage of repeat guests should be significantly higher than the typical travel agent.

Hopefully you are now on to the next level of customer loyalty – creating brand advocates to maximize word-of-mouth advertising.

If you have any questions on the subject, drop me a line.

 

Create More Brand Advocates in 2008

Are you looking for a profitable New Year’s resolution? Why not resolve to create stronger customer relationships and more Brand Advocates for your luxury hotel.

The linkages between relationships on one end and profits on the other are well documented.

• Research from the prestigious consulting firm Bain & Company shows that depending on the industry, when firms retain just 5% more of their best customers, corporate profits can be boosted 25 to 85%
• There are numerous studies reporting that companies lose between 10% and 20% of their customers every year. At the high end, this equates to a 100% customer every five years.
• In the seminal book on the subject, “The Loyalty Effect”, Frederick F. Reichheld informs us that companies with the strongest customer relationships grow at close to twice the industry average and do so more cost effectively.
• In a 2004 McKinsey Report it’s stated that the average business spends $100 to acquire a new customer and only $10 to keep one.

Creating stronger customer relationships and building Brand Advocates offers a bonus – positive Word-of-Mouth. Studies abound showing recommendations from friends and relatives is the most effective advertising a company can have.

Richheld says is best: Customers who show up on the strength of a personal recommendation tend to be of a higher quality – that is, to be more profitable and stay with a business longer – than customers who respond to conquest advertising, sales pitches or price promotions.

So if you would like your luxury hotel to be more profitable in 2008 – resolve to strengthen customer relationships and build more Brand Advocates.

 

1to1 Marketing for Hotels and Resorts – Article

What a nice  present I received Christmas morning when I read the article – “1to1 Marketing Case Studies” in the January 2008 issue of Tourism-Review.com.  The article details five case studies of luxury hotels and destinations engagements Madigan Pratt & Associates have successfully completed.

Featured in the article are case studies for three hotels – The Reefs and Stonington Beach in Bermuda and Casa del Mar in Los Cabos, Mexico.  The two destination case studies are for the City of Philadelphia and Scotland.

It is wonderful to be featured in a prestigious magazine with global distribution, but even more wonderful to know these are but a few of many great case studies where we have helped clients increase revenue and customer loyalty.

If you would like to learn how our 1to1 marketing skills can help increase revenue for your luxury hotel – contact us.  We’d love to hear from you.  If you have a question – feel free to leave a comment.

1to1 Marketing Case Studies

 

7 Deadly Sins – Top Hotel Marketing Article for 2007

I just heard my article, “The 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing for Luxury Hotels” was among the Top 50 Most Read Hospitality Marketing Articles for 2007 according to HotelMarketing.com.  I am obviously pleased – not so much for the honor – but to learn so many luxury hotel marketers are interested in improving their email programs

The bottom line is: as more hotels follow email and direct marketing best practices when developing their campaigns the more likely email will become the “killer app” it should.  Email will create stronger customer relationships, loyalty and sales.

HotelMarketing.com – the online travel, hospitality industry and Internet news web site has been publishing relevant articles for hotel marketers since 1997.  Its daily e-newsletter is sent to 37,000 hotel marketing executives and contains recently published articles.  Every December HotelMarketing.com announces the list of that year’s Top 50 Most Read Hotel Marketing Articles.

Read the article and please share your thoughts with me and others.