September 2009 Newsletter

In this edition of InTouch Download:

• Meet Abbie...
• Profiling Guests- Brand vs Hotel Marketing...
• Email Marketing Metrics Report...
• Our Top 5 Spring Things.....

Meet Abbie
Many of you will have already been in contact with Abbie Bradshaw over the last few months, noticed the new name on your ICE reports, or a friendly new voice answering the phone.

Abbie came onboard with ITD in early April as Office Adminstrator and is handling all frontline client queries and administration functions. She is also managing all Direct Mail campaigns and is quickly becoming a dataArc wiz.

Before joining ITD, Abbie was most recently living and working in Dubai, UAE on the pre-opening team for a new hotel. Prior to her OS adventures she worked for Tennis QLD and the Sofitel Brisbane.

She is a keen cook (the whole office is enjoying the results) and keeps very active in her spare time.
Abbie is based in the ITD Brisbane office full time and can be contacted on 07 3255 0401 or abbie@intouchdata.com

Profiling Guests- Brand vs Hotel Marketing
We run a lot of geo-demographic profiling for hotel marketing teams, covering the guest history in entirety over a number of years, but also looking at smaller groups, such as leisure, weekend or loyalty guests.

Cluster or Brand Marketing teams will often request the same type of reporting, to look at the combined profile for specific brands.
What we have found generally is, that for branded hotels, there is not an enormous amount of difference in the overall demographic trends of guests- even between three, four and five star hotels.

The reality is, that a reasonably definable (and not so large) part of the domestic population is in a position to consider hotel stays on a regular or semi-regular basis, and factors like length of stay, distance, who the stay is with (partner or kids), occasion, and other travel related costs will impact significantly on the choice of property.

We find that the demographics will shift more substantially when factoring in the purpose of travel, and that brand marketing teams can successfully exploit this by appealing to these purposes for different groups while still delivering a single brand message.
From a hotel perspective the same guest history in dataArc can give you good insight into the purpose of your guests’ travel by looking at things like day of the week, rate, number of people in the room, additional F&B spend, etc of the stay. This insight can then be translated into marketing action by targeting these groups with tactical initiatives.

Of course, if you are part of a group, another objective should be to have the same guest move between the brands in your portfolio only, which again is supported by brand marketing.

Talk to the team at ITD about how to discover the different user groups on your database, to study and understand their activity, and use it to drive your marketing initiatives at hotel, cluster and brand level.

Email Marketing Metrics Report
Vision 6 has just delivered its 6th Email Marketing Metrics Report for the Australian Market.

Vision 6 is the platform supporting the ezymsg product and a vast number of the most common email distribution systems.

The following key metrics are focused on:

• Open Rates
• Click Through Rates
• Bounces
• Most Popular Send & Open Days
• Metrics by Industry

Click here to download your copy.

Our Top 5 Spring Things: 

• The dreaded but necessary spring cleaning
• Missing winter (for all those people who love the cold weather)
• Picnics whilst the weather is perfect
• Plant your seedlings, ready for summer
• Go for a wander through a garden and enjoy the blossoming flowers (and the hayfever?)

InTouch Download has been created to communicate information, tips and hints based on our clients' most frequently asked questions. I hope that you have enjoyed this month's edition and learned something new. If you have any suggestions regarding future content, feedback or requests for information please let me know.

With warm regards,

Rebecca Reilly
Director
Intouch Data