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How to Collect More Email Names for Your List by Asking Brick-and-Mortar Customers for Them Offline

June 3, 2003 /

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CHALLENGE: Within a few weeks of starting work as Director of
Business Intelligence & Database Management, Menka Uttamchandani
was ready with a slew of new plans for her company. It was summer
2001.

MarketingSherpa, Inc

But that company – Affinia (formerly Manhattan East Suite Hotels)
– is New York’s largest all-suite hotel chain. And we all know
what happened next; Uttamchandani’s budget went the way of the
post-Sept 11 travel market.

She remembers, "It forced us to look at smarter measures that
wouldn’t cost as much."

Email marketing was an obvious choice. It was low-cost and, more
importantly, a perfect vehicle for customized marketing based on
the vast amount of customer information Uttamchandani had on
file.

But looking through the guest history records, only about 3%
included an email address plus permission to use it.
Uttamchandani and her colleagues needed more addresses. Here’s
how they got them.

CAMPAIGN: The Affinia team chose not to focus just on online
tactics, but to engage the whole company in collecting addresses,
particularly front office staff who – by definition – collect
data from each guest on arrival and departure anyway.

In essence, Uttamchandani wanted desk staff to encourage guests
to put their email address on their registration cards and give
permission to be mailed further communications. But that’s easier
said than done.

Task #1: Get company-wide buy-in

Uttamchandani knew there was no point asking staff to collect
emails and data if senior management didn’t believe in the value.

She also needed the active cooperation of operations, sales,
marketing and (especially) IT to make the whole system of data
gathering, processing, and email marketing work.

She says, "There was a huge team push – nothing flies
successfully without teamwork. Getting everybody to first believe
how critical it is is key. Then it becomes second nature. And
then the challenges are different; it’s about the
practicalities."

Task #2: Get frontline staff to start collecting

Together with the Marketing Information Manager, Uttamchandani
then visited the front office staff at each hotel in the chain to
discuss the initiative.

The initial reaction from front office managers was positive but
tinged with understandable skepticism, given the amount of work
they already had and the need to process guests quickly and
efficiently.

So on each visit, the team gave a PowerPoint presentation
covering:

o The importance of accurate customer data and email addresses
o What they do with the information and how this benefits that
particular hotel

Uttamchandani says, "We had a slide saying what the big deal
about email is. There’s a slope you have to go through with new
things. You have to stay consistent and share with them the whys,
instead of just saying ‘do it’."

The main concern voiced was how this might irritate guests. A
common comment was, "we say to guests we want your email and
they’re like, ‘no, no, no I get enough junk mail already’."

So the team trained staff to make four points clear when asking
guests for their email address:

a. we don’t rent or sell email addresses
b. the email address is purely for the hotel’s use
c. the guest receives a preview of hotel specials (i.e.
there’s value for you)
d. mailings are only periodic (i.e. you will not get a lot of
emails from us.)

Task #3: Give feedback & foster intramural competition

The marketing team then followed up after each visit with phone
calls to check on progress, remind staff of the initiative, and
give feedback on the results.

Each month, for example, they send out a bar chart showing the
percent of emails collected from guests that have checked out.
There’s a bar for each hotel and one for the company as a whole.

Uttamchandani says, "It’s amazing how that kind of clear-to-see
graph generates competition to a point where it’s really hot and
healthy."

Email address acquisition was also a topic at leadership team
meetings, to make sure top management believed in it and talked
about it once in a while with their staff.

The most effective feedback, though, says Uttamchandani was to
share email marketing success stories with both corporate and
hotel teams, showing how email broadcasts produce incremental
revenue for the hotel.

She says, "We sit down with [each hotel] general manager and give
him a vision of the marketing future. They can see how more
email addresses translates directly into money."

Task #4: Review and address practical problems

Once front office staff started collecting email addresses, a few
practical problems started appearing, such as a relatively high
number of bad addresses. Here’s what the team learnt and/or
changed…

o Uttamchandani says initially they’d get addresses like
@yahoo.co, which sounds easy to correct manually, but not
when you’ve got thousands of addresses to work through. So
they taught staff to recognize typical domain names and
extensions (.com, .org and .net etc.) and make the
corrections at data entry.

o This didn’t solve the problem with usernames though (the bit
before the @). Often, handwritten email addresses on
registration cards were, says Uttamchandani, "a matter of
interpretation…and if you get one letter wrong, your
email’s not going anywhere."

On the suggestion of one front office manager, the team
changed the guest registration card design to include boxes
(one box per letter) for the email address entry, which cut
down on errors enormously.

o The team also noticed that reservation desks sometimes
entered the wrong email address into a guest’s record; by
taking the email of the person making the reservation, rather
than the guest themselves. So they encouraged them to only
input an email address if it really comes from the guest.

o Some guests gave out their email address, but didn’t want to
opt-in to further communication (or unsubscribed later).
These addresses are marked in a guest’s records to ensure the
address is locked out of all future mailings.

o Some guests didn’t have an email address or didn’t want to
give it out. But initially, this meant front desk staff would
keep seeing a gap in the record and irritate the guest with
repeated requests. Now there’s a special code in each guest
record, so that front office staff know not to ask the
question again.

o Some addresses went bad with time (the old churn issue), but
staff wouldn’t ask for an email address if one was already
listed in the guest’s record. Bad addresses are now
eliminated from the records system, so staff know to ask for
a new email address next time the guest stays.

Task #5: Use incentives to rekindle enthusiasm

After initial euphoria, email address acquisition started to
level off in mid-2002. So the team decided to reinvigorate
efforts by introducing an incentive plan through the operations
team.

For several months, any hotel that reached a pre-defined number
of emails (expressed as a percentage of guests checking out)
entered a prize draw. The winning hotel team then got a no-cost
flight to anywhere in the USA to give to one of their front
office staff, plus other rewards like a pizza party or written
recognition from senior managers.

Uttamchandani says the hotels are now operating their own
informal incentive systems, with – for example – pizza parties
for staff when internal targets are met.

Task #6: Don’t just rely on front office staff

Although the main focus was on getting room guests to join at
check-in or check-out, Uttamchandani and her colleagues didn’t
neglect other address sources either. Here are a sample:

o At the website, visitors can opt-in to get promotions from
Affinia when signing up for a no-cost weekend sweepstakes
promotion, when registering as a member, when booking a room
or when viewing the "specials" page.

o The team gather prospect email addresses by renting double
opt-in lists and through co-registrations at third-party
travel sites.

Uttamchandani says it’s hard to find the right rental
demographics – she’s restricted to using income, travel
frequency and travel destination, when what she really wants
is to select addresses who travel to Manhattan X times per
year, spending Y dollars per night at hotels.

o Other hotel and chain staff are encouraged to collect email
addresses, too. For example, restaurant and spa staff are
starting to collect email addresses from non-residents, and
sales staff collect addresses from the corporate travel
managers they visit.

Each email address that comes in is tagged according to source –
guest, travel agent, prospect, corporate travel manager,
food/drink/spa guest – so that subsequent messaging can be made
more appropriate.

Each address is also tagged with the source hotel (where
relevant). So while generic chain promotions might come from
Affinia, Uttamchandani can also do hotel-specific promotions,
which get better open rates.

For example, the team recently sent out an email promotion for
free high-speed internet access for guests at the chain’s Affinia
Dumont hotel. It went only to ex-Dumont guests and had the
hotel’s name in the from field. Uttamchandani says, "We don’t
want to cannibalize guests from one hotel to another. The
emphasis is always on incremental revenue."

This source/hotel segmentation is, of course, in addition to all
the traditional data segments built into each guest record, such
as distance between home and hotel, most popular days of week for
stays, etc.

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… addresses in early 2002, Affinia now has more than 10 times
that number today. The best-performing hotel is consistently
capturing permissioned email addresses from more than 80% of its
guests.

Uttamchandani says address collection’s become second nature for
staff and part of the corporate culture.

And has the effort translated into revenues?

Well, Affinia’s still rolling out their email marketing strategy,
but Uttamchandani says it’s already bringing substantially more
incremental business from existing guests, particularly on the
leisure side of things.

They’re also converting 2% of email leads (i.e. people who signed
up for more email communication following a pop-up or list rental
promotion) into recurring guests. She says, "It might sound
small, but it’s an incredible amount of money – it’s purely
incremental business and the ROI on acquisition campaigns is
fabulous."

Another positive impact is that outgoing email promotions
encourage recipients to use the website for bookings, rather
than, for example, the phone. As a result, the percentage of
first-time-only bookings coming through the website has fallen
from the high 90s to a lower (albeit still impressive) number,
even though the actual *number* of first-time bookings through
the website has risen.

Last but not least, overall revenues booked through the Web site
in Q1 2003 were 125% higher than in the same quarter the year
before.