InterContinental Hotels Gets Personal with Integrated Email Platform

If it takes up to three weeks to create and deploy a targeted, dynamic email, “dynamic” isn’t really an apt description. That’s the situation InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) found itself in. The company wanted to be able to create highly personalized transactional emails and lifecycle messaging for each of its seven brands on the fly. What’s more, it wanted to automate the process so that customers could receive the appropriate messages in as close to real-time as possible.

To that end, in early 2010 IHG replaced the two email service providers it had been using—one for marketing messages and one for transactional emails—with StrongMail. It integrated the email platform, managed hosting services, and StrongDelivery Tools with Unica Interact, Unica Campaign, and its Teradata data warehouse.

Now, explains Kara Trivunovic, senior director of strategic services for StrongMail, “IHG has the ability to send prestay and poststay messages in real-time and have them automated in such a way that they are self-assembled—you don’t need the human element to get them out to the guests.”

Prior to the implementation, IHG was unable to personalize its reservation confirmations, thank-you emails, and other transactional messaging because the data were stored in separate databases, says Lincoln Barrett, IHG’s vice president of guest marketing. So a long-time member of the company’s Priority Clubs loyalty program who had made his fifth business-related reservation at a Holiday Inn in six weeks would receive the same basic confirmation message as a leisure traveler who had booked his first-ever stay at a Crowne Plaza hotel.

IHG knew it was missing out on upsell opportunities by not being able to quickly send highly targeted messages to guests based on their history and preferences. In addition to promoting hotel services such as spa facilities and restaurant reservations, IHG wanted to be able to sell its loyalty program to nonmembers and upsell its 52 million existing members to higher levels.

IHG decided to switch email providers in late 2009; by the first quarter of 2010 it went live with StrongMail. It now has 31,860 versions of its reservation confirmation email alone, mixing and matching elements based on the hotel brand, whether the customer is a loyalty club member, the location of the hotel and nearby attractions, and the amenities offered by the hotel.

“We can now link details about the customer to the actual transaction itself,” Barrett says. All versions of the confirmation email are assembled within seconds using just one template. Previously confirmation emails were sent in batches.

In addition, the new platform enabled IHG to roll out prestay messages, which Barrett describes as the emails “working hardest for us.” Three or four days before a customer is due to check in, his hotel will send an email that not only confirms the reservation but also includes a local map, information about what’s going on nearby, links to restaurants, and value-added promotions. “Hotels can load in their own individual offers,” Barrett says. These can range from a free drink at the hotel bar to discounts on local attractions.

IHG follows the same principle with its poststay emails. In addition to including a link to an online feedback form, these follow-up messages include personalized offers based on the guest’s previous transactions.

Personalizing the transactional messages in this way allows IHG to establish “a richer dialogue,” says Barrett, “which in the end gives a greater response.”