Neolane central to Accor’s hotel marketing campaigns strategy

AccorHotels.com, part of the Accor hotel and service group, installed Neolane to improve the prospect and customer online communications of its hotels group. The use of marketing datamarts, collaborative content management, and campaign personalisation and automation enabled them to save around £200,000 in the first year alone and significantly boost web site visits and conversion rates supporting a drive for increased revenues.

Background
Accor is the European leader and one of the world's largest groups in travel, tourism and corporate services. With over 4000 hotels worldwide, Accor Hotels covers all segments from economy to upscale. All Seasons, Dorint, Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, Suite Hotel, Etap Hotel and Formule 1 are just a few of Accor’s hotel brands.

Accor online
Many customers locate and book their Accor hotel accommodation through www.accorhotels.com and associated brand-specific web sites, where they are offered the opportunity to opt-in to an online communications programme.

Marketing campaigns
Mathieu Staat, is customer relationship and marketing director of Accorhotels.com.
“Online relationship marketing is an important, but complex activity for us,” said Staat. “We have several hotel brands and offer online communications in up to five languages to subscribers across 15 target zones. We also run six different loyalty and subscription cards.”
Conducting effective campaigns against such a complex multi-brand environment requires a degree of automation. Prior to Neolane, Accor used a service-based application solution to plan and manage its online campaigns. However, Accor was dissatisfied for a number of reasons:

• There was little content-management functionality. It was not possible for more than one person to work on the same campaign. Given the brands and geographies involved this caused delays and conflict.
• Targeting was limited, leading to rather general, volume-based campaigns.
• There were problems with data ownership and confidentiality, causing compliance issues.
• There was no scenario or automation functionality.
• The process was labour intensive, prone to human error and inconsistent in demand upon personnel, constantly swinging from under to over-capacity.

Campaigns were taking an inordinate amount of time, effort and resource to deliver and once finally launched, reactivity rates left room for improvement. The process simply couldn’t scale to cope with Accor’s online marketing demands and this was putting the marketing department under a great deal of pressure.
"In addition, we had to pay the service provider for each campaign and there was no way of linking these operations in real-time with our in-house information systems", explained Staat.

Room for improvement
Accor knew it had to review things and began the search for a new licence-based software solution offering:

• Support for an international, distributed, multi-lingual and multi-brand environment, allowing collaborative working, yet centralised control of this important activity.
• In-house control of customer data
• Sophisticated targeting and segmentation
• Cost-effective generation of large numbers of small, focused campaigns.
• Easy real-time integration with other information systems.
• Data security

Accor set the constraint that any new process would have to have a short learning curve and begin to deliver a return on investment (ROI) within 12 months. It would also be required to contribute to a corporate-wide objective of driving and supporting an ever-increasing rate of online reservations.

The choice of Neolane
Accor benchmarked a series of potential solutions. It eliminated products that were technically incompatible and also those from the CRM domain that required substantial investments with typically long term ROIs. It also rejected solutions that required burdensome levels of integration.
Following strong references from existing users, Accor selected Neolane as practical, affordable and encompassing. Deployment was phased and completed in under two months.

Comprehensive solution
Neolane now provides Accor with a unified campaign database. When once customer data was stored across a variety of data silos and was of sometimes dubious quality, a cleansed single customer view is now presented. This covers each customer’s reservation history, geographic and demographic data, communication history and opt-in confirmations.
Analytical and statistical tools allow sophisticated segmentation of the campaign database to support focused, well targeted communications. For example Accor can now segment, communicate and personalise each message by geographic, language and consumer profile patterns.
Ready-to-use template-based documents enforce brand identity consistency and graphical charters. The Neolane integrated and collaborative content-management infrastructure allows local input to support regional campaigns, ensuring ‘multi-local’ relevancy. Many standard communications can be automated, for example ‘welcome’ style emails to new customers or new rewards offers triggered by reaching set point levels.
Neolane also tracks Accor campaign responses and customer reactions, allowing action-reaction mechanisms to be triggered and profiles to be updated in the centralised datamart in real-time. Of course, opt-in and opt-out requests are automatically catered for too. Managers can analyse reports to evolve their campaign strategies.

The right result
Accor went live with Neolane in early 2005. Staat is proud of the results. “Neolane has strongly supported Accor’s targets for growing internet-based reservations,” he said.
Further analysis of campaign statistics clarifies how Neolane is adding value.
“In 2005, our first year using Neolane, we sent almost 20 million emails in five languages and actually carried out two and a half times the number of campaigns we ran in 2004”, explained Staat.
Campaigns in 2005 were smaller, more frequent and better targeted with all email content fully personalised depending on customer profile, card membership, geographical position and other variables.
“We more than doubled reactivity rates to nearly 30 percent. Neolane is helping us to increase frequency of web site visits and conversion rates,” said Staat.
Not only is Neolane helping to boost online sales, but according to Staat, campaign costs are actually down too. “The time taken to create communications has been cut by half. In the first 12 months we saved an estimated £200,000.”
Since implementing Neolane, opt-out rates have fallen too. Accor has revealed that its database of more than one million people, continues to grow, now reaching a rate of 40 percent per annum.
“Implementing Neolane was an excellent decision! No doubt about it,” concluded Staat.