success stories

For international budget accommodation and entertainment group Interpub, successful online customer relationship management is essential to gaining and retaining business.

For maximum return in a transient market, Interpub needed the flexibility to clearly identify the customers worth focusing their marketing resources on and an email marketing toolkit to make this possible.

St. Christopher’s Inns

St. Christopher’s Inns, Interpub’s accommodation brand, offers quality, budget accommodation to value-focused customers aged 18-28. Their hostels provide college graduates and backpackers with a lively base from which to explore international cities including London, Amsterdam and Paris.

The brand’s online marketing activities consist of two major monthly email campaigns sent out to around 80,000 recipients, which focus on collecting data and driving customers to st-christophers.co.uk by providing user-generated content and feedback.

Focusing resources

With plenty of experience engaging with customers online, St. Christopher’s Inns found focusing energy on already active individuals on their database proved a much more rewarding online activity than putting resources into re-activating cold leads.

‘In our industry successful sales is more about investing time and I’d rather have 20,000 active users than 120,000 non active ones.’ explains Media and Communications Manager, Duncan Robertson.

However, he elaborates, the audience needs to be approached in the right way to keep them active: ‘Our customers are resistant to any really hard sell so customer relationship management is a central activity. They are travelers so they are not interested in getting prospected.’

Finding the right tools

The hunt was on to find sophisticated enough tools to allow them to streamline their online marketing strategy, targeting the most active members of their database with a higher frequency of tailored communications and cutting down contact with low activity users.

‘Monitoring individual customer behaviour metrics in order to target hot prospects became a must,’ says Duncan. ‘We were long-time users of Microsoft’s Listbuilder service and at the time we were limited to a spray and pray mentality with e-mail marketing.

We found Pure added the dimension of data and analytical tools we needed.’

Data segmentation Using Pure’s advanced reporting and analytical toolkit, St. Christopher’s Inns was able to drill down into their database and look at how their recipients behaved. They identified and discarded black spots and focused more attention on users who displayed active interest by clicking through to the website more often, for example. The results were instantly noticeable.

In the twelve months prior to being able to truly segment their data, St. Christopher’s Inns was generating about a 9% feedback from all e-mails distributed. Since focusing more of their campaign on active individuals this has increased to around 12 – 15% feedback per campaign.

Segmentation and tailored targeting

The future looks exciting for St. Christopher’s Inns with plans to develop their online marketing strategy further by generating and sending emails to customers tailored to their specific interests and destination preferences. ‘By combining data manipulation tools with the information gathered from our feedback focused mail-out “Pillow Talk”, we can achieve an ongoing discourse with our database,’ says Duncan. Creating a dialogue with customers and trending their behaviour before they walk through our doors will make a huge difference.