Case Study: Coral Beach Email Redesign & Optimization

Situation & Objective

Coral Beach Resort was looking to drive more repeat visitation. The property had been sending emails to their guest history database for several years but the list had grown fatigued and the property wanted to improve the performance.

The primary objective was to drive more total bookings and revenue by leveraging the email databse. In order to accomplish this, we had the following goals:

• Increase email open rates by 50%
• Increase the overall conversion rate of people who opened the email all the way through to making a booking by 100%

We realized that these KPIs can be artificially improved by simply reducing the size of the overall list and removing unengaged profiles. To ensure that we were actually focusing on the main objective, we also set a goal to increase year-over-year revenue from email by 100%

Target Audience

The target audiences were previous guests and travelers who had signed up to receive marketing messages from the property. We also ensured that our audience only consisted of people who had not yet booked a vacation with the property in the next six months.

Geographically, the audience was primary from the easter states, including South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, New York, and Ohio.

Research & Planning

We analyzed the subject lines and email content from the previous 12 months to determine what messaging was leading to the highest conversion rate.

We also analyzed the engagement and noticed that there was a steady increase in consumers reading the emails from their mobile devices but that the engagement for mobile users was lower than for desktop. From this, we identified that the messages that the property had been previously sending were not optimized for mobile screens.

We also noticed that there were a lot of people within the list who had both been engaged for some time and realized that this could be hurting their deliverability –especially with Gmail addresses.

We employed the following approach:

• Converted the message from image-based email sends to a fully responsive HTML template
• Coached client on creating stronger offers and more compelling messaging
• Ran a real-time A/B test of the subject line to maximize the open rate
• Removed people who were unengaged for more than 12 months
• Optimized the website landing pages to be more mobile-friendly

Message & Implementation

The messaging focused on leveraging the key insights that we had gained from our research.

The primary factors that were driving engagement and bookings were:

• Price point and special offers
• Location of property and vicinity to the ocean
• On-property amenities, including pools, hot tubs, lazy river, bowling alley, and numerous restaurants/bars.
• The cleanliness of the property and the friendliness of the staff

Results

We met or exceeded all of our goals and we saw the year-over-year increases in average open rate, total revenue, total orders, and overall conversion rate. We also saw increase in ROI in the first month of launching.