Achieving 11x ROI from personalisation at Lake District Hotels

Lake District Hotels had disparate data sources and no integration between their general marketing and reservations databases. This made it hard for them to understand their customers’ lifetime value and send relevant, personalised campaigns.

They needed a single customer view to automate customer journeys with minimal time and resources. Implementing Spotler made this possible; overall bookings increased by 4% in the first six months.

How to recognise your guest

Like many hotel groups, Lake District Hotels had valuable guest information on legacy reservation systems with many incomplete or incorrect fields. For example, despite having a dog-friendly policy, they could not identify if a visitor had brought their dog with them. The reservations database was not integrated with their general marketing database, so they did not have a detailed understanding of their guests’ journey and overall lifetime value. Sending personalised, targeted campaigns based on customer lifecycle journeys and previous behaviour was almost impossible.

A clean database

Cleaning the databases would have taken a significant amount of budget, time, and resources that were unavailable then. James Pass, Online Marketing Manager, explains:

“We wanted to be able to access our reservations data easily in order to target our previous guests in a much more efficient and personalised manner.”

Lake District Hotels uses direct mail as part of its overall mix in addition to email. Like many marketing teams, it had issues accurately attributing revenue and ROI per marketing channel.

Adding intelligence to email

Lake District Hotels is a long-standing Spotler customer that uses Spotler to create and send email campaigns. Adding Spotler’s Customer Data Platform was the natural solution to their data and personalisation challenges, as it offers a single customer view and automated customer journeys.

“We have used Spotler for a few years, and I thought Spotler CDP was the answer to our data management problems. Other solutions involved moving away from Spotler, and I didn’t want to do that.”

The Spotler team ensured the onboarding process ran smoothly, meeting the hotel group’s needs.

Integrating for the win

James Pass was pleased with the process: “Having Tracey (our specialist) demo the system in person, then follow up with calls and screen shares to explain how to create customer journeys was invaluable.

Any questions I had were answered as soon as possible. Spotler went above and beyond to get all our data synced with our reservations system, which was no mean feat due to how the system we use is built.”