As anyone with an e-mail account and a favorite hotel brand or airline can attest, there is a fine line between a company maintaining a relationship with customers and over-communicating. It’s one thing to notify your customer base of special offers well suited to them; it’s another to send frequent mass messages that amount to nothing more than run-of-the-mill advertising. To today’s e-mail user, such messages might as well be spam.

Kimpton Hotels recently updated the look and feel of its monthly e-newsletter, increasing open-rate. In addition, Kimpton now offers its five e-newsletters in mobile versions for its loyalty program members.

Honolulu-based Outrigger Enterprises Group recently retained interactive marketing relationship firm ClickSquared Inc. to help the company both manage guest data and create personalized, timely, relevant marketing messages based on that data.

To start, ClickSquared will build a database using information from all Outrigger sources, from property management and reservation systems to the call center and on-property spa or restaurant outlets, says Cabot Woolley, ClickSquared’s vice president of travel and hospitality. The database then will be automatically updated in real-time with each customer action or transaction, creating detailed customer profiles that can be used to trigger outgoing messages.

As for the messaging itself, “even our best guests, if they love us and love Hawaii, may see us a couple of times a year,” explains Rob Solomon, chief marketing officer for Outrigger. “Most people don’t have an opportunity to travel to Hawaii every month. So, we know they don’t want to hear from us every week, or every other week, or every month. Probably the most they want to hear from us is [a few] times a year. It’s a simple thing, but in today’s world, it’s smart to get it right and to understand when they want to hear from us and how often.”

Solomon cites a few major U.S. air carriers and their overzealous e-mail communication with customers as an example of getting it wrong. “I hear from each of them about every other day,” he says. “If not for professional curiosity, I would just block them.”

His goal for Outrigger is to “put more discipline into ensuring the communication we send is relevant and timely. We want to [communicate] with selectivity. We are investing in quality content. If we accomplish nothing else, we feel this will be a highly appreciated service from our guests.”

Solomon also notes that when the company talks to its customers, he wants it to do so with not only offers, but also with interesting information and timely, event-driven opportunities—“things they will want to share with friends and colleagues,” he says. “Letting the guest know that here is an experience that is available—it’s not an advertising come-on, it’s a service. If we serve up the right information at the right time, it has a great value in its own right,” he explains.

Offers, meanwhile, should be simple and powerful, Solomon says, like a note asking for a lapsing customer to come back and providing a US$100 e-coupon as an incentive. “One, it’s addressed to me. Two, it’s timely and true. Three, here is a relevant benefit and a simple but warm-and-fuzzy message,” he says. “One hundred dollars is a good investment for bringing a customer back. It’s simple and to the point.”

He believes Outrigger customers have an appetite for the right type of information, and that as long as the company respects its guests’ time and intelligence, and uses technology to smartly stay in touch with them, brand messages will be well-received and add long-term brand value.

IHG’s Barrett, meanwhile, focuses his team on getting to a position to deliver relevant content at the right time via the right channel to increase incremental revenue without inundating customers with unwanted messaging.

To do this, a business case was made for a major CRM infrastructure project that includes IHG’s global IT department building a new CRM platform with a central data repository and integrated marketing automation tools, plus an enhanced loyalty database with a more flexible, open-architecture environment so the company can more readily harness information across the enterprise.

“We have not had one customer database for people in or not in Priority Club,” Barrett says. “This will get all customer data in one area, where it will live in a more flexible environment, and we will add to that campaign management [functionality] that will increase efficiency and speed to market.”

As part of its lifecycle marketing focus, IHG will leverage that campaign management functionality to put out personalized marketing messages throughout the guest stay cycle—from pre-stay to post-stay communication.

“We’re trying to leverage the technology platform we are building to make sure that we are able to recognize [guests] consistently and persistently across their travel,” Barrett says.

That includes messages and offers being triggered as guests approach new status tiers, Barrett says. “It’s not mass communication—it’s personalized to you based on your lifecycle and your transactional record.”

When the infrastructure project is finished, IHG will be able to more effectively serve communication across e-mail, the Web and SMS messaging, Barrett says.

San-Francisco based Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants also is focusing on sending the right message in the right format. To help do so, the company recently updated the look and feel of its monthly e-newsletter. The new template scraps the former table of contents and showcases larger horizontal photos, larger type and more white space.

“We felt like it needed an update and a fresh, new look,” says Natalie White, Kimpton’s vice president of customer marketing and relationships. “We tested the new look versus the old one, and the open-rate increased significantly.”

In addition, Kimpton now offers mobile versions of its five newsletters (the monthly newsletter plus topical newsletters on food and wine, health and hedonism, one dedicated to women and one for the gay and lesbian community) to new loyalty program members, an option that has been well received, White says.

“We saw through surveys that people wanted this. Everyone’s got a mobile device—it’s a world of PDAs,” she notes. Soon, the company will begin offering the option to all Kimpton InTouch members, White adds.

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