Nigel Pocklington

About Nigel Pocklington

For new markets, when’s best to begin your email campaigns?

At Hotels.com, email plays a key role in our marketing mix. We have localised websites around the world and run email programmes in 85 countries in 35 different languages utilising newsletters as well as triggered and transactional initiatives.

Many of these markets can be classed as mature but, for emerging markets, one of the first questions to address is when to introduce email into the frame?

What criteria should be used to judge the optimum moment to begin and how should the programme develop?

How big data influences design at Hotels.com

You don’t need me to tell you that big data is big news. It’s one of most talked about topics of recent years, as marketers worldwide battle to make sense of all the data generated across their business. 

Insight gathered from big data is enabling businesses to focus their investments in everything from sales and marketing, to customer service and research and development, more intelligently.

At Hotels.com, we’re using data from across our business, website and apps to better understand what our customers want from us and how we can improve the experience that we deliver to them.

So, how are we doing this? We started by making sure that we were tracking all data from across our business, be it analytics from our website, booking information from our apps, or customer enquiries in our contact centre.

By improving our understanding of how our customers interact with us and what they’re looking for, we have been able to optimise the design of our website and apps to ensure that we are consistently delivering an excellent experience.

How to foster loyalty with great customer service

Despite initial concerns, research shows that the exponential growth in online shopping has not killed off brand loyalty. In fact, good customer service is still one of the main driving factors for consumer spend.

With the cost of acquisition of new customers relatively high through search engines, affiliates or other channels, it pays to keep hold of the customers that you already have on your side, to encourage repeat visits, building for the lifetime value of that customer rather than taking a quick win.

You cannot buy loyalty in the true sense of the word, it has to be earned, but the good news is that there are a number of ways that you can foster it: