Relevance?

R

As a past guest and/or meeting planner of Millennium Hotels and Resorts we are pleased to share these occasional special offers. If you no longer wish to receive email communications from us, please click the unsubscribe link. Please note that this broadcast is sent from an address which is not monitored. If you have questions about the offer, please contact us directly. Our hotel contact details may be found in this email offer above or you may visit www.millenniumhotels.com.

This is the footer of an email sent by a hotel I stayed at sometime in the past. I thought it was a year ago, but I checked with the groom of that particular wedding party and it seems it was 2 years ago. My, how time flies.
But where is the relevancy to me? I went to the hotel as a part of a block carved out for the above mentioned wedding. It was two years ago and I’ve not been back to that city since. I can understand that there are long periods of time between visits to a city. And I can understand that sending emails to people who haven’t stayed in your hotel in 2 years might make good marketing sense.
What I can’t understand is why this hotel thought that this particular deal might be of interest to me. Remember, I visited said hotel as part of a wedding party. The hotel knows I came just for a wedding. So a good “come back” message might be to visit my friends and take them out for dinner to remember their wedding day. Or something slightly relevant to what I did the last time I was in that city.
What is clearly irrelevant is an offer to come visit the hotel and get tickets to see the local baseball team play. Wait? What? Baseball? Baseball in a city 2 timezones east of me? Really? They know where I live, they could have even made it slightly more relevant by offering me tickets to see one of my local teams play their team. Sadly, no, they didn’t even do that.
Email recipients want mail that speaks to them. That brings them an offer or an idea or information. That makes their lives easier or better or happier. What they don’t need is irrelevant junk clogging up their inbox.
What senders want is email that persuades recipients to buy something.
In this case Millennium hotels gave me fodder for a blog post, which does make today a little easier. But I also unsubscribed from future emails because it’s unlikely I’m going to return to that particular city any time soon. And if I do I’ll probably stay with friends and not in a hotel.
What did Millennium hotels get out of this? Not a whole lot, other than a lot of unsubscribes and probably a number of complaints. Oh and a blog post talking about how badly they ran this particular marketing campaign.
 

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2 comments

Leave a Reply to Martijn Grooten

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  • But if the email is too targeted, most people tend to find it creepy. “Hey, we know you stayed here two years ago for a wedding. As your local baseball team will be playing here next month, you might be interested in our latest offer…” Imagine you _are_ following the baseball team. It does sound like they store an awful lot about you.
    Now you (and I) know that this makes sense and that they only keep a few basic details, but even with that knowledge it does sound like this would be a little _too_ targeted.

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