Q: Can one booking reminder email be enough to get past guests back to your resort?

About the same time each year, like clockwork, many resort guests will once again get around to making plans and booking their vacation. But what if they don’t? What if a year passes and they still haven’t made the decision to come back? You may have heard of a “booking reminder” email to get past guests to return. We set out this week to find out if it actually works.

The Setup
Other platforms may vary in the way they handle this, but whenever a guest makes a reservation with one of our clients, our system populates an “anniversary date” field with a date exactly one year in the future. Then, the daily booking reminder system works off of this date and automatically delivers a simple “come back” email to anyone that matches two criteria:

• Their booking anniversary is that day
• They are not already on the books

So, if you booked a vacation on September 5, 2011 and hadn’t booked another vacation by September 5, 2012, you would receive one of these booking reminder emails.

For each of our clients that ran a season-long booking reminder campaign last year, we took all of their guests who hadn’t yet booked another vacation by their anniversary date and compared return rates between the group that DID get a booking reminder and those that DID NOT. Here’s what we found:

• Average return-booking rate of those that DID receive a reminder: 4.22%
• Average return-booking rate of those that DID NOT receive a reminder: 3.92%
• Difference between recipients and non-recipients: +7.79%
• Net increase in bookings per 1000 emails sent: 3.05
• Average booking amount for resorts in sample: $857.73
• Revenue per 1000 reminder emails sent: $2,616.07

Every booking reminder email that was sent last year generated an average of $2.62 in additional booking revenue (this amount does not include ancillary spending on dining, rentals, shopping, etc.)

Why This Matters
It’s easy to look at 3 extra bookings per 1000 emails and not realize how well such a simple message is performing. The fact that one email sent automatically generates an additional $2.62 each time it goes out is impressive when you consider the only work required is to setup the campaign in the first place.

This is one example of ways to get guests to come back. It’s simple, automated, and, as far as we can tell, works surprisingly well. It doesn’t cover all the bases, but looks like a nice addition to a database marketing lineup.

Tip of The Iceberg
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