Terme di Saturnia uses email to increase bookings

Located in the heart of Maremma Toscana, Terme di Saturnia Spa & Golf Resort is one of the most famous wellness facilities in the world. In addition to its thousand-year-old thermal spring, with waters reaching 37°C, Terme di Saturnia includes a 5-star hotel, the Aqualuce Restaurant and the gourmet Acquacotta with 1 Michelin Star, an award-winning spa as well as an 18-hole golf course. Terme di Saturnia Spa & Golf Resort is a member of The Leading Hotels of the World.

Goals

For 2017, Terme di Saturnia set itself the goal of increasing its rate of conversions into bookings, using the best times of the year, celebrations and holidays to encourage customers to stays at the establishment. Using email as the channel to drive the growth in conversions, Terme di Saturnia aimed to:

• Boost loyalty among existing customers
• Recover customers who only stayed once by offering an incentive (rewarding)
• Promote brand image and the range of services offered to prospective customers.

Prior to creating the email campaign, three key activities were established:

1. Analyzing customer behavior during the last holidays and occasions
2. Determining the cluster of customers to engage in the Email Marketing strategy
3. Converting the cluster into a mailing list.

Strategy

Terme di Saturnia has developed – and continues to perfect – a Business Intelligence software to analyze and manage user information. With MailUp’s APIs, Terme di Saturnia has been able to integrate the software into the mailing platform, to enable automatic sharing of information between the two systems and ensure the email campaigns have a high level of profiling.
After analyzing the purchase history, Terme di Saturnia determined that Valentine’s Day was an occasion with high potential for conversion. In addition to highlighting the customer trend of giving their partners an overnight stay for February 14, the Business Intelligence system suggested that between 2014 and 2016, a large percentage of users returned to the facility in the days around February 14.
Thanks to the integration with MailUp, Terme di Saturnia has been able to easily convert the cluster of 8,347 customers extracted from the software into a ready-to-use mailing list, including:

1. Customers who had stayed overnight in the weeks around February 14 in previous years
2. All active customers since 2016
3. Customers interested in receiving offers and promotions.

The company then produced two offers valid for the same period, included within a single email.
In terms of cross-selling, the two offers included Spa and Restaurant services in addition to the overnight stay. The campaign template was made up of the following:

• A central header with appealing photos, dynamic and differentiated dates based on the users and source of origin.
• Diversified text based on data of interest for Saturnia Terme users
• An emotional image that is appealing to women (70% of brand users are women)
• Call to action directing to the site’s booking engine.

Once the campaign was launched with MailUp, Terme di Saturnia could track its performance in real time thanks to statistical reports, analyzing the opening rates and clicks on the call and action. Tracking the recipient’s actions made it possible to monitor the campaign’s conversion rates.