Business Overview

Accor, the European leader and a major global hotel group operating in nearly 100 countries with 170,000 employees, wanted to increase their brand image in Asia Pacific and acquire a new database of potential guests for their hotels in the Asia Pacific region.

The Challenge

How do we improve our brand awareness throughout the Asia Pacific region, promoting our numerous hotels and at the same time significantly increase the size of our email database for email marketing purposes?

Inetasia Solution

Inetasia developed an attractive and fun competition utilizing Inetasia’s email marketing solution, Site Manager Direct to announce the competition to the current Accor email database. As a part of the competition InetAsia created an easy to use website enabling visitors to enter and refer their friends to win hotel packages in Asia Pacific and a grand prize in Paris.

Inetasia used its extensive Internet marketing expertise and syndicated a number of press releases and articles related to the competition over the web to generate traffic and interest for the competition. Inetasia also used its creative expertise and designed a number of banners to promote the competition through various websites.

Results

• 105,000 member increase in email database
• 9,000 individuals entered competition
• 24,000 unique visitors to website
• 37% conversion rate
• Average time on website of 7 minutes
• 900 sources of traffic to website

Conclusion

A properly executed viral marketing campaign is an effective way to increase brand awareness, presence on the Internet and expand existing membership. The Asia Pacific region attracts a large number of tourists from all over the world, and therefore companies within the hospitality industry need to provide innovative solutions to separate themselves from the competition. “The Accor Experience” results were impressive. The multiple eDM’s (electronic direct mail) had an average open rate of 25%. Of the 24,000 visitors to The Accor Experience, 37% signed up for the competition, highlighting the intuitive design and excellent usability of the website. And over a 3 month period from November to February, over 105,000 new e-mail addresses were collected for the Accor database.