Oct 19 , 2004
Among the business tools emerging nowadays is e-mail marketing. Compared to other marketing tools (such as brochures or advertising), e-mail marketing promises more efficiency in terms of cost and the time it takes to reach a target audience.

Marketing is a 'compulsory' activity in every industry. A recent finding by The Hospitality Research Group of PKF Consulting states that hotel owners and managers have considered marketing expenditures as an investment to be made rather than an expense to be cut, even in a period of declining revenues. This indicates the importance of marketing's role in a hotel's very existence.

Other marketing activities include telemarketing, radio, print ads (brochure/magazine) TV or billboards. Some of these marketing methods require extensive work and high budgets -- for instance, print ads/brochures -- not to mention the cost of distribution and time constraints; the cost of having a high quality brochure already requires extra attention. However, Internet technology offers many appealing solutions to this challenge, and one of them is e-mail marketing, enabling hotels to distribute text, pictures and even video, all providing an even more effective sales effort.

E-mail marketing indeed helps in many aspects, such as:

Cost Efficiency . Clearly, distributing information with one click will save more than an activity such as sending brochures, posting mails or making phone calls. Hotels can easily distribute all their promotional and informational material, as frequent as they wish through e-mail, and at less cost. Imagine the cost if a hotel has to print a different brochure four times a month, just for a special weekly promotion.

Fast Distribution . E-mail marketing reaches potential customers relatively quicker than other marketing activities. Hotels can send e-mails to a large number of people right after a new package is made up. This faster distribution works together with cost efficiency. Further, telemarketing does not have time constraints in distributing information; however, it can only reach one potential customer at a time, which means it is not costly but time- consuming. Easy to Measure Performance Evaluation of a marketing activity is important, as the goal is set in the first place. E-mail marketing has several parameters that indicate performance, such as the number of responses made by a campaign, the inquiries responding to a particular announcement, as well as the actual number of people who print out the e-mail and bring it to the front desk.

Increased Loyalty . E-mail marketing helps hotels build customer loyalty and awareness. When a hotel designs e-mail marketing as a continuous campaign, it actually builds customer awareness and brand loyalty. Continuous e-mail marketing can contain several interesting subjects about a hotel (new packages, news, even daily promotions) or perhaps even tourist destinations, like nearby hotels, which can themselves often become potential customers, if not informed too late.

Pelican System incorporates e-mail distribution feature integrated in the on-line reservation system that helps hotels to send e-mail to thousands of clients in ONE CLICK. The features allow hotel to send e-mail about specific news information/packages to selected groups of clients in order to target to the right audience. Database structure design in the Pelican system allow hotel to manage e-mail distribution based on the client segmentation including Internet user, Travel agents and corporate clients.

In addition to the above, Pelican's e-mail distribution features, enabling a hotel to send e-mails directly to reservation personnel at the travel agent's counter sales department. This feature allows a hotel to deliver information directly to the correct selling person, at a fraction of the time, compared to manual distribution.