• by Lynn Russo , June 27, 2006

Haiku e-mails help position boutique brand

If you're a mobile professional who lives out of a suitcase and thinks every hotel room looks alike, the Hotel Indigo is for you. This boutique takes a unique approach to interior design, with hardwood floors and backwards script on the walls. The decor in each of the four locations (two in Chicago and one each in Atlanta and Houston) is refreshed quarterly to keep visitors excited and engaged. There's a coffee bar and a snack bar, but no restaurant.

Even the monthly postcard-style e-mail campaigns that promote this boutique brand of the InterContinental Hotels chain, which includes Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, are unique. Rather than the typical this-is-our-best-offer-and-it-will-self-destruct-in-10-days-if-you-don't-respond-now pitch that consumers have grown to expect, InterContinental uses gentle haikus to convey a softer message.

Each e-card features a single haiku--a three-line Japanese poem comprised of a series of five, seven, and five syllables--with emotional language such as: "It's been a while since we last shared a moment...now two to tempt you." InterContinental has so much faith in the campaign, it seems, that it doesn't even ask for the sale.

Though quirky, the strategy appears to be working: The Hotel Indigo brand reports a 58 percent e-mail open rate, 36 percent click-through rate, and a 10 percent pass-along rate to date.

"From an internal point of view, I'm continuously challenged to try and do new things," says Gareth Morgan, global e-mail marketing manager of InterContinental Hotels. The haiku approach goes against the best e-mail marketing practices of the chain's leading brands, but, Morgan says, "Our Hotel Indigo audience is the type of consumer who goes to 'Tarzhay,' not Target, and drives an entry-level luxury car like a Mercedes. They're consumers who are 'trading up' to higher levels of quality and taste...but still seeking value," Morgan says, adding, "Part of what the brand stands for is inclusive rather than exclusive."

Getting to know you

Hotel Indigo collected e-mail addresses and then sat on them for 10 months while developing its strategy. This left the team in a quandary.

"We had this challenge," Morgan recalls. "How can we reconnect with this audience, yet launch our campaign in a way that acknowledges that we should have been marketing to them before, but at the same time that it was worth the wait?"

The campaign had three objectives: to reconnect with the list, start a relationship with people on the list, and reconfirm the viability of the haiku approach.

"For the other [InterContinental] brands, I continuously deal with scope creep," says Morgan. "We've all done newsletters that start with a specific vertical length and keep increasing. With haiku, you can't have scope creep. It's simply, What word would you like to replace? You have to do a lot more thinking about the wording you choose. Every word becomes important," he explains. A logo bar across the bottom underscores all the InterContinental brands, including Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn, and Candlewood Suites.

"We accept the challenge to be different," says Morgan. "A lot of what we're doing with the Hotel Indigo campaign goes against the fundamental approach. Everybody talks about unsubscribe and delivery rates, but the delta between all of those is engagement."

The chain compared people who had received six mailings from its other brands against those who received six mailings from Indigo. With the other brands, response rates dropped off by 34 percent by the sixth delivery. With Indigo, they only declined 10 percent. "Those first transactions are very important," says Morgan. "They're our greatest opportunity to connect with people. And the strategy we've taken so far has definitely stretched out the engagement."