Qhotels takes off with Rocketseed

The Client: Qhotels

QHotels was founded in March 2003 by a team of experienced hoteliers in collaboration with Alchemy Partners. Today, QHotels offer a prestigious selection of 22 highly individual properties throughout the UK welcoming leisure, conference and corporate guests. The company prides itself on investing in elegant, beautiful and sometimes historic hotels and their 2500 staff. In keeping with the company ethos of quality and innovation, QHotels selected and began using Rocketseed in October 2006 to brand all the company’s outgoing emails. As well as pushing the brand of the young company and driving traffic to the website, emails also feature promotional links to special offers and news items, such as hotel refurbishments.

Greater Interactivity Drives Above-Average Click-Through Rates and Enables Intelligent Marketing

Liz Howe, Director of Marketing for QHotels offers her opinions:

I had seen branded email before, but nothing as interactive or with the same level of reporting and analysis that Rocketseed provides.” The beauty of Rocketseed is that it enables people to go from an email directly to information of interest to them. From our branded emails, customers can click straight through to any of the different areas of our website, or can click on links to specific promotions or special offers. As a result, we have been consistently getting click-through rates of over 10% compared to average industry rates of around 3%. The level of insight and detail available through Rocketseed reporting is also generating a raft of new marketing opportunities. We are now looking at how we can hone our marketing activities to tailor the communications our customers receive from us to their specific needs and interests.

In addition to being able to see the specific interest areas of an individual customer, QHotels are using these insights to ensure that key messages and promotions now feature prominently in those sections of the email that customers most frequently click on.

Simplifying event administration

Another Rocketseed success at QHotels revolved around an internal Senior Management Conference, for which a branded email was issued to 130 people internally, containing links for accessing further information on the event and additional links to either accept or decline the invitation.

Using Rocketseed made the whole process much quicker and easier. It was simple to put together the email template and distribute it to our senior managers in 23 locations. All the invitees had to do was click on one of two links for us to know almost immediately who could or could not attend – all the details were obtained in a report generated by Rocketseed. We got a 100% response within days, without having to send out a single reminder, and we also got lots of positive feedback from our managers, who found the email invitation really distinctive and innovative.

- Liz Howe, Director of Marketing for QHotels

Driving growth and increasing margins

Operating in a highly-competitive, but fast-growing industry, QHotels has invested significantly in e-commerce and is keen to increase the number of bookings made via the company’s website in order to further drive growth and increase margins.

Today some of our online bookings come through web-sites of third parties, to whom we pay a commission. Within the next couple of years, we aim to take 20% of all our hotel accommodation bookings directly via our own website and Rocketseed will be a key vehicle to help us achieve this goal, thereby contributing directly to our growth and profitability.

- Liz Howe, Director of Marketing for QHotels