Over the past few months, the Marcus Hotels & Resorts IT department has been hard at work developing a brand new Email Campaign System! We’re excited to finally share this exciting system with you!
A little background
The Email Campaign System (from hereon, “ECS”) is built on the new MarcusApps 2.0 platform (more to come on that later). We wanted to give our properties (hotels, restaurants, spas and theatres) an all-new way to manage the content on their various digital outlets (web sites, signage, emails, and so forth). We’ll be announcing more about MarcusApps and more apps that you currently use today will be completely rebuilt from the ground up to give you the best possible experience in managing your information.
More about ECS
So what exactly does ECS do? It’s a powerful tool to allow our hotels (restaurants to come soon) to send targeted emails to their guests. What’s the benefit of “targeted emails” versus regular email blasts? It’s pretty simple: targeted emails allow you to send your email to a very specific group of people which gives you the greatest ROI. So far we’eve added just a few criteria to create your lists, but we’ll add more criteria and options for you to choose from. Let’s take a look at how some of this works.
Subscriber Lists
The subscriber lists the people (guests) whom either match your criteria for the email and/or have specifically signed up through your web site. You can select things such as “Include guests that stayed in December 2011″ or “Include guests that stayed and used the following rate code(s).” These are the things that allow you to create a very specific list to go to the people who may be most interested in what you have to say. You can reuse the lists you create over and over again, as well as make copies of them to tweak them a bit. Note that you will never be able to see exactly who is on your list, but you will get an estimated count of how many people the email will go to.
Templates
The templates are the “pretty” part of your email. We’ve worked to make it as easy as possible to make your emails look great! You can use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, or edit the plain HTML if you’d like. The images for your emails will be stored within your MarcusApps account and can be used across multiple emails (and soon, other applications). You’ll also be able to keep your templates in “folders” to help organize. You may choose to make a “Holidays” template folder, or something along those lines. Like subscriber lists, you can make copies and then rename and tweak it however you’d like.
Campaigns
Now for the icing on the cake. The campaigns are what tie the subscriber list with the template to create your actual email to be sent out. Creating a campaign is pretty simple, and has the following steps:
- Create your subscriber list
- Create your template
- Create your campaign
- Give it a name and description (like anything else)
- Select your list
- Select your template
- Select a launch date/time (by default it’s ‘now’) but you can schedule it in the future
Before you can launch your campaign, you must send a test message. You can send a test message to as many people as you’d like and as many times as you’d like. If you make any changes to the list or template that’s associated with the campaign, you must resend a test message before the system will allow you to launch it.
So your campaign is ready for launch. Go ahead and press that pretty blue button on the launch screen. Your campaign will now be moved to “pending campaigns” for up to 10 minutes. We have a nifty little timer for you to know when your email will be launched, and you can cancel it any time up to that time. When you cancel it, you can go back and edit it or do whatever you’d like and then test and re-launch the campaign.
The reporting tools for campaigns will allow you to see exactly how many people opened your email, forwarded it and so forth. You can even see how many people clicked on each link in the email. Pretty powerful stuff. We’ll be adding more detailed reports for you as time goes on too.
So that’s a little about the new Email Campaign System. We’re really excited to start sharing this with you and hope you enjoy it! We’re excited to see what comes out of the system! We’ll also be adding many more features to it as time goes on, and we’ll be sure to let you know about those!
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