The Email Strategy That Turned First-Time Customers into Repeat Visitors at Quality Wellnessresorts

Tim Glomb: Who would not love to spend the day at a quality wellness resort? Spas, saunas, it's good for the body and the mind, right? I recently had that opportunity to visit Quality Wellnessresorts in the Netherlands and do just that. But you could imagine in a pandemic, they were not doing so well. All industries were affected by the pandemic, and many came out the other side and tried to discount or offer win backs to try and get people back into their facilities. Well, the Quality Wellnessresorts doubled down on the email channel and truly brought their audience back to life, and it's a growth story. Check it out right here, and I'm afraid we couldn't really share much inside the resort because it is 100% nude, hence me clothed in the introduction. But it's a great story, so I hope you enjoy it. Ronald, Tessa, I can't thank you enough for having me here in the Therme Berenson Quality Wellnessresort Spa. It is beautiful. I've got waterfalls in the background. I can hear them, they're soothing. Thanks for having me.

Tessa: You're welcome. It's nice to have you here. It's amazing, right, this place?

Tim Glomb: It is so amazing. I wish everyone could be here with us, but let's jump in. Why don't you tell us your roles here at the Quality Wellnessresort. Tessa?

Tessa: I'm the email marketer here.

Tim Glomb: Excellent. Ronald?

Ronald: I'm responsible for all digital channels, the data driven marketing mindset, analytics, et cetera.

Tim Glomb: Great. So I have the marketing team here. I love it. Let's dig in. But first, for everyone who doesn't know what Quality Wellnessresorts is here in the Benelux region, what do you serve? What do you do? What is your business?

Tessa: Well, today we're here at Therme Berenson, and this is one of the four wellness resorts in the Netherlands. We try to give our guests oasis of peace. And with saunas and pools, we help them escape from the daily chaos and stress. And here they can relax again.

Tim Glomb: I love it. I saw no cell phones allowed. I love, that's relaxing. And you're an ultra premium service, right? I mean, you want your guests to have the ultimate experience, right? Tell me a little bit about that.

Tessa: Yeah, definitely. We're all about positive energy and we want to share that positive energy with our guests and also with our employees.

Tim Glomb: I love it. I love it. I can feel it already. Well, let's talk a little bit about how Intelligent is helping you because you use the Intelligent platform to connect with your consumers via email. Do you want to tell me a little bit about the problems we're solving for you when you're connecting, building relationships with your customers in the email channel?

Ronald: Yes. We have a lot of guests and with a lot of customers in our database, and we want to bring them an ultimate relaxation feeling. We want to exceed expectation of the customers, and that's only possible with personalized communication in our fishing with automated communication. Because you can imagine if we have, I think 500, 000 email addresses, it's not possible to ride them personalized. So Intelligent is the main tooling to stay in contact with potential guests, with guests, with our fans. So it's a very useful tooling for us.

Tim Glomb: I love that you talk about personalization, We're going to get into that in a little bit. But also Intelligent kind of is in the center, you have a lot of different technologies stitching in. You've got your CDP, you've got data lakes, you've got your booking platform. Yes. So all of those can kind of trigger, as you said, the right automation's, the right journeys, correct.

Ronald: Yes, correct. Because people said sometimes, Oh, we have to do something with marketing automation or personalization. But I think the first step is to getting the basic rights. So to connect all the channels to integrate and BI tooling for, analyze and monitor the systems to integrate and customer data platform for a 360 degrees view and put all the data to Intelligent for the right marketing automation pace.

Tim Glomb: It makes total sense. It makes total sense. Now being a service based business where people are in your actual business in spas and pools, the pandemic had to hit hard. And we talked a little bit about this off camera, but that also gave you an opportunity to level set to almost change your business. Can you talk about how the pandemic allowed you to look into data, understand high value customers really come out on the other side of an even stronger brand?

Ronald: Yes, of course I can. Well, I need to take you a few years back because before the Corona pandemic, it was very busy here. Our main focus was on the quantity of visitors. And we didn't look to how many the failure of the customers for how many days spent during a visit. And we saw people didn't like that. We wanted nine plus experience for customers. But if it's too busy, customers don't like it. So during the Corona Pandemic, we used such opportunity to make kind of reset for our strategy. So we say, Oh, we do. We have maximum number of visitor each day, but we want very high variable customers in our resorts.

Tim Glomb: So Got it. This is a shift from quantity, a lot of people to quality and really premium product. Yes. I love that. I love that. Let's talk about a little bit of your onboarding, because any business, you have to turn unknown consumers into known contacts. That is stage one of relationship marketing. And when you bring them in, you have to put them onto a journey, a journey that they can take on their own. Can you tell me a little bit about what your journeys look like when someone joins your database? What can they expect to get over the email channel? How are you communicating with them?

Tessa: When guests made a booking, the relaxation already begins. It starts with an email, five days upon our arrival, and it shows them all the necessary information about our resorts. And we even added a package list so they don't have to think about anything anymore. And they can just already begin to relax.

Tim Glomb: Just make it very simple for them to kind of get in.

Tessa: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Glomb: But then you extend the journey even after my booking. So I've been here and I've had a great day, I go home. Can you tell me what a journey could look like there via email?

Tessa: Yeah, definitely. Well, we want to stay in contact with the whole customer journey. And also when they ended their visit at us, we want to extend that relaxed feeling in our resorts. So the first we build a one timer flow and the first emails, we try to extend that relaxed feeling.

Tim Glomb: So to remind me of the great experience I just had, maybe having

Tessa: That at home. So we added some meditation, some relaxation tips, even a relax challenge for you to do at home.

Tim Glomb: I'm up for that.

Tessa: I will send it to you. And then in the middle of the one timer flow, we sent all information about the resorts, things they haven't seen when they visit the first time. So the hidden gems of our resorts.

Tim Glomb: That makes sense. Because look, I mean this is a giant facility. There's no way I can really experience the entire thing. You're going to remind me of the things I didn't have, which kind of gets me back. So now let's talk about, you mentioned one timers. So these are people on average, how many people come and only come once per year?

Ronald: Well, once a year. I think in a day we have around 600, 700 people each year short and on average. And that's also we found in our data, the average visit in a year is 1. 6, but 74% of our database will visit or one of our resorts once a year. So that we call it one timers. So we said it's very kind of low hanging fruits. If we are 1% of that, people will come a second time. We do not have enough space. So that's the reason we focus on this kind of campaigns.

Tessa: So we designed this whole one timer flow for periods of six months just to try to show them more of our resorts and getting that second face visit in our resorts.

Tim Glomb: That makes total sense. And I'm assuming email is a channel that's actually driving revenue, It's converting these one timers back in?

Ronald: In. Yes, yes. But we also do it in other channels. We also fire first party data matching with sending the same message, for example, via social media advertising of display advertising. So it's combination of different channels with the same messages.

Tim Glomb: So this is a true cross- channel experience. I love it. I love it. But email is the heart and the backbone of what you do. Yes, yes. And you've had explosive growth. I understand. Can you tell me a little bit about this campaign that you created that was an acquisition tool that kind of let people virtually go through and it had explosive growth into your database. Can you tell me a little bit about this?

Ronald: Yes, of course cause it's one of my favorite campaigns we did. It's 360 degrees campaign and we started with a big social media campaign and then people came into a 360 degrees environment. And if this environment is online and they can have a look around to the whole environments and they need to find an object, that was the task for them, they need to find an object. So it was a kind of gamification. And if they click on the object who said, Well, great job. And they directly got discount codes for our resorts. But then it's a leads and we are working on lead generation. So I think the weeks after the submission, we are sending them a couple of emails about our resorts to transform them from a leads to our sister and to a fan of course, later on by the other channels.

Tessa: We really added an extra feature by creating this flow and showing them all about the resorts and all the fantastic things we have to offer.

Tim Glomb: Well, this is great. Gamification. You use multiple channels. I know you use social to promote it. Net new customers come in, they do a scavenger hunt, let's say in this virtual video kind of world.

Tessa: They're looking for the oil lamp oil.

Tim Glomb: Look for the oil lamp, the hidden gem. That's excellent. But you literally, you increased your database in four months, like exponentially. Was it a huge percentage?

Tessa: I'd love to think 48%.

Tim Glomb: 48% growth.

Ronald: Yes, and of course we have seen most of that leads in the resorts later on. So that was the goal.

Tim Glomb: So there you go. Gamification. It actually drives net new. You turn them unknown into known. You put a good journey in place with the email channel and you can turn them into customers. Yes. That's huge. Okay. Well clearly you know what you're doing when it comes to email marketing. It's great that you're using Intelligent, It's great that you're creating these journeys, personalization, et cetera. How about loyalty, right? Cause retention and creating loyalty with your customers. True brand ambassadors is the fourth and final stage of relationship marketing. You have to have, It repeats the cycle. What is Quality Wellnessresorts doing to foster that loyalty with your customers right now?

Tessa: Well, we designed loyalty program for our guests. We want them to feel like a VIP, a true VIP when they enter the doors. We want our staff to know who they are and who we want to give them a warm welcome. And we made a loyalty program with four levels. And the first level is if you only visit or resort once a year. And the fourth level, the last level is if you visit our resort three times or more a year. So that's our true VIPs, our true loyalty guests.

Tim Glomb: Got it. And all this information through your CDP, your data lakes and Intelligent, you can now create different journeys for the different value of customers, right?

Tessa: Yes. And we also added something extra for our loyalty we added some personal benefits. Yes that's interesting.

Tim Glomb: Let's sell me on these. Tell me why should come back and back and back?

Tessa: Yeah. So all the guests who only visit our resorts once they get a personal benefit, like a discount for a resort to visit again. But in the fourth level, we try to offer them a voucher for a free cup of coffee because they want to feel welcomed and they want to feel known. So we add a little bit extra for them.

Tim Glomb: This is great. This is all anchored in personalization. The more you can make a person feel welcomed, feel like they're being recognized by you, you're going to do better with your brand. Now, let me guess, you have 50 people in your marketing department to pull all this off for your resort?

Tessa: We wish.

Tim Glomb: What does your marketing department look like?

Ronald: We think we have eight people in a marketing team, but it's also offline. And I think online our team is three, four people. But of course we have some partners who work together. But yeah, I think the online team is four people.

Tim Glomb: So I'm assuming this Intelligent platform makes it fairly easy for three or four people to get into the digital end of marketing and bring these great journeys to life and drive that revenue.

Ronald: Yes, of course. Very helpful for us.

Tim Glomb: All right, great. Well, look, you talked about gamification. You're bringing people into your fold, you're building your database, and I believe you got a 50% open rate on that gamification. Long trip. This is awesome. What is next for Quality Wellnessresorts in the digital space?

Ronald: Well, I think we have a lot of ideas and plans to continue, but first of all, we are doing the right things because we are seeing this in our data. So we want to continue what we are doing. We want to make more fans. And of course we want to use more innovative techniques like artificial intelligence, like predictive modeling to have more and more relevant communication. Cause I, and we think we have to send the right message at the right time in the right moment. And that's relevant and that's makes the ultimate guest experience.

Tim Glomb: I love this. You're absolutely right. You're doing it well. I love your spa resort. I know you're going to open soon and I understand that it is a clothing optional resort. Correct? Okay, so our cameras can't stay here for long and I am actually going to get in there. So I am going to bid everyone. Farewell, this has been a great session. Thank you for having me again. Can I come back and see you soon?

Ronald: Yes.

Tessa: Definitely.

Tim Glomb: I want to be level four on your loyalty program. So I will fly from America multiple times this year to get to that level.

Ronald: Enjoy your stay here.

Tessa: You're welcome. Enjoy.

Tim Glomb: Thanks again everyone at home, I encourage you. Check out Quality Wellnessresorts, check them out on our website, but also come check at the spa. Have some fun.