With recent events forcing properties to reconsider their marketing tactics, many are faced with the challenge of finding more efficient ways to maintain their presence in the market and increase visitation. All while being strapped with a tighter budget. Digital media offers a highly targeted and efficient way to reach your guests, making it a critical piece of the overall marketing plan. One of the most important factors in having the ability to implement that plan is an accurate and robust email database.
Uses for email addresses
Most properties have been utilizing email in some format for monthly newsletters, entertainment announcements and promotions reminders for over a decade. With the advancements in app technology and PURLs (Personal URL), sophisticated operators have even utilized email to communicate regular database offers to guests. There really is no argument that having email addresses presents a clear value to your casino marketing team.
Where some are missing an opportunity is the additional uses for email addresses beyond traditional newsletters and general information. For instance, IP targeting should be a standard part of any digital marketing strategy. It allows properties to serve digital ads to guests based on their email address. The lower cost of digital, combined with the fact that it only goes to your guests, make this an efficient use of your budget.
What about social media?
Using email to create an audience or lookalike audience to serve Facebook Ads is an engaging way to target social media users.
What about triggered emails?
Sending visitors of your entertainment page a list of upcoming concerts, visitors of your hotel or reservations page an incentive to book, and visitors to your restaurant or golf pages a link to book reservations and tee times are all effective tactics to increase visitation.
One of the keys to triggered emails is identifying who is visiting your site, which has been a challenge in the past. The good news is that there are emerging technologies, like Catalyst Capture TM, that can help with that.
Catalyst Capture TM is an automated process that can capture the information of approximately 35% of your anonymous website visitors. With minimal setup, website visitors are checked against a national opt-in database and any identified records are then checked against yours, all in real time. The user’s name, email and physical address for any new records are automatically added to your CRM. There is no waiting for a list upload and no manual process to bog down your database team.
Growing your email list
Continually growing your database has its challenges and can be somewhat inefficient due to timeliness or expense:
- Growing your email list organically is a slow process that only happens over time. The average opt-in rate cited by Sumo is 1.95 percent. So, for every 100 people that visit your site, you will average about two new email subscribers.
- Purchasing an email list from a third party can be expensive. According to Cost Owl, a purchased consumer list can cost up to $80 CPM and you generally do not get the actual email addresses.
- Email appends can help capture information for a portion of those already in your database, but there is an expense associated with the process and it doesn’t offer instantaneous results.
Catalyst Capture TM offers a cost-effective, simple, automated and immediate path to growing your database and increasing your ability to target visitors who have already shown interest in your business.
For more information or to see how it works, visit
https://teamcatalyst.com/catalyst-capture/
While you are probably already utilizing your email list and see value in growing it, also consider how to get more out it. Tighter budgets have forced us all to look at how to do more without spending more. Using the tools you have is a start, growing them will only make you more effective.
