World’s largest hotel group enhances one-to-one email marketing and reduces costs by integrating StrongMail with Unica and Teradata

London, November 17, 2010 – StrongMail, a leading provider of online marketing solutions for email and social media, today announced that IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) [LON: IHG, NYSE: IHG (ADRs)], has begun transitioning from near-time to real-time email marketing by integrating StrongMail with Unica and Teradata.  IHG replaced two existing email service providers with StrongMail to enable seamless integration with its customer data, which is necessary to achieve its goal of delivering true one-to-one messages in real time. 
   
IHG is the world's largest hotel group by number of rooms. Each year, more than 130 million guests visit one of the more than 4,500 hotels and 650,000 guest rooms that IHG franchises, leases, manages or owns in 100 countries around the world.  In order to better serve its 52 million Priority Club rewards members and grow its business, IHG launched a strategic initiative to transition into a real-time marketing organisation.

"We need to evolve because our customers are behaving and communicating in real-time, but IHG was still behaving in batch," said Lincoln Barrett, Vice President Guest Marketing at IHG. “As we progress towards a real-time marketing organisation, we can now offer our guests a better end-to-end experience, ultimately building customer loyalty and retention and increasing customer lifetime value.”

By seamlessly integrating StrongMail with Unica Interact, Unica Campaign and its Teradata data warehouse, IHG can now generate and deliver highly customised, one-to-one messages to their customer base in less than two seconds.

"In addition to providing us with real-time access to response data, StrongMail’s platform offers us more integration capabilities to segment our lists based on individual customer preferences, behaviors and events," said Barrett.  “Using StrongMail and Unica together has unlocked a lot of opportunity for us and our click-through rates have increased significantly."

IHG also switched to StrongMail for its unique hybrid deployment model. By taking advantage of StrongMail's Managed Hosting Services, IHG receives the cost and integration benefits of owning an in-house email system without having to worry about the hassle and process inefficiencies of running everything through their IT department.

IHG is also leveraging StrongMail’s Strategic Services team to optimise their marketing and transactional email programs to maximize revenue. StrongMail's experts created a singular look for all of IHG's email communications, which paired with its new one-to-one messaging capabilities has significantly increased the performance of their campaigns. 

“IHG's commitment to its real-time marketing initiative is a great example of what smart businesses can achieve when they have the technology to effectively leverage customer data, and the right strategy to put it to good use,” said Sam Cece, CEO of StrongMail. “StrongMail's unparalleled integration capabilities and multiple deployment options make it possible for Fortune 2000 organisations to realise the benefits of true, one-to-one marketing.”