Head of Marketing stated “we drop too many opportunities. I know there
would be much more to do in RM and lead hunting but we have not figured
out the way to get there”. Bowden (2011) states in chapter 2 that
involvement creates loyalty in the long run. Compared to this claim
Company X is on the right track regardless the goal is in numbers or in the
general level of increased loyalty. When asked if Company X has planned
loyalty progression Head of Marketing answered “we‟re planning action to
ensure that but to be honest we have too little of loyalty enhancing
features and services. We‟ve had loyalty club for years and some people
are very keen on that. We are planning to upgrade, modernize and expand
our loyalty club and other loyalty related services as well”. Marketing
Coordinator said that “actually we have been gathering with account
management a list of possible trigger messages that we could send to
recipients that reach to certain level of monthly/yearly bookings”.
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Interesting difference between what marketing representatives said and
what Key Account Manager stated. Key Account Manager‟s opinion was
that events and trainings where you can meet people are actually bringing
more loyalty and bookings than email marketing could ever do. When
asked the same issue form Digital Marketing Coordinator and Marketing
Coordinator they stated that definitely email marketing would bring more
bookings but about loyalty they couldn‟t really tell. E.g. Marketing
Coordinator said “definitely email marketing would bring more bookings as
we‟ve just done the one trigger campaign, which it has already brought
about 3000 bookings. And I don‟t have to do anything unless the trigger
somehow malfunctions, like some people have got multiple messages
even though they have booked during past 3 months. It seems
embarrassing to say „we have not heard of you for while‟ if the recipient
have just booked”. It is probable that if email marketing would be heavily
steered to RM there would be more malfunctions whereas with human
contact there would be fewer mistakes towards clients. The impact on
loyalty by these “embarrassing” mistakes on loyalty is another topic for
further studies.
When asked of communication‟s nature in align with Merisavo & Raulas
(2004) findings (this was not told to interviewees) Head of Marketing told
that email marketing is basically way to remind of Company X existence
but there are few findings they have further developed to other means.
“From the analyses we saw that our CEO‟s annual summary of how
business travel hotel bookings are evolving in general have got attention
very well. This was from our monthly newsletter. Now we‟re about to make
those same reports as an inducement to join our lead-hunting mailing list”.
This is a good example of dribble effects to new customer programs which
have been initiated to be RM in addition to email marketing. Company X is
not knowledgeable if newsletter recipients, loyalty club members and so
called multi-bookers are the same people as those data sources where the
information locates is not merged to CRM. As Marketing Coordinator said
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“I was given a task to measure the profitability of Loyalty club. We pay
about 9 000 € to keep that thing running and we just have the feeling that
it creates bookings and keeps customers using us. It wasn‟t easy to
measure it as I had somehow to cross-refer booking engines
reservations/user and Loyalty club members and club points. I still don‟t
know if the figures match up. I just hope I don‟t have to do it often”. The
ESP representative stated that quite many e-commerce based customers
in Sweden use email marketing to enhance the loyalty through triggered
email bonus programs but not too many in Finland. She had a feeling that
vivid email marketing is a bit lacking in Finland compared to Sweden.
Head of Marketing, CEO and both Marketing Coordinators admitted
willingly that they should do more towards gain and ensure customer
loyalty. CEO stated “this has been too long on our to-do list with the same
excuse that there are more important tasks to be done”. Digital Marketing
Coordinator said “thank God, we finally got rid of that awful old CRM
system. It has hindered this progress far too long. I could not even use
demographic data to see what kind of users are using to loyalty club”.
Many comments referred to the problems that Company X “first must
handle” before progressing. It might indicate the fatigue towards the nonprogressing
issue or just order of importance in general.