Relationships aren’t built on points
Loyalty programs are deeply embedded in the travel industry. Airlines, hotel groups, and cruise lines have spent decades refining points systems, tier structures, and reward mechanics. These programs are often positioned as the cornerstone of guest retention, with the implicit assumption that rewarding repeat behavior will naturally lead to loyalty.
Why reliability beats novelty in travel marketing — and what it reveals about email marketing
For more than a decade, marketing conversations have been dominated by novelty. New platforms promise higher engagement, faster growth, and greater reach. Each year seems to introduce another channel that claims to outperform everything that came before it. This raises a broader question that continues to surface across the industry: why email marketing still works in an environment obsessed with new channels.
In that environment, email can seem almost unremarkable. It lacks the immediacy of social media, the algorithmic intrigue of emerging platforms, and the cultural energy that surrounds the latest marketing trend. It rarely generates headlines, and it almost never feels new.
Why long gaps make relationship marketing more important
Seasonality is often treated as a convenient alibi in travel marketing. When bookings slow, campaigns pause. When guests disappear from view, communication goes quiet, explained away with a familiar shrug: It’s seasonal. The implication is subtle but powerful. If demand is cyclical, then silence feels justified.
But this logic mistakes rhythm for absence. Seasonality does not weaken the case for CRM. It strengthens it. In travel, long gaps between purchases are not an exception or an edge case. They are the structural reality of the category. That reality makes relationship marketing harder, certainly, but also more necessary. When time stretches between moments of intent, continuity becomes the work.
Different data, different mandates, same strategic blind spots
Travel CRM is often discussed as if every organization is facing the same fundamental challenge: collect guest data, automate communications, drive bookings, repeat. It is a clean, reassuring narrative. It is also a misleading one.
Hotels, attractions, and destination marketing organizations all operate within the same travel ecosystem, but they do not begin from the same place. They do not have access to the same data, they are not accountable for the same outcomes, and they are not responsible for the same moments in the guest journey. Treating them as interchangeable CRM actors leads to strategies that feel technically correct but operationally strained, and to programs that underperform not because of execution, but because of misalignment.
Why linear models fail cyclical travel behavior across the guest journey
For years, travel marketing has relied on a familiar mental model: the funnel. Guests enter at the top, progress steadily downward, and eventually convert. It’s tidy, measurable, and reassuring. And in travel, it consistently misrepresents how decisions are actually made.
Email, data, and the long memory of guests
Travel organizations spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and budget trying to reach people.
New audiences. New eyeballs. New clicks.
At the same time, many of those same organizations already sit on something far more valuable: a direct, permission-based connection to people who have already shown interest, intent, or trust — their owned audiences.
Why short-term optimization quietly undermines long-term guest value
In travel, relationship marketing is built interaction by interaction. And every interaction carries meaning.
A confirmation email, a pre-arrival reminder, a post-stay message. Each one shapes how a guest perceives a brand, not just in the moment, but over time. Yet many travel organizations approach these interactions through a narrow lens, optimizing for the next conversion rather than the ongoing relationship.
Travel CRM isn’t software. It’s a strategy for managing guest relationships across the full travel journey, before, during, and long after the experience.
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is one of the most widely used and misunderstood terms in modern marketing. In many industries, marketing leaders treat CRM as a software category, a sales database, or a collection of automation tools. In travel and hospitality, that framing falls short.
Email marketing is often framed as a contradiction.
Depending on who you ask, it is either a relationship marketing channel built on trust, permission, and long-term value, or a high‑performance sales tool optimized for conversions, revenue, and measurable results.
This framing is not only misleading; it actively limits how organizations design, measure, and deploy email programs.
How over-investing in paid media and SMS can quietly erode your most effective channel.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched marketing budgets shift in a very predictable direction, particularly in how brands invest in and activate their owned audience. More money toward paid digital media, more experimentation with SMS, and more pressure to diversify channels and show visible activity. The intention is understandable. Marketing leaders want to be where their customers are, and no one wants to appear stuck relying on a channel that some still dismiss as old-fashioned.
What is less often examined is what this shift costs when the audience is already known, already reachable, and already owned.
We’re delighted to announce the addition of an influencer marketing service through a new travel blog aimed at English-speaking readers in Canada and the USA. The Happy Traveler is a travel blog aimed at the 55+ clientele looking for inspiration and advice. The destinations covered are numerous and draw on the personal travels of the Traveller himself: Mark Morin.
The blog opens the ball with reports on cruises in Alaska and road-trips in Italy.
At STRATEGIES, we bring brands and people together. Our clients, leading national and international brands, rely on our services to build stronger customer relationships through CRM, email marketing and marketing automation. So when they tell us we’re doing a great job, we’re thrilled. But when they take the time to tell the world how much they appreciate our hard work and dedication, well we’re simply over the moon! So imagine our delight when our five star customer reviews lead to something even bigger!
You don’t realize how great you really are unless you compare with what others are doing. It’s time to come out of the shadows and claim your share of the recognition you deserve. It’s time to measure how well you’re doing. To figure out how to take your email program to the next level. How does your program measure up? What parts are great, and what parts are simply Meh? Beyond opens and clicks, what do you need to look at to measure your email program performance? That’s precisely why we created this simple, and we hope fun, email benchmarking tool. Use it to evaluate your email superpowers and set yourself on the path to glory.
A healthy marketing database requires constant upkeep, or it will degrade fast. The causes of this degradation are many: Customers become inactive. Implied consents expire. People unsubscribe. As a result, your relationship marketing program falters, no longer delivering the sales growth needed to ensure the continued prosperity of the company.
Marketing ROI is becoming the number one metric for evaluating campaign success. And for good reason: Marketing spend is increasingly under pressure for greater accountability.
For this reason, campaign profitability analysis is essential. So is the need for optimization. ROI is often equated with profitability and traditionally stands for “Return on Investment”.
I am a big fan of optimization and A/B testing. But that was not always the case. When I was studying for my MBA at HEC in the 1980s, the most challenging courses I enrolled in was Statistics and Probabilities. This course, loaded with obscure equations, was meaningless gibberish to me. And I couldn’t see how it could be useful in real life except maybe for surveys.
Why should we learn to master marketing automation fundamentals when we have so many other priorities? The answer is simple: in recent years, marketers have embarked on an epic quest for customer-centricity and one-on-one customer relationships. This quest has led to the development of large-scale marketing automation platforms.
These martech tools make it possible to trigger on-going campaigns according to the customers’ behavior. They also help marketers better understand where customers fall in their brand adoption journey.
As consumers, we are constantly faced with the challenges of too many choices and too much information broadcast across a cluttered and fragmented media landscape. Any attempt to guide people through their customer journey is totally useless if we can’t deliver the right message at the right time.
This short video explains how personalization can play en important role by increasing the relevance of your marketing messages. Personalization helps your customers make the informed choices that are best for them. In doing so, they will get more enjoyment out of everything they buy from you.
Each year, the Quebec Marketing Association (formerly the AMR) holds a competition to select the top marketing campaigns created by prominent brands and their agencies. Year after year, Strategies does quite well in the standings. Last year, we were awarded Best omnichannel marketing campaign. The year before, we were honoured as the Agency of the year.
This year, we have three campaigns nominated for an award (out of three submissions) for three of our clients. Check out the videos below to learn more about the nominees.
Despite all your best efforts to avoid them, sometimes errors slit through your carefully-planned safety net. Maybe it’s “just” a typo. Or a small design flaw. In which case, you simply make a mental note to pay more attention in the future and move on to the next project. But when it’s a more serious issue, like a broken link, the wrong price, or an email sent to the wrong audience, you only have one option: send an apology email or “oops!” email to your customers.
It’s easy to forget about quality assurance (QA) with all the time pressures to get your emails out the door. Easy despite the fact that it is one of the most important steps in the creative process. Easy to forget that after having invested tons of time, energy and dollars in designing the perfect campaign, the simplest of errors can trip you up.
Which is why we wrote this post on how to do effective email campaign QA:
A lot has been written about the customer journey, or path to purchase, and about the importance of communicating the right message at the right time according to what stage of the journey your customers find themselves.
![Stratégies wins 4 awards at the AMR 2018 Gala [video]](https://strategies.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Photo_Seule-790x500.jpg)
At their annual Awards Gala, the Relationship Marketing Association (AMR) and the Flèches d’or Awards (Golden Arrows) jury recognized the excellence of our marketing campaigns by awarding four Top Awards and a certificate of merit including the Best Multi-channel Marketing Campaign as well as Gold in three categories.
We are honored by this industry recognition of the quality of our team’s great work. It’s thanks to our clients and the confidence they place in our strategies that we are able to shine.
Email marketing is sometimes equated with sending out newsletters. But it’s so much more! Simply put, Email Marketing is the systematic and structured use of email in order to initiate, build and consolidate a relationship between brands and people. Email is the most popular media for Relationship Marketing. This is largely because of its impact, its ROI and its ability to grow sales.
If you want an email marketing program that really delivers results, you need to get the technical basics right. The most beautiful content won’t drive results if it doesn’t get delivered. According to ReturnPath email deliverability report, an average of 20% of all email messages never reach their audience. Generally because they’re blocked or diverted from the inbox.
I often ask my workshop and conference participants – typically seasoned marketing executives – what the role of marketing might be? Their answers are, by and large, always the same. They revolve around advertising and marketing communication.
They tell me it’s all about branding and image. About differentiation and value. This, of course, is all true and essential. Part of what we are tasked to do as marketers. But is it enough?
Strictly speaking, marketing encompasses what we all know as the four Ps. This is how marketing is taught in most business schools on the planet. Price, Place, Promotion and Product. This model for marketing management was first published by E. Jerome McCarthy, back in 1960. But has it kept pace with the times?
The word collaboratory (pronounced co lab ratory) is a blend of the words collaboration and laboratory. The term is borrowed from the scientific community and is defined as a virtual collaborative environment. It’s a place where scientists and researchers from around the world work together on research projects.
This environment allows them to share resources, research and knowledge. The objective is to achieve innovative solutions faster by leveraging collective knowledge.
My, how time flies! The year is quickly coming to a close. And most of us busily preparing for the new marketing challenges that lie ahead. Fine-tuning budgets. Tying up loose ends. And perhaps looking forward to some time off with family and friends. But before we break for the holidays, why not take a few minutes to reflect on how we hope to change and improve in the coming year. Here are three 2018 Marketing Resolutions : dumb things you should stop doing in the next year. Heck, why not stop doing them right NOW!
Lead nurturing is a hot topic these days. Historically, lead generation programs were always designed to quickly pass fresh leads on to sales as soon as they were identified. Time was of the essence, the theory went. And quantity was king. Today, things have change dramatically. In recent years, organizations have realized that it is preferable to let marketing hang on to leads as long as possible before passing them on to sales. Why the big shift in strategy? And what’s be big advantage of nurturing leads before handing then off to sales. Let’s examine what brought about this fundamental reversal.
Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL), also known as C-28, comes into full force on July 1 of this year. If you’re sending emails to Canada and haven’t already taken steps to prepare for CASL, you have a few short days to get ready to comply with what is considered to be the most stringent anti-spam legislation in the world. And there’s a major incentive to do so: fines of up to $10 million for a business, or $1 million for an individual.
At the heart of CASL is the need to obtain consent – either explicit or implied – in order to be able to send Commercial Electronic Messages (CEMs) to your customers, prospects or subscribers.
Explicit consent is consent which is given verbally or in writing by a contact, using various means including a web page that provides a check box (which cannot be pre-checked) or a subscribe button.
![Physical Meets Digital – How to Increase Marketing ROI [VIDEO]](https://strategies.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Screen-Shot-2015-11-04-at-10.51.21-AM-790x500.png)
In today’s cluttered always-on marketplace, strong Marketing ROI is often illusive. One of the reasons is that as channels multiply, marketing communication becomes increasingly siloed. Digital on one side, traditional on the other. Same for social media, PR and event marketing.
With some many teams working independently, it’s a challenge to get everyone on the same page, delivering a consistent brand message regardless of the channel.
Because of the tremendous economic pressures since the downturn, and the need for marketing accountability, ROI has now become Marketing’s new Holy Grail. However, effectiveness and ROI are not synonymous, though many marketers perceive it to be so.
ROI is the efficiency with which a marketing activities produces a result. ROI calculates the revenue generated for each dollar invested.
The fact that a given media, or marketing activity is efficient – meaning that the cost per dollar of sales generated is low – doesn’t automatically make this media or activity a better choice relative to others with a lower level of efficiency. Obviously, you want both. But you can’t always get what you want!
Relationship marketing is a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on creating, maintaining, and growing long‑term relationships between an organization and its customers. Rather than optimizing isolated transactions, relationship marketing prioritizes continuity, relevance, and cumulative value over time.
At its core, relationship marketing is concerned with the quality of the relationship, not just its immediate outcome. It asks how trust is built, how expectations are managed, and how an organization remains relevant across repeated interactions, not just at the moment of sale.
A well designed landing page can make the difference between a raging success and an abysmal failure for your lead nurturing program. The people at Pardot, just released this really powerful Infographic on the anatomy of a well designed landing page. Their point is well taken: because you typically lose over half your visitors right from the getgo and have to really work hard to convert those who stay on the page.
Know and share your value
Some of the elements that really stand out to me as a relationship marketer are the need for strong call to action and a well crafted value statement. Answering the age old question “WIIFM?” (What’s in it for me?) is essential to producing strong results. This to me is the deciding factor in a landing page, or any other marketing piece.
One of the most popular forms of personalization used on eCommerce sites is the “people who bought this, also bought that” recommendation. The assumption is that people have similar tastes and so if other people are buying the same things, so should you. Sometimes, the intention is to ensure that someone who buys an item requiring additional accessories be reminded of all that is needed before checking out their shopping cart.
Some sites use an algorithm to predict which products should be paired with each other. Others simply tag products and bucket them into groups. Now the latter can same time and money, but sometimes leads to some strange recommendations as seen below on the Tiger Direct website.
One of the guiding principles of B2Me is to use simple language and familiar terms in order to clearly communicate what you need to say to your customers. Get rid of jargon and marketing speak — Make it a priority!
American insurer Cygna clearly understands the importance of simple and effective communication. The company prides itself on systematically simplifying the language it uses in its marketing communication and more important, in its contact between their employees and customers.
There’s an interesting article on B2Me™ on the Retail Experience Blog, by Paul Flanigan, former director of brand communications for Best Buy.
Here are a few lines from his post:
When you look at marketing from a purely transactional perspective, you often lose sight of an important dimension: the long-term value of a customer. Or more precisely, the cumulative net revenue that a customer provides during the “lifetime” of the relationship between the customer and a business, or a brand.
This transaction perspective focuses on the immediate sale of good and services through marketing campaigns of all nature. From that point of view, the customer value is equal to the amount of the sale produced as a result of that campaign. Transactional marketers will work to reduce the cost per transaction in order to maximize short term revenue. Nothing wrong with increasing revenue… far from it. But this narrow vision often forces us to make choices that as purely short-term.
In his best-selling book Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell examines the concept of influential individuals and how they impact the spread of trends and change. He categorizes them into three groups: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.
We all know one or more Connectors: people who seem to know everyone. People through whom you could reach a very large population. Mavens on the other hand, are those who are considered experts in a given field by their peers, who know the answer to any question related to that field and to whom everyone they know turns when they have a question or need advice.
Seth Godin and Tom Peters sum it up quite nicely: writing a blog — just like writing a book — changes the way you think, the way you communicate and the way you live. Do you have a blog? How has it changed your life?
Do you know your real value? Can you explain it clearly to a total stranger? To a prospective customer? To a member of your family?
A lot of what is said and written about branding relates to brand personality. How a business or a brand is expressed visually, the tone and manner and nature of the message. But the essence of branding is simply a question of clearly expressing how you, your product or your business are unique. In B2B (business-to-business) marketing, this differentiation is expressed through the value statement. A few short sentences that succinctly express the value that you bring to your customers.
You’ve probably heard the expression “elevator pitch” or “elevator speech”: a short statement that would allow you to explain to a total stranger who you are and what you do best in the time it takes to travel from the lobby to the top floor of an office building by elevator. Your value proposition is in essence your elevator pitch and it focuses on the value that you could provide to a prospective customer.
As a fan of all things Gladwell, I would like to share with you this excellent video produced by TED TV that chronicles the history of how Howard Moskowitz changed the way we shop for groceries — a change that led to the avalanche of choices that we face in our lives, day-to-day. Presented in typical Gladwellian style, this is a fascinating tale of innovation that began in the ’80s.
n this video from TED TV, american social psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice explains the negative impact of choice – or more precisely, the impact of too much choice – on our level of satisfaction with the things we buy in our day-to-day lives. Unrealistic expectations, or persisting doubt over the choices we make: these are the reasons why we must limit the number of products and services we offer our customers. By personalizing content and product recommendations, B2Me allows us to reduce the number of products suggested to a limited set or a single item that best suit the customer’s needs… One customer at a time!