Luxury Hotel Builds Agile Customer Experience with Cheetah Digital

Atlantis, The Palm is a luxury 5-star Dubai hotel resort hotel situated on the Palm; a man-made island that has captured the world’s imagination with its magnificent scale and ingenuity. From the hotel architecture to the award-winning restaurants and must-visit aquatic attractions, this is one of Dubai’s luxury resorts that never ceases to amaze.

Atlantis, The Palm, is a world class, award-winning hotel home to 65,000 marine animals, 1,539 hotel rooms, 23 food and beverage outlets on site including Nobu. The hotel includes a spa with 27 treatment rooms, 3 private white sand beaches and Aqua venture water park which is ranked top 3 in the world.

It attracts visitors worldwide, including from the UK, UAE, China. Russia, India, Germany, France, Australia and the US.

As the success of Atlantis, The Palm’s email program continued to grow exponentially, they turned to Cheetah Digital to help them transition from a full-service to self-service user of the Marketing Suite. In a successful partnership spanning several years, Cheetah Digital has helped this majestic 5-star Dubai hotel embark on various memorable marketing campaigns. So to help their evolution, we designed an in-depth training programme to ensure their continued success.

Here’s how we helped Atlantis, The Palm take control of their email communications program to build a more agile customer experience.

The challenge

As a full-service client, Cheetah Digital had been seamlessly setting up and deploying campaigns on behalf of Atlantis, The Palm, working as an extension to their business, managing their projects and providing strategic support.

The travel sector, like many other industries, has witnessed a radical change in how consumers expect to be communicated with. Travelers across the world demand immediate interactions that are customized across all touchpoints throughout their exploration and booking journey.

Atlantis, The Palm found themselves in an increasingly competitive market awash with tempting deals and all-inclusive package holiday offers. They wanted to find new ways of driving awareness about their hotel and respond quickly to commercial pressures, offers and room availability in order to ensure sustained growth. They also wanted to decrease their dependence on offline travel agencies and take advantage of the significant proportion of their target market (couples, families, local business conferencing, and weddings) using the internet to plan their trips abroad.

To offer the best experience possible to each customer, they decided to increase their focus on email to better activate their brand voice, and provide rich content that catered to their customers’ needs.

Email has since become a key revenue channel for the brand with an increase in response rates and a subsequent boost in their customer base.

As their marketing team expanded, Atlantis, The Palm wanted the full flexibility to set up and deploy their own campaigns. They needed direct access to the Marketing Suite’s data-driven capabilities to structure and analyze their data in order to gain perspective on their consumers’ behaviors and expectations. In essence, they had to transition into self-service clients – and so needed Cheetah Digital’s help to achieve this.

The solution

We understood that to meet the needs of today’s digitally-savvy global traveler, the marketing team at Atlantis, The Palm, needed to be able to optimize contact with their customers by creating relevant and engaging email communications using the Marketing Suite. So, we created an exclusive training plan to help move the brand from its current full-service state to their desired self-service state.

We kicked off training with the ‘Marketing Suite Fundamentals – Sending Your First Campaign’ course – an interactive video classroom introduction to the Marketing Suite platform that is designed to guide marketers through the process of navigating the platform, accessing data, creating campaigns, applying filters and reporting.

We split the one day course into two half-day sessions to accommodate our client’s Dubai time zone, and to avoid information overload.

“It was an extremely smooth transition from full-service to self-service. We wanted training that could help us focus on immediate, highly personalized interactions with our audience, and it did just that! The interactive sessions helped us feel equipped for success and added real value to our roles.”

Declan Kilcourse, Director of CRM at Atlantis, The Palm

Whenever we run training sessions, it’s important that we present the information in a way that sparks curiosity and aids retention, using real-life scenarios and interactive activities to enable dialogue between ourselves and the client.

Our expert trainer delivered a streamlined, interactive training program that quickly immersed Atlantis, The Palm’s, marketing team in the capabilities of the Marketing Suite, ensuring that the overall content in each module was consistently concise, compelling and vivid.

The ethos behind the training given to Atlantis, The Palm, was to establish an environment that encourages curiosity and embraces the excitement marketers have towards Cheetah Digital products. The course highlighted the ease at which non-digitally-savvy marketers can use the Marketing Suite successfully and gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence to achieve their marketing goals.

Following on from the two-day training, we encouraged attendees to use their Marketing Suite Training Account to explore the platform and ask questions directly to their dedicated trainer. We arranged follow up sessions to continue the support, which consisted of Q&A’s, screen sharing, weekly calls, and overviews of other areas of the platform.

In addition to the two workshops, subsequent training topics were identified by the marketing team at Atlantis, The Palm, who prioritized areas they wanted to learn more about.

The results

• The training programme was successfully held to the CRM marketing team at Atlantis, The Palm, and the company migrated from full-service to self-service in a matter of weeks.
• They were trained on how to use the Marketing Suite to its best effect, understanding how to optimize each mailing to build a one-to-one dialogue with each customer, strengthening engagement, transactions, and customer affinity.
• They now send millions of emails every year to their global database via a seasonal communications plan.
• Their email communications focus on room and restaurant bookings, the water park and aquarium, and other seasonal offers.
• The process created advocates of the Marketing Suite who supported implementation and sought further training to explore other topics.

“Our trainer Zoe was absolutely phenomenal. She didn’t just deliver the workshops, then walk away – she kept following up with us with one-to-one sessions, which made it feel more like a service than a chore. Although we never used Cheetah Digital’s Shadowing Service to support our transition, having Zoe a click away made it feel like she was literally onsite with us.”

Declan Kilcourse, Director of CRM at Atlantis, The Palm

The takeaway

Becoming self-service clients allowed Atlantis, The Palm, to foster direct and relevant relationships with their consumers and create efficiencies of scale for their business – with full access to the Marketing Suite they can adapt their communications with ease to engage with their audience. Cheetah Digital understood their need for flexibility and agility and supported them in achieving their commercial goals across the evolving travel hospitality landscape.

Our training never just ends, we pride ourselves on our dedication to marketers and continue to build strong relationships with our clients, obtaining valuable insight into the training process.