The brand

The July is a portfolio of premium apartment-hotels in Europe. Today, the properties are all located in Amsterdam, but the group is investing more than one billion euros to expand their network, taking their concept to London, Dublin, and Lisbon in the coming years.

The challenge

The marketing team at The July aimed to engage their guests through personalized email campaigns that mirrored the unique experience at their properties. They aimed to create unique campaigns for specific segments of the guest database, but struggled to do more than send mass emails due to the basic functionality of their existing email marketing platform. Unwilling to let OTAs dominate their bookings, The July team started searching for a technology platform that would enable them to compete and win direct bookings.

The solution

A Revinate Guest Feedback customer since 2016, The July added Revinate Marketing to their tech stack in 2022. Digital Marketing Manager Robin Moesman says, “Our decision was influenced by three main factors: Revinate’s widespread customer base, its user-friendly interface, and its excellent integrations with CMS Mews and Triptease, facilitating our digital framework for guest experiences.”

With Revinate Marketing and Revinate Guest Feedback now in place, the team is better able to understand guests’ interests and on-site experiences, and leverage these insights to drive bookings and foster loyalty, as well as make operational enhancements. Marketing campaigns went from generic to highly personalized, leading to better conversion rates. For example, an automated winback campaign thanking guests for their recent stay at The July – Boat & Co received a sky-high open rate of 76% and an 11% CTR. In the first two months, it resulted in 52 nights booked.

Revinate Marketing allows the small team to automate a significant portion of their tasks and maintain an always-on revenue engine. They leverage out-of-the-box birthday, we miss you, OTA winback (featured right), cancelation recovery, and upsell campaigns to reach guests at just the right time in their journey to encourage a direct booking. Automation in Revinate Marketing helps the team streamline communications at each stage of the guest journey, providing detailed information to guests before they arrive onsite, so they know what to expect from their stay. For example, The July’s welcome sequence drip campaign received a 75% open rate and 6% CTR.

Finally, with Revinate Marketing, the team has sophisticated features like A/B testing, an email health assessment, and deep reporting, to ensure they’re continually optimizing performance and driving the best results. Matthijs adds, “Despite being easy to use, it’s rich in functionality and allows us to compete with much larger brands. These technological advances have become integral to our current operations.”

The results

With Revinate, The July has the technology it needs to confidently compete against OTAs and drive direct bookings. Performance highlights include:

• One-time campaign performance
  Average open rate: 42% per campaign
  Average click-through rate: 3% per campaign
• Automated campaign performance
  Average open rate: 63% per campaign
  Average click-through rate: 9.6% per campaign