Problem: 32% of people mistaking money saved as cost per night in hotel offers in email marketing for an employee discount program. Here is my research and initial solutions as well as results.

Email Examples

To get started, I researched other marketing emails. Usually they would lead with a general location like our Friday emails. With a few exceptions, it seems emails are usually pretty vague in the exact details of hotel name and price. If we don’t want to utilize specific hotels and lean all the way into somthing similar to like Member Travel I could see that being effective for people planning trips with a location already in mind and then seeing a generic discount there in that section like USAA Perks does. 

Travel Site Examples

It was very common to show the standard public rate crossed out and then their special exclusive rate. Along with various info about the hotel but keep in mind this is after the user has searched a specific location. 

Previous Iterations

You’ll notice previous iterations had the “exclusive pricing vs public rate” or at least showed more than just the savings amount. I think we were trying to declutter the immensively info packed Wednesday emails so this aspect got chopped. 

Some Ideas

Biggest Takeaway: Show a public rate then the exclusive price OR just generic discounts. But, just “Savings” by itself is confusing. Either way, I think to emphasize the location first to give context to whatever Hilton, Marriot, or whatever hotel happens to be there. Although not drastically different, you can see I implemented a few things from the other examples I saw. 

A few questions I had:

-Was stating “per night” necessary or is it already implicit? There’s examples of both. 

-Should those tags to the hotel images to show percentages or amounts saved? Or just add them to draw attention to exclusive pricing?

Results

First Test: Essentially testing showing the “You save $100/night”  versus not showing it. I also asked them what they thought the strikethrough price meant.

• 60% of users selected the design that showed the “You save $100/night” (see attached Excel for their comments why). However, although it is performing better, given the test was with 20 people, it was not statistically significant.

• 95% (or 19 out of the 20 people) thought that the strikethrough price of $200 was “the hotel’s standard price”

Second Test: Showed “Your Price” vs “Member Price” I also asked them what they thought “Public Rate” means. 65% of respondents preferred “Member Price”. This is 90% statistically significant. 95% thought the “Public Rate” refers to the hotel’s standard rate for the room.