Case Study: CRM, Email, and Unlocking Untapped Revenue
Real relationships, real ROI, real results.
Introduction
CRM that proves its worth.
In hospitality, your database is one of your most valuable assets and most brands aren't using it. At Lala Comms, we build CRM strategies that segment intelligently, automate thoughtfully, and attribute clearly. Across three hospitality clients, an immersive cafe, a luxury nightlife venue and a competitive socialising operator, each with a completely different database profile, here's what that looks like in practice.
tracked revenue attributed to email activity in 30 days across a single client
Segmentation That Converts
Our immersive cafe client came to us with something many brands dream of and dread in equal measure: a large database that had never been contacted. No campaigns, no automations, no warm-up. Just a significant pool of customers waiting to hear from someone. Sending the same email to everyone is the fastest way to lose them. Instead, we built a fully segmented strategy covering active visitors, lapsed customers, new site audiences, and guests whose favourite venue had closed. Each group received a tailored message, and each campaign had a job to do. Our active visitor campaign achieved a 14.38% unique open rate on a database of over 4,000 contacts, generating £2,254 in tracked spend within 14 days.
emails delivered in a two-month campaign window for just one client
Protecting Relationships Through Disruption
When one of their venues closed, we didn't let that customer base go cold. We identified the affected contacts and moved them, with a carefully crafted migration campaign, toward a nearby alternative. CRM isn't just about driving revenue. Sometimes it's about holding onto people when everything else is changing. Our welcome activation campaign for a new site reached nearly 11,000 contacts and generated £3,700 in attributed spend, with 78 customers walking back through the door within a fortnight. Across all activity in 30 days, this client saw £4,772 in spend tracked directly to email. All this from a database that had never been activated before.
Automations That Run While You Sleep
The best CRM programmes don't require someone to press send. For our luxury nightlife client, we set up an automation linked to wifi sign ups that triggers after the guest leaves, delivering review requests and membership nudges while the visit is still fresh. The result is a 24.64% open rate and a 20.59% click rate, against an industry average click rate of just 2.3%. A birthday automation running alongside it is generating a 22.95% open rate and 14.29% click rate. For our immersive cafe client, a brand new birthday automation and website welcome journey had already generated tracked spend within days of launch, with the welcome automation hitting 45% open rate on a cold database, well above the hospitality benchmark of 28%. These are the foundations of a CRM programme that will compound in value as the database scales.
Meeting Clients Where They Are
For our competitive socialising client, the challenge is a different one. This is a large, constantly growing database, fed by ongoing bookings and WiFi sign-ups across multiple venues. The reality of that kind of database is that not everyone on it is equally engaged, some contacts are fresh, some have gone quiet, and the audience is always shifting. Our job is to cut through that noise with relevant, well-timed campaigns that keep the brand front of mind. A 30% open rate across 50,000+ emails in a two-month window, on a mixed-engagement database, comfortably beats the hospitality sector average and demonstrates that consistent, quality sends keep even a sprawling list warm.
Key Stats
direct spend in 30 days from a previously untouched database
click rate vs. 2.3% industry average on a growing nightlife audience
open rate across 50,000+ sends on a large, constantly refreshing database
customers returned within 14 days of a single welcome campaign
Every hospitality brand is sitting on revenue it hasn't claimed yet. It's in the customers who visited once and never heard from you again; in the guests who connected to your WiFi and walked out the door without a reason to come back; it's in the database you built through years of bookings that has never once received an email.
The data we've shared here tells a consistent story: targeted, well-crafted CRM activity drives real revenue with minimal effort. A single segmented campaign to a cold database generated thousands of pounds in tracked spend within a fortnight. A WiFi automation that requires no ongoing input is converting at nine times the industry average click rate. Campaigns to a large, mixed-engagement database are still outperforming sector benchmarks simply because the right people are being contacted with the right message.
Conclusion
CRM That Grows With You
That's what Lala Comms does. We look at your database, understand who is in it and what stage they're at, and build a strategy that speaks to each of them differently. Whether your database is cold, growing, or too big to manage, and whether you've never sent a campaign or you're sending every week, there is always an audience in there ready to respond. We find them, we talk to them, and we bring them back through the door.
If you'd like to know what your database could be doing for you, we'd love to have that conversation.