marketer2marketer: The FT’s Jocelyn Cripps and Starwood Hotels’ Nicolas Hauvespre

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Nicolas Hauvespre
Regional director of marketing
Starwood Hotels Western Europe

Which of your online strategies has so far proved to be most successful in maintaining a loyal FT audience and does this vary by market?

Jocelyn Cripps: Data and insight are very important to our online strategy, so we are looking to have touchpoints with our customers at all levels. We have exit and cancellation surveys, and we monitor social media, all of which feeds back into very strong retention and win-back. We are testing things all the time in terms of what will encourage customers to come back.

We recently offered customers a Nexus 7 tablet as part of a deal we did at Christmas with Google.We offered the Nexus to customers that were either being acquired in certain offers or through retention.

The thinking behind this was that customers who read the FT on mobile and in print but who are also using a tablet could potentially consume more content. If we can encourage them to use the FT across all these channels as and when they fit into their day, it will have a far more effective boost on engagement. We’re continually testing different offers and incentives, as we know that different things work in different markets.

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