The situation
Point B has been doing hospitality brand work since 1974. It sells brand retainers to independent hotels, and the offer was a free 2-page audit showing where a property loses direct bookings to the OTAs.
The first campaign used a standard contact database: 27,735 emails, 15 positive replies. The copy and the offer were sound. The list wasn't. When we checked later, the database had a contact at only 12% of the hotel domains in the market.
What we built
575,225 Google Maps searches across 41,727 zip codes returned 1,036,049 listings. We collapsed listings into companies by shared domain and phone number, threw out call-center numbers, and capped chains. An AI read 72,171 property websites for $19.20. 49,024 lodging companies qualified.
About 72% of the 20,384 addresses we sent to came from our own crawl of 73,128 contact, about and team pages. Reading the raw HTML instead of a cleaned-up version is what found the mailto links. An extraction guard threw out 167 addresses the AI had invented.
Over 10 segments, each with its own copy. Cabins hear about Airbnb and VRBO. RV parks hear about Campspot and Hipcamp.
Emails to the front desk ("Hey there") did exactly as well as emails to named contacts: 0.348% positive per email for both. That roughly doubles the usable size of every hotel list.
Bounces on an earlier campaign hit 5.7%. We traced 633 bounces and found they clustered by company, with one email-security gateway 13x over-represented. We suppressed them and held out 331 gateway domains. Bounces fell to 4.2% within a week, and positive replies went from 3 to 7 on 6% fewer emails.
The email
Hey first name,
one observation about the property
Point B has been doing hospitality brand work since 1974.
The pattern we keep seeing at independent properties: sharp brand, 2019 booking funnel, and every booking it loses goes to an OTA at 15 to 25% commission.
Want to see where property is losing direct bookings? We'll map it in a free 2-page audit: the 3 biggest fixes, ranked by what they'd recover.
Worth a look?
Step 1, as sent in both campaigns below.
Results
| Campaign | List source | Sent | Replies | Positive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Campaign 1 | Contact database | 27,735 | 79 | 15 |
| Campaign 5, Sep 24 to Oct 13 | Built by us from Google Maps | 20,121 | 226 | 70 |
Campaign 5 produced more positive replies in 19 days than every earlier Point B campaign combined. The 3.4x lift is per prospect contacted, measured at day 11 and reported to the client that week.
The rendering studio
Point B's sister brand, SONNY+ASH, makes 3D architectural renderings and had only ever grown by referral. We cold-emailed custom home builders with one offer: a free concept render of one of the builder's own projects. 17,220 emails, 21 positive replies, and the smaller, more specific campaign beat the bigger one.
