Data is changing the foundation of hospitality marketing. With personalized content, hoteliers can now engage and nurture their guests like never before. As a result, you have a new way to increase satisfaction and cultivate loyalty to generate profitable revenue growth. In that respect, marketing departments are realizing that using their own data to compile audiences has become one of their biggest assets.
Audience segmentation is the key process that not only makes data actionable but enables personalization. It allows marketers to change their approach from a pattern of interruption (e.g. TV or radio commercials) to a more efficient engagement strategy that focuses on quality instead of quantity. Below are the steps you need to take to segment your audience and enable true one-to-one marketing.
Centralise your data to build a robust guest profile
Hoteliers have a wealth of data in their systems, (including Property Management System (PMS), Point of Sale (POS), Central Reservation System (CRS), call center, food & beverage, spa, etc.) that you can integrate with online (email, web analytics, guest satisfaction survey (GSS), and social media platforms) to build the foundation of a robust guest profile. By augmenting your first party with third party data, you can then access a complete view of your guests that covers an array of useful dimensions:
- Guest history
- Value
- Status
- Behavior
- Preference
- Interest
- Intent
- Engagement
Implementing audience segmentation – Step 1: Know your audiences
Now that you’ve consolidated all of your data into a single view, it’s time to cluster guests into relevant marketing segments that you can use to build, automate and personalize your campaigns. There is a wide range of clustering techniques that you can use to segment your audience, most of which are easy to implement. Many people think that clustering techniques require an advance knowledge of statistics or a database, but this is not the case.
Start your basic segmentation process with the RFM technique, which looks at frequency, recency and monetary value as a way to differentiate your guests. This allows you to organize your profiles in a way that enables you to answer the following important questions:
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