A potential guest planning a trip explores your hotel’s mobile site for available rooms. She clicks on a special offer to download your hotel app for an exclusive direct-booking deal but then gets sidetracked with other plans. Later, she visits your website on her laptop to finalize her booking. The next day, she uses the mobile app to complete her reservation.
NB: This is an article from Revinate
Fast forward several months, and she stumbles across one of your Instagram ads showcasing your tempting spa services at another property. She impulsively books a stay and a massage without ever leaving the app.
This type of disparate, multi-channel customer journey is increasingly common today. The challenge for hoteliers lies in tracking these myriad interactions, unifying them into a single guest profile, and leveraging this data to create tailored experiences and targeted marketing.
This is where the power of identity resolution comes into play.
Why identity resolution is important for hotels
Identity resolution is the cornerstone of an effective hotel data strategy, and it’s an element that benefits your entire organization, from marketing to guest-facing staff to privacy compliance.
- Empower accurate segmentation
With fragmented data, you can’t easily identify your highest-value customers, and your email segments won’t accurately reflect guest behavior. Even if your intentions are to run a proactive, customized approach to guest engagement and promotions, when your data is faulty, you remain in the dark. You experience reduced ROI, sacrificing margins due to lower campaign conversion rates.
Key benefit: Higher conversion rates
Accurate identity resolution empowers proper segmentation, allowing you to offer the right service to the right guest at the right time. It leads to higher open rates and better conversions, because the more you know your guests, the more relevant your offers can be. As an illustration, we analyzed one-time promotional emails sent from Revinate customers to their guests. The results show that targeted campaigns sent to fewer than 5,000 recipients are opened 2x more than campaigns with broad messaging sent to 50,000 recipients. Even more impressive is the fact that segmented audiences have 5x the conversion rate of those sent to larger audiences.
- Conquer duplicate data
A key issue hotels grapple with is the challenge of duplicate profiles. These often stem from human error, such as a typo when inputting an email address, or a last name change from a recent marriage, or a booking made with a nickname vs. a full name that was used on a previous stay. The resultant duplicate profiles hinder your marketing and personalization efforts.
Key benefit: Precision marketing and personalization
Identity resolution merges and reconciles multiple identifiers associated with each guest, thereby eliminating duplicate profiles and enabling precise targeting for marketing initiatives. It also enables your teams to craft highly customized experiences, perks and personalized offers, driving 40 percent higher revenue and boosting retention rates. Hoteliers can also more easily understand their most loyal guests, understand their booking habits, and create data-driven marketing strategies.
- Unmask OTA emails and anonymous visitors
Masked OTA email addresses are another major cause of duplicate profiles. Of the one milllion-plus duplicate profiles we’ve merged, over 75% of them have had two or more OTA emails and real email already at a property; and an additional 12% have four or more emails from an OTA. This means you have repeat guests who are loyal to your property but not the booking channel. You need to be able to identify these customers as well as anonymous website browsers.
Key benefit: Boost customer loyalty
Accurate identity resolution with Advanced Profile Synthesis unmasks those frustrating OTA emails. In fact, we’ve merged over 1 million profiles with opaque OTA emails. In addition, the solution sheds light on anonymous website visitors, allowing you to connect them with known guest profiles. Moreover, AI/ML-powered identity resolution provides a clear understanding of guest preferences, behaviors, and histories. This allows you to create consistent customer experiences and personalized interactions that forge deeper emotional connections, driving greater loyalty and brand advocacy.
