NB: This is an article by Tim Sullivan, President of Cendyn/ONE
Leveraging over 120 million CRM Guest Profiles representing 35 billion unique data elements, Cendyn/ONE delivered 1.2 billion personalized marketing messages in 2015, generating over $500,000,000 in directly booked room revenue for our hotel and resort clients.
Guests who receive fractured, impersonal messages from a hospitality brand get easily annoyed. As a result, they start ignoring communications, tuning out brand messaging or simply unsubscribing and unfollowing the account. What this means is that hoteliers must anticipate their guests’ needs and preferences to curate engaging interactions. Hoteliers by and large understand the rules of engagement in the era of the Internet and social media, and want to use their existing data for personalized communications. However, before they invest in hotel CRM and digital marketing platforms, they want to know how they can leverage their data to drive personalization and what the ROI will be for this level of effort.
Benchmarking the ROI for Enhanced Guest Profiles + Personalization
Managing over 120 million enhanced guest profiles for our clients, Cendyn/ONE constantly analyses the Return on Investment (ROI) on personalization and data-driven marketing. We found that clients who utilize our full suite of CRM and Data Driven Digital Marketing products achieve an average ROI of 34X.
These guest profiles, which encompass over 35 billion unique data elements, are the engine that fuels personalization. Through marketing automation that data was used to deliver 1.2 billion highly-targeted and personalized messages, which resulted in over half a billion dollars in directly booked room revenue for our hotel and resort clients in 2015.
So How Does Personalization Drive Direct Bookings?
The key to success for one-to-one marketing is centralizing and unlocking the value of the information that is sitting stagnant in your disparate hotel systems: CRS, PMS, F&B, Call Center, POS, Spa, Golf, Mobile Apps, and Web Analytics, to create a holistic view of your guests that details:
- guest history,
- value,
- behavior,
- desire,
- interest,
- intent,
- satisfaction,
- and engagement.
Through segmentation and predictive modeling, this data is turned into actionable insights that anticipate your guest’s behavior. The next step is sending highly targeted, data-driven and personalized communications to your guests across all digital channels:
- Email,
- Web,
- Display,
- Mobile,
- Video,
- and Social,
Not only do our hotel clients effectively nurture their guests throughout the entire guest journey (pre-stay, on-property, post stay), they also prospect for new guests that look like their best high-yield customers, using our marketing automation technology. With our CRM platform’s Guest Intelligence capabilities, hotels are able to track and optimize campaign performance. As a result, they achieve profitable revenue growth through increased guest satisfaction and loyalty.
Why Personalization Matters
On a daily basis, your potential guests are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages. For every message they see, they have the choice to read, interact, or ignore that content, as well as the ability to unsubscribe from your emails or unfollow your social media accounts if they don’t see value in the communication.
What provides that value? Personalization.
Here’s a familiar example to illustrate the point.
Let’s say a guest named Susan Jones stayed at your hotel last year and signed up to receive emails. Inside the latest email, the content discusses an upcoming golf special (Susan doesn’t play golf) and the opening of your new steakhouse (Susan is also a vegetarian). Susan could not care less about these topics and unsubscribes. The next time she is in market for a trip to your city, she goes to TripAdvisor instead of your website.
You’ve just lost a lot of potential revenue from Susan as well as all of her family and friends – people she would have recommended your hotel to if she became a loyal, repeat client.
By leveraging hotel CRM that captures Susan’s preferences and allows you to easily access those data points, you can create an automated and personalized communication workflow to ensure Susan only receives the emails and messaging that apply to her specific interests and preferences.
Let’s say when Susan stayed at your hotel she had a treatment at your spa and also enjoyed her time by the pool. You know this from her folio detail and post-stay survey data. With our hotel CRM, this preference data is added to her guest profile.
Now instead receiving the irrelevant golf email, Susan receives a personalized email that addresses her by name and details the upcoming spa weekend specials at your resort and also includes a discount for pool cabana rentals. Now Susan is forwarding the email to her girlfriends and planning a group trip to your property.
The Guest Demand for Personalization is an Opportunity
Hotel CRM that provides data-driven marketing and personalization technology provides a powerful tool to compete effectively with Online Travel Agencies and other competitors for the right guests, while increasing profitability. The consumer demand for personalized experiences is a real opportunity for the hotel industry to reduce its reliance on low yield distribution channels.
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