The battle for the attention of your guests has never been more intense. Fortunately, there are a few ways to help ease your hotel email marketing efforts to retain customers.
NB: This is an article from Revinate
Hotel marketing automation is one of those effective digital balms.
The key is, through timing and segmentation, you can gain valuable insight into real guest data that leads to more effective email marketing campaigns. Here are some ways hotel marketing automation has enabled a new level of analytic strategy.
1. Save time on repeat campaigns
You can save valuable time by automating repeat email campaigns. This reduces repetitive functions that keep you tied to your email marketing management systems.
For example, if you see an opportunity in your inventory for upgrades, you’ll want to offer this opportunity to incoming guests to drive more revenue. What if, instead of manually sending out this email based whether or not inventory is available, you could automate this campaign? With an email system that is integrated with your hotel’s PMS, it is possible to automatically send an upgrade offer to incoming guests.
The result? More revenue for the hotel, plus you get more time to focus on other marketing efforts and incoming guests are impressed with the hotel’s level of attention.
2. Offer tailored messages
Email marketing automation isn’t just a time saver. It also helps you enhance your messages to specific guest profiles.
An automated solution can continuously receive information related to customer activities such as purchase history and habits. You can then use this activity-related data in the future to develop targeted offers based on real guest data.
3. Get to know your guests
Marketing automation encourages accurate analytics for understanding how your guests interact with your hotel by collecting information like email link clicks, purchase history, reasons for the stay, social media data, and more. Instead of creating generic campaigns based on the hotel’s motivations, you can now consider a range of data to hit the right guest with the right message at the right time.
For example, a generic message might be sent to all contacts regardless of context, such as “Book now and receive a complimentary appointment with our award-winning spa!” But with the right data and the right automation solution, you can marry different data points and target specific guests with specific behavioral attributes. For example, send this to past guests who have previously booked with the spa: “Remember that massage at our award-winning spa? Come stay with us again and receive a complimentary appointment.”
Efficiency comes into play for this reason: Targeted marketing emails produce 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs than undifferentiated campaigns. 76% of all email marketing revenue comes from more advanced practices than generic broadcast email.
Translation? By automating your marketing messages, you’re sending smarter campaigns that drive higher ROI. With set-it-and-forget-it campaigns like the upgrades campaign to incoming guests, it takes zero extra time to do it. Incorporating hotel marketing automation into your customer relationship management system can be a great path for increasing analytic capability and ultimately increasing sales.
4. Connect with guests throughout the customer journey
Pre-arrival upsell emails are great, but you want to continue staying connected with your guests throughout their journey with you. With on-property welcome letters, you are able to influence their first impressions of your hotel once they step foot onto your property. Personalize Welcome Letters and include management contact information (just in case) and relevant upgrade offers. Automate these emails so they’re always ready to go when guests arrive.
It’s smart to regularly schedule emails about events going on at your hotel in the form of weekly incoming guest newsletters. Marketing automation makes it easy to create a regular, consistent email schedule to boost your sender score all the while exposing recipients to all that your property has to offer.
5. Support operations team
In addition to pre-arrival upsells, on-property welcome letters, and weekly incoming guest newsletters, marketing automation is a great way to support your operations team so they can focus on the most important part of your hotel – the guests.
With data from guest surveys, send out automated emails to promoters and detractors so you can improve guest experiences for everyone. As the hotelier, you can easily create emails for either type of guests and send them accordingly with segmentation options. Encourage promoters to share their positive reviews and connect with detractors to show you genuinely care about making things right with special offers.
Another efficient way to use automated emails for your operations team is with operational announcements. Although you can’t predict the need for these announcements, with marketing automation, you will have the segment card ready to deliver messages when you need to. Moreover, monthly staff newsletters work perfectly when automated. Keep your employees in the loop and use these emails as opportunities to promote a positive and transparent work environment. This will create a better space for your employees. Happy employees mean better customer service for your guests.
Hotel marketing automation is a real time- and resource-saver in many regards. Whether it’s decreasing your workload by creating repeat campaigns or providing more useful insight into your guests’ preferences, the efficiency of automated email marketing campaigns leaves you with many opportunities to work on other aspects of your hotel to optimize guest experiences.
