Amazon’s personalization efforts aren’t exactly new — but they’re certainly noteworthy. For years, its product curation and recommendation algorithm has made headlines. Amazon knows if you’re a country music lover with a dog, or a runner with an obsession for organic snacks. And, in turn, it delivers to you a plethora of personalized recommendations that often inspire unplanned purchase decisions.
Amazon is far from the only brand going one-to-one with its digital marketing. Target, Spotify, even certain airlines and vacation rental services are launching personalized marketing strategies that let their customers know they’re paying attention to their habits, behaviors and buying patterns and trying to customize offers that are specifically geared toward the individual. Stop by potterybarn.com, for example, and put a leather chair in your cart. Then leave. Within a few hours, you’ll likely get an email asking if you’re still interested in said chair and oh-by-the-way here’s a 15% off coupon code to use if you come back and purchase it.
Such data-activated marketing based on a person’s real-time needs, interests, and behaviors represents an important part of the new horizon of growth, according to a recent McKinsey & Company report.
Now for the million-dollar question: Can hotels do something similar?
“There’s a lot of opportunity here in the hospitality segment,” says Duetto’s Nathan Crisp, who was recently named VP of Managed Services and Customer Success, Americas. “At the moment, there isn’t a good platform to collect and analyze the cookies about a person’s online shopping habits and then translate them to present a personalized hotel offer—but the technology is coming soon.”
The goal for hotels, according to Crisp, should be for hotels to have a deeper digital profile on a guest based on their online behaviors. If they spend a sizeable amount of time on a golf-related website, then purchase a business-class airline ticket, a personalized offer for a corresponding hotel should be presented.
