‘The OTAs know more about your guests than you do.’ It’s a harsh comment but one that rings true for many. By compiling data and learning guest behaviour over time, OTAs have a competitive advantage over hotels in this field. This type of powerful data aids in marketing, advertising and product progression plans. The OTAs have mastered its use but it’s time for hoteliers to join in on the party too.
By providing a seamless booking process, loyalty schemes and targeted marketing advertising campaigns, OTAs have got it sussed when it comes to engaging with customers, but hoteliers can too and it doesn’t require using all your marketing budget to do it. By using the data you already have from each guest profile, hoteliers can learn about their guests’ behaviour and engage with them in the right way, using the right tools throughout the travel journey.
So, how can you create a robust guest profile?
1. Get their email address
Get their personal email address either at the front desk or before arrival via an online form sent via email. Using their temporary OTA email address, reach out to your guests and offer them an incentive to share with you their personal, direct email address.
2. Integrate your reservation data into one CRM or marketing platform
By pulling your PMS data into one consolidated platform, you have the ability to use this data, intertwined with marketing data collected over time.
3. Collect additional booking data
Up-sell to your guests prior to arrival and alongside this, store the data in one central place to track their behaviour. What’s their favourite restaurant? Do they always like Champagne on arrival?
4. Collate guest feedback
Not only does this improve your performance as a hotelier and a business as a whole, it’s important to see and understand what matters to each guest. This data can be stored and referred back to when a guest books again. Use it to your advantage.
5. Keep track of email marketing engagement
Engagement data is an important way to track how a guest perceives your brand. By tracking your email marketing campaigns, you can see how that guest has interacted with your promotional material and therefore how they wish to interact with you in their personal time.
So now you have a guest profile, how do you use it?
1. Setup marketing automation
Using reservation and behavioural data, automated emails can be set up following a booking to target specific types of guests. Hoteliers can engage with their guests in an effective and efficient way that improves brand perception, provides a personal experience and drives engagement with each guest. Of online consumers, 69% agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company’s message influences their perception of a brand. With this in mind, we suggest segmenting automated emails based on the timing, type of reservation, type of booking, location of traveller and no./type of guests in their party.
2. Provide up-sell opportunities that are tailored for each guest
Based on reservation data, a great way to encourage engagement prior to arrival is to provide a platform for guests to research their travel destination, make activity or restaurant bookings, learn about the surrounding area and tailor their trip to their needs. This can either be via the hotel website or through a separate online platform.
3. Request feedback and send reminders
If a guest hasn’t completed their online survey or shared a TripAdvisor review, send a reminder to that guest. This can not only improve survey completion rates, but also increase review volume online and therefore influence TripAdvisor ranking.
4. Tailor your email marketing efforts
It’s so easy to draft a campaign and just hit ‘SEND ALL’ to your entire database. Some people will click through, a small portion may then book but you’ll find that over 95% of recipients may not even open the email at all.
So why not try a different approach? With all the data you’ve collected from your guests, we suggest using some of it to tailor your promotional communications to each guest. According to research, campaigns that are sent to segmented lists and contain relevant information can achieve up to a 760% increase in revenue. Remember, your email automation and email marketing efforts are all an extension of your brand and therefore affect how a customer or guest perceives your brand. The more relevant and personal the message, the better the perception from the recipient.
Summary
We can see now more than ever that it’s not just about providing the best customer experience – it’s about how you win, engage and hold on to customers in a competitive and crowded landscape. By targeting guests in the right way, using the right tools and ideas, hotels can keep up with OTAs in how they engage with their guests, not by draining their budgets by competing with the OTAs, but simply by understanding their guests’ behaviour and acting on it in the right way.
About the author
Nicki Graham is the Marketing and Communications Manager at Guestfolio, a guest engagement and marketing platform hat helps hoteliers engage, convert and retain guests. The company’s goal is to personalize the travel experience for guests and provide insights and tools that build lasting brand loyalty for its hotel customers.
