When guests visit your hotel, they bring with them a wealth of potentially useful information, which usually goes untapped. Not only is it helpful to gather lots of information on your guests just for research purposes, but it also provides a great opportunity for remarketing and for targeting people who are like your guests.
The Smart-Data hotels need to be capturing
At a bare minimum, you need to be collecting the below basic info about guests (and others who utilise your hotel), which can be done as an SOP on arrival (speedy check-in via email for brownie points). It could be as simple as asking your guests to please fill in this information, if you make it easy for them, 95% won’t mind one bit.
- Name
- DOB
- Reason for stay
Using your Smart-Data in email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is one excellent way to use this data effectively to share information with past guests. By using one of the leading EMS systems such as Revinate, you can send an email out to only a list of past guests who fit certain criteria. For example, you can target people who are visiting on a city break with a specific city break offer or, families with a ‘kids eat free’ styled offer. In doing so, your email will be seen as more relevant and therefore will have a higher quality score in the eyes of any spambot filter.
Feeding your automated email series
What better surprise than waking up on your birthday and finding an email from your favourite hotel wishing you happy birthday and offering you a £20 voucher to spend on food? By collecting the DOB information, you can do just this. You can also send an email based on timings-rules meaning you can send an email roughly 60 days before their ‘stay-versery’ with a special offer to help entice them to be a repeat guest.
(This is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done with an effective automation series and we will be sure to write more on this in future..)
Using your data in your prospecting activity
At the time of writing, lookalikes are still firmly a real thing and that is another reason collecting data is crucial for your marketing. Let’s say you have Jane@gmail.com as an email address on your email list. If you feed this list into Facebook and ask to find lookalikes to target, Facebook will match Jane@gmail.com to Jane’s FB account and work out people who are similar to Jane based on her user behaviour. Now, imagine you want to promote your refurbished conference rooms, wouldn’t people similar to your 100 past conference guests be a good starting point?
Bottom line
As permission-based marketing slowly erodes the effectiveness of ad platforms abilities to target people based on interests, it will be increasingly important to arm yourself with the highest quality data possible. In applying Smart-Data to your SOP and marketing efforts, you can prove a greater ROI on your activity.