Revinate

Data talks. Learn how to listen.

Data talks. Learn how to listen.

“It’s like playing a game of telephone!”

Have you ever heard someone say that? Maybe you played the game yourself as a kid? You know, the one where everyone sits in a circle, and one person whispers something in the ear of the friend to their left — starting a chain of whispers. Each friend repeats that “something” to the person sitting beside them until it gets back to where it all started. And almost 100% of the time, that “something” is so completely inaccurate compared to the original whisper.

When you have a database filled with inaccurate and even duplicate information, telling your guests’ stories becomes like playing a game of telephone — the story is all wrong.

Because, believe it or not, your data talks, and it tells a story about each of your guests. But in order to hear that story, you have to learn how to listen. And to listen, you need clean, accurate data that comes from your own systems in a variety of channels that you can control.

The question to ask yourself is, “How do we bring in data and make it easy to operationalize it and bring it to life?” Revinate CEO, Bryson Koehler asked and answered this exact question on the Hotel Moment podcast.

The answer starts with prioritizing the quality of your database.

What you will see here

Prioritize clean data

Clean data goes beyond telling each of your guests’ stories and is really just the beginning of your marketing journey. Clean data informs your entire marketing strategy and determines the success of your marketing funnel to target guests again.

But before you can get to the stage of feeding data into your marketing funnel, it has to be data that’s correct. Plain and simple. You can’t “link data together to continuously improve that view of the guest, to help the hotel, in real time, market to the right person, create the right segments, create the right opportunities, the right message” if it isn’t clean data, which Bryson explains is the core of what hoteliers do.

That’s why every character [guest] in your data story needs to have a clear and precise profile.

Here’s where identity resolution comes into play.

Identity resolution

Identity resolution is the facilitator of a great story. And you know you have a great story on your hands if you operate with technology that cleans profiles — readying that data to target your ideal guest.

Data expert Jeff Jonas, Founder and CEO of Senzing, highlighted on the Hotel Moment podcast, determining when two parties, two people, or two companies, are really the same even though they were described differently. When they made their reservation, they used this information. When they signed up in the loyalty club program, they used that information. And you don’t have three customers. It’s really one. And then, when you do that, your opportunity to also figure out who’s related to whom — households, families that share email addresses, even though they don’t share the same address. And that becomes really powerful as well for understanding value and risk.

Jeff’s talking about the significance of identity resolution. It’s how the Salamander Collection listened to their data stories — prioritizing clean data in order to personalize messaging to guests that called or booked online. As a result, information coming from any channel was filtered to the correct profile and led their team to achieve $45 million in direct revenue.

It’s about confirming with your teams, “Is this the story our data is trying to tell about this guest?” Because an OTA-masked email address and a profile for three different “Janes” that look oddly similar might not be the most accurate story to base your next email campaign on.

Don’t rely on third-party systems more than your own

We’ll get back to talking about data stories in just a second, but first know that the fastest way to drain profit from your hotel is to rely on third-party systems like OTAs. It’s only when you rely on your own system and data that you power a truly lucrative direct booking strategy.

And as Joe Pettigrew, CCO at EOS Hospitality, reminded us in his episode of Hotel Moment, “The only thing that matters in measuring the success of the hotel is the NOI. Nothing else matters.” One of the main ways to see a dramatic increase in NOI is to invest in a direct booking strategy. Shifting marketing dollars from OTAs to direct channels increases your revenue capture rate. While OTAs are likely to cost you 20%, direct booking channels are likely to be closer to 5% — preserving your NOI.

If we take this same idea of focusing less on third-party systems when it comes to data stories, then it’s much easier to actually hear those stories. Because who’s really telling your guest’s story? You or the OTAs?

In reality, if you don’t have control over your own data, then you’re getting the story from someone else — perpetuating the game of telephone and reducing the accuracy of that data story. As Bryson reiterated, “We depend on our own systems last, and we depend on third-party systems more, and that’s the opposite of where we need to be going.”

Take an omnichannel approach

“All of those channels — email marketing, voice, messaging — as we start to drive direct bookings across those channels, we’re also gathering that intelligence and putting it back into the engines, so it becomes a flywheel.”

That’s Revinate CMO and host of the Hotel Moment podcast, Karen Stephens talking about how Revinate’s solutions serving email, voice, text, and web channels feed data into our Revinate CDP to power direct bookings for hoteliers. Because it’s with an omnichannel approach that you can extract data insights from every channel to complete your guest’s data story.

Taking an omnichannel approach is what helped The Houstonian Club & Spa listen to their data story and drive 188 room nights. With this automated cart abandonment drip campaign, data from the hotel’s web channel informed their email channel with the data needed to transition guests from the inspiration phase to the booking phase of the guest journey — reminding them of all the reasons they wanted to book in the first place.

Once you know how your guest’s story unfolds on a number of channels, you can consistently execute personalized and segmented communication, stay after stay — a flywheel that’s always turning.

A true data story gives you superpowers

Your data does speak up and tell a story. Once you learn to listen to that story, your business becomes exceptionally powerful. The data stories about your guests never end, and as you continue to add more data, you strengthen guest communication and establish your power among competitors and OTAs — generating a loyal customer base you are close to.

To hear more about how to achieve data superpowers and hear your data story, listen to this episode of the Hotel Moment podcast with Revinate CEO, Bryson Koehler.

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