Why Every Hotel Marketer Needs Closed-Loop Reporting

Closed-loop reporting is one of the most powerful tools that hotel marketers have at their disposal. Not only does it allow marketers to demonstrate their work’s value to their organizations, but it also enables them to improve their marketing.

What is closed-loop marketing?

First, let’s clarify what closed-loop marketing is. Closed-loop marketing is marketing that relies and on data and insights from closed-loop reporting. “Closing the loop” in terms of hospitality operations just means that bookings and other revenue are directly tied to specific marketing efforts, which helps hotel marketers understand their best and worst campaigns. Typically, this involves connecting your marketing analytics software with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. With closed-loop reporting, hotel marketers are then able to plan more strategically for the future by focusing on their best campaigns–those with the largest direct revenue attribution.

Focus on the right campaigns and offers

Closed-loop marketing gives you direct revenue attribution to your best campaigns and offers. By looking at what you’ve historically done right, you will be able to identify ways to continue to deliver the most effective marketing for your hotel’s customer base.

Report clearer results to your boss

The data you can gather thanks to closed-loop marketing will also help you build your authority and support the decisions you make in front of your boss. It shows that your strategy is driven by evidence and doesn’t rely on abstract theories or assumptions. It also enables you to build powerful marketing presentations for organization-wide meetings. For example, consider how much more impactful it would be to tell your boss that with your latest targeted email marketing campaign, you drove $45k in revenue for the hotel? What better way to both validate your inbound marketing efforts and show your worth?

Gain insights about your guest database

With closed-loop reporting, you can gain a 360-degree view of the success of your marketing throughout the guest lifecycle. By looking at how guests interact with your emails, from the welcome email to the post-stay survey email to the re-engagement email, you collect insights about what subject lines, Calls-to-Action, and offers work with them. Using this information can help you build guest profiles.

Analyzing the path that your repeat guests take on the journey to purchase not only tells you something about those guests individually. It also tells you something about the needs and desires of your guest database as a whole. This kind of intelligence can help inform your future marketing efforts, and even your hotel’s offerings. For example, if an email prompting guests to book a tee time was successful, why not target those guests with an invite to a golf clinic in six months?

Set the right goals and expectations

By knowing precisely what your open, click, and conversion rates are for your marketing emails, you can set the right goals and expectations for your marketing and sales organizations each month. To ensure that you are moving in the right direction, you should also compare your current performance to last month’s, or last year’s.

Keep your guest acquisition cost low

It is much less expensive to get a loyal guest to re-book than it is to acquire new guests through OTAs or booking sites. Closed-loop analytics gives you insights about your marketing, so you can experiment with your messaging and figure out what your guests respond to. By consistently delivering relevant campaigns and developing intimate relationships with your guests, you can get those guests to book again and again, lowering your acquisition costs.

Want to learn more about hotel email marketing? CLICK HERE get our free on-demand webinar, Hotel Email Marketing: 5 Campaigns You Should Be Running.