Modern hotel marketing requires personalization. If you’re still sending out a single communication to your entire database, it’s likely landing in spam folders or remaining unopened by your guests. Consumers don’t want to be spammed or treated like one of the masses. Rather, they want brands to make them feel special and appreciated as individuals. 

That’s why today, the best hotel marketers are implementing one-to-one guest communication using data that they capture in their hotel CRM. This data is used to segment guests, group them by similar characteristics, and personalize the message to ensure that guests feel understood by the hotel both before the stay and when they’re on the property. 

Segmentation of the guest database is important for communications that hotels send before the stay to ensure that promotions and upsell offers align with the needs of the travelers. Savvy marketers segment by geo-location, loyalty, demographics, and more. In fact, many hotels stayed afloat during Covid by marketing exclusively to their local customers who were able to access the hotel by car. They didn’t send offers to other guests who were unable to travel due to border restrictions or shelter in place orders. Doing so would have been a waste of effort and tone-deaf to the realities of the pandemic. 

Why is the segmentation of the guest database important for hoteliers when guests arrive? An invitation to a happy hour might be laugh-worthy to a mom traveling with her young son. But a young business traveler with no plans for the evening might relish the opportunity to network with other hotel guests. Another great segmentation opportunity is around staying purpose. A conference guest might be inconvenienced by an email alerting him to an open 3 pm slot at the spa but a leisure guest might jump at the opportunity to get a highly sought-after reservation. 

Research shows that close attention to segmentation pays off. As we showed in our recent Marketing Benchmark Report, emails sent to segments of less than 5,000 guests saw 4.2x the conversion rate compared to segments of 50,000 guests. When you target guests one-to-one, the conversion is even higher. In this blog post, we will share how hotel one-to-one guest communication helps our customers drive direct revenue. 

Personalization by Booked Room

Your Apartment is one of Bristol’s leading serviced accommodation providers with more than 125 fresh and vibrant serviced apartments in many of Bristol’s most iconic neighbourhoods. With so many varied units in different locations and with different amenities, Your Apartment personalizes the pre-stay email to ensure the right upsell offer is presented to the right guest, depending on the apartment. In addition, guests have all the information they need to access their rooms on their own.

Segmentation also allows Your Apartment to execute apartment-specific upsells that are driving significant revenue for the company. For example, at apartments where parking is available, it is proving to be a strong upsell. The company is also able to offer baggage drop-off for apartments located near their head office. One-to-one hotel guest communication makes this possible.

Read the case study here.

Personalization by Guest Feedback

The Stafford Collection is focused on creating personalized on-property experiences using data from post-stay guest feedback. Because this feedback is accessible to the team in Revinate Marketing, the marketing team can use it to personalize one-to-emails, in addition to the stay itself. So, for example, if a past guest complained about not getting enough towels, they can ensure that the room is well-stocked before they enter their room. Pre-arrival reports and access to the hotel CRM allow the staff to access and use guest data to provide the personalized experiences that they are known for and that drive revenue and loyalty.

Read the case study here.

Personalization by Net Promoter Score

Abbey Beach is generating a monthly ROI average of 156X thanks to one-to-one guest communication. Guests who’ve stayed more than a designated number of times receive a special series of emails for pre-arrival, on-property, and post-stay. OTA winback emails get sent to guests that previously booked stays through OTAs. Other valuable segments for the hotel include guests of the VIP program, past guests, and corporate travelers. Another important segment is detractors or guests that would not recommend the hotel to others. These guests receive a personal email from the general manager or other staff. This one-to-one touch allows the GM to win back the guest so they give the hotel another try. 

Read the Abbey Beach case study here.

In all these hotel marketing examples, the hotels used Revinate Marketing to create the personalized guest communication that drove powerful guest experiences and revenue. With Revinate, it’s easy to create and send completely customized touchpoints to your guests while ensuring brand consistency and campaign tracking. 

With Revinate Marketing, hoteliers can easily engage in powerful one-to-one marketing opportunities that include:

• Sending a one-time promotional code to a specific guest.
• Sending confirmation emails to VIP guests
• Customizing upsells for specific guests
• Sending emergency communications and/or other physical updates
• Sending a pre-booking email
• Sending an email alerting a guest that they’ve left something in their room
• Sending personalized messages to high touchpoint guests from the GM
• Sending any other type of individual and personalized communication to your guests

This functionality, released by Revinate at the end of 2020, is available to customers who upgrade to the Revinate 2.0 Enhanced Composer. The process to create these one-to-one communications is simple and requires no design or engineering resources. In fact, anyone can build these campaigns and take advantage of reaching out to guests in a highly personalized way.

Marketers can create a library of campaigns that can be accessed, in real-time, from a guest’s Rich Guest Profile by clicking on the “Direct Message” button on the top right corner of the profile. From there, marketers can select the campaign template they would like to send to the guest personalize it for the guest.

This feature even allows hoteliers to communicate with guests who have unsubscribed from your marketing communications since this email is one-to-one. As a precaution, Revinate will warn you that the guest has unsubscribed before allowing you to send the email. The best practice is for personalized emails to unsubscribed guests to be limited to non-marketing content.

If this hotel marketing solution sounds too good to be true, it’s not. It’s Revinate. Like everything we do, from guest feedback to hotel CRM, we have taken something technically complex and made it easily accessible for anyone on staff. With Revinate Marketing, you can create highly personalized emails and experiences that optimize your time while driving revenue. Want to learn more? Book a demo today.