How CRM has evolved the digital landscape
The landscape of how we manage our data has changed. People are more aware of how important data is when it comes to making decisions about pricing, marketing campaigns, investment and hiring. But as this data management grows increasingly complex, hotels have shifted their focus to software platforms that can assist them with make these important business-focused decisions.
Why is data so important?
First of all, data tells you who your guests are and how to connect with them in meaningful, memorable ways. It also helps you identify your most valuable guests, entice them back, and find others like them. All of which advance the three ultimate objectives of hotel management: driving profitable revenue, increasing guest satisfaction, and earning guest loyalty. Using a central data warehouse, like a hotel CRM, enables hoteliers to leverage this data by storing all the relevant information needed for each guest in one central platform.
How has data affected the industry?
For the travel industry, this evolved way of managing guest data and providing guests with enhanced experiences throughout their travel experience has pushed the boundaries on what can be expected. Digitally, we have never been so engaged with so many different channels and through this, we now expect brands to be able to provide us with the content, information and experience that suits our needs.
What can we expect next?
The expectation of travelers will only continue to grow. As we become more aware of what we like, how we like to travel and what we like to experience, brands will have to keep up with being able to predict our travel needs and hoteliers will need to step up their game when it comes to managing and analyzing their data from each guest.
How do we achieve that?
Here are a few examples of how hotel CRM can help you aggregate your data and use it to provide the best experience for every guest:
- Manage marketing automation and guest intelligence at the enterprise level, including multi-property and multi-brand implementations. Ensure your guests are recognised and treated as loyal guests regardless of which hotel they stay at within your group.
- Analyze booking patterns, purchase history and sentiment for advanced targeting and higher guest satisfaction.
- Automate and segment communications based on a multitude of data points such as spend per stay, frequency, booking patterns, and reasons for travel.
- Automate website marketing, display advertising and social media marketing activities to drive more traffic to your website and improve guest retention rates.
- Match guests with any publicly available data across any social network and gather information about their behaviors across a range of channels.
- Build multiple best guest personas (e.g., mid-week, business travel, weekend, leisure, etc.) and target campaigns to each group.
- Find potential best guests based on demographics, lifestyle, behavior, preferences and travel history and target them with social advertising.
- Manage your loyalty program and integrate it with other CRM capabilities.
When you take an integrated, centralized approach to your data, it can unlock a tremendous amount of potential for understanding and engaging with your guests. Now is the time to do this and get ahead of the curve and prepare for
