The Future of CRM, AI and machine learning for hotel marketing – Part 3
Distinctive, optimized marketing campaigns
Successful marketing is relevant and contextual. With an AI-powered CRM, it’s feasible to deliver relevant messages personalized to each guest and according to the context of each channel. This “right message, right time, right channel” approach improves outcomes for marketers who will spend more efficiently to reach specific segments.
Relevancy and context also matter immensely to optimizing hotel marketing across all phases of the guest journey. Relevant offers, delivered at the right time in the ideal channel, perform far better than mass marketing messaging without any context.
While this all sounds nice, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish manually. There are simply not enough hours in the day to create micro-segments, brainstorm messages, create graphics, and then monitor the resulting experiments. AI liberates hotel marketers to be bolder, experiment more often, and amplify what works best.
Pricing that’s precise — and profitable
Data’s prevalence has transformed the way hotels price rooms, upgrades, and packages. Revenue management has become a core competency and data analysis skills are just as important as operational chops.
The downside to all this data is a growing sense of dread that there’s never enough time to analyze everything. Rather than walking the property, serving guests, or inspiring staff, many managers feel like they’re stuck crunching numbers or blindly creating offers and incentives without basis in data.
AI rectifies this imbalance and tips the scales back towards having more time for true hospitality. Offers, incentives, packages, and group sales proposals can be based on CRM data to inform a more precise, profitable pricing strategy.
Defining the future of CRM today
Continuous optimization based on unified data is the future. Data silos undermine your business with manual data look-ups, guesswork and delays. Hotels must centralize information from multiple systems into a single source of truth for data-driven guest engagement, end-to-end efficiency, and informed decision-making.
When you’re able to drive direct and repeat bookings with the right message automatically delivered at the right time, you improve marketing ROI and overall profitability. We’re only just beginning to unlock the power of AI-enhanced CRM — the potential is limitless, so take the time to consider how next-gen CRM should factor into your technology plans today.
This article originally appeared in the “Hotel Yearbook 2020 – Digital Marketing” edition.
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