Hotel loyalty 3:10 Min read
Marketing tools to make your hotel customers loyal.
To make current hotel customers loyal and spread awareness for your hotel, you must also work with other marketing tools (and strategies).
It is very likely you are familiar with hotel loyalty programmes. And that the benefits involved are highly demanded by guests. So, it’s likely you already have one or are thinking about creating a loyalty system to help you define and manage points and levels. But, do you know how to increase the number of loyal customers?
The truth is a loyalty tool is not everything when your goal is to get more guests to participate in your programme. And this programme surely offers major advantages, right? But, how will they know about it if you don’t engage in loyalty marketing?
To make current hotel customers loyal and spread awareness for your hotel, you must also work with other marketing tools (and strategies).
CRM Software
For your hotel, CRM is an essential tool on many levels. On the one hand, you can store, manage and analyse your entire customer database in one place. On the other hand, you can implement different marketing and customer service strategies including loyalty strategies.
Why is CRM software essential to making customers loyal?
Firstly, CRM is now both a tool and a strategy that allows you to know your hotel customers perfectly. Just think that with CRM, you can know what your customer is like in all the buying phases from searching for information to arriving at their holiday destination and even after staying at your hotel.
For example, you can know if a customer is only interested in coastal hotels or only stays at “Adult Only” hotels. You can know what type of board options they always choose or how much they invest in their stays. You can even maintain a record of how many times they’ve asked for an upgrade or how often they stay at your hotels.
And this information is highly valuable when managing marketing and loyalty campaigns. These data allow you to optimize the actions taken to encourage guest conversion to loyal customers as you can find out about their preferences based on the number of times they’ve stayed at your hotels.
In short, you can record relevant information on your customers to find out about their destination preferences and hotel stays.
Secondly, CRM allows you to segment your contacts into different lists based on common characteristics or actions taken at your website or during their stay, for example. You can implement actions that are more focused on their preferences with these lists. In the case of a loyalty strategy, emphasis may be placed on additional benefits or services that go beyond grabbing the attention of these potentially “loyal” or repeat customers.
Thus, this software not only allows you to record data such as actions taken by your customers but also enhance and focus marketing actions implemented by your team. In other words, the information recorded allows you to find out what type of material or content your users and customers have consumed, draw conclusions and create segmented lists to execute actions that improve conversion of repeat and loyal customers at your hotel.
Enrichment with PMS of guest data collected through Hotelinking WiFi:
Contracting a hotel CRM module is necessary to exploit and activate the data to generate email marketing and loyalization campaigns. The hotel CRM module can
easily and quickly segment them to personalize campaigns using a large variety of variables.
Email marketing software
Automatic email marketing software is another essential tool for hotels. In general, email marketing is one of the biggest assets for the tourism industry given the versatility. Associated with different goals, email marketing campaigns can be one of the great solutions for attracting and converting potential customers and even more so for making them loyal.
Is an email marketing tool necessary to make customers loyal?
Yes, absolutely. You have to remember you won’t always get your guests to agree to join your loyalty program after just one stay. You don’t really know them yet and they also don’t know you enough to accept such a commitment. Even though a loyalty programme offers them certain advantages, there is still some hesitation you must fix by generating engagement.
And how do you generate engagement? With an email marketing strategy focusing on making your customers loyal and getting them to stay again. With marketing automation software integrated into your CRM software, you can come up with a campaign to do just this.
On the one hand, you’ll have the necessary customer information to create segmented lists based on preferences. On the other hand, you’ll have a tool for sending specific emails focusing on generating engagement after your guests stay. And these emails can be personalized with the synchronization offered by both tools.
After all, email personalization is essential to connecting and making your customers loyal.
Email marketing software will allow you to create a responsive email design that fits your target’s style preferences and send them with personalized subject lines and bodies automatically.
This automatic personalization in emails is what offers a friendly image for your hotels. By sending information of interest and tracking stays, you can understand how to satisfy your customers; however, making everything personal is what can improve the click rate from emails.