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Benefits and Challenges of using Customer Data for Marketing your Hotel
There are many ways to use your customer database for marketing your
property. Email marketing is not new to the fold, however, it has evolved,
through the use of customer data. It is no longer acceptable to send blast
emails to everyone in our database, we must consider GDPR and if the offer we
are sending is relevant to the person receiving it. For email marketing to be
beneficial it must be highly personalised. To create personalised
emails, we must have a strong customer database with relevant details. Once you have a good customer database all
you need to do is add a little creativity and you have a successful campaign.
The Benefits of Using Customer Data for Email Marketing
- Emails are permission-based, so it is a less invasive way to communicate with past guests or visitors that sign up via your website. Using targeted emails will result in fewer unsubscribed.
- You can use your Property Management system to collect data that can be easily segmented into different markets. For example, if you would like to grow your leisure market you can send direct emails to families, couples, and other leisure travelers. You can also segment geographically, this was especially useful during the recent Covid 19 pandemic, as hotels could directly target the staycation market with offers.
- One of the main benefits of email marketing is that it can be easily tracked. It’s as simple as including a UTM parameter on a “Book Now” button to track conversions
- Cost-effective way of communicating with customers – personally!
Challenges of Using Customer Data for Email Marketing
- Keeping data up to date can be a challenge, it is not always possible to contact visitors to correct email addresses.
- Customers can unsubscribe easily
- GDPR does not allow you to store data for long periods, so you need to entice customers to opt in to your email customer database.
- Reliant on Front Desk to ensure email addresses are correct. Often an unusual name can be misspelled in an email and therefore is invalid.
- Online Travel Agents collect the customer data at the time of booking and do not share it with you.
While customer data is a very useful way of communicating your offers to the right people at the right time at little cost, there are some challenges. In order to ensure you reap the benefits, you must ensure accuracy when collecting customer data for marketing.
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Written by Daire Dillon
great post
ReplyDeletegreat tips and some excellent takeaways and food for thought.
Caitriona
This is a great post Daire, I like the challenges that you highlighted on this post. It can be difficult to maintain databases up to date when the front desk team do not update email addresses (usually due to lack of time) when the customer has booked through travel agents and those are the customers hotels want to be able to contact so they can book directly the next time. - F, Pinate.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great blog Daire and very valid. In a hotel, so much information is taken via the phone when customers call to book and also on check-in so all this information is reliant on the staff to input this correctly. When information is input incorrectly you are losing the chance of a future sale. Email marketing is crucial to business and as you said for GDPR purposes you need to get the customer to opt in. I see a lot of hotels currently offer a 5% discount for opting into your database. Overall great read.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great blog Daire and keeps very much to the point on the benefits of using customer data for email marketing which forms a large part of a hotel's online marketing strategy. It is important to note that a big challenge in the hotel industry is the lack of infrastructure. Whilst hotels have their PMS systems, many hotels do not have their email marketing channels integrated with them resulting in a lot of manual work in putting their databases together. This coupled with the lack of resources of staff with expertise in online marketing means many hotels especially the smaller hotels do not have the right people managing their CRM systems correctly and therefore not maximising the opportunity of using their customer data in the correct and legal manner.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great blog read Daire and explained well for those of us who are new to evaluating key data . Your highlighted key challenges in terms of high level awareness that makes the reader curious about how to address these . I would suggest adding a perspective from front line teams eg receptionists, reservation agents to illustrate the point that these staff members often dont have an understanding of data protection obligations. Great read, cant wait for the next blog :)
ReplyDelete