Hospitality Industry? – Catch The Rocket Now…!

 

Hotel industry is again gaining momentum after the long pandemic lockdowns, travel restrictions, vaccination, and online hotel reservation carts abandoning. Now hotel marketers and hoteliers of all sizes are keen on regaining their existing customers and at the same time, want to attract new customers.

Many things have changed during the pandemic, like pricing, hotel stay procedures - to ensure social distancing, enhanced facilities for Covid-19 prevention and how the guests are ensured safe stay, and much more. It is important to communicate these information to your customers to gain their confidence. Communicating your safe-stay assurance and new offers to individual customers should be the primary objective. One of the best methods to reach individual customer, is sending personalized emails. The process of systematically running an email marketing campaign and subsequent transactional emails play a crucial role for Hotel or Hospitality industry to catch the Rocket (not the Bus). There needs to be a hotel marketing plan or strategy through online advertising to attract the target market. Let’s go deeper on how to capitalize the situation and gain momentum super-fast…

The process starts from list generation. Contacts list generation is the base for the marketing activity (other than generic Ads on print media / social media / mass media) as well as the customers journey in the marketing & sales cycle. Generation of  contacts list is mainly from three sources. First take all the contact details from your existing repository or contacts database. Other two sources are explained below:

How to generate list from Hotel records

Identify where all guests are requested to give feedback when they are in your premise or your website; like restaurants, bars, boutiques, etc. Collect and consolidate the contacts with your contacts database and reconcile to eliminate duplicates. Important point to is, whenever you collect the guests’ contact details, get their consent on receiving promotional emails / newsletters. In case they opted “No” for this, please identify and keep that in a separate list. Do not include it in your mailing list.

How to generate list through Sign up forms

New contacts through signup forms are generated via your signup forms in your website or landing pages of your social media Ads. When you publish Ads in social media and generate traffic to your website or specific landing pages, make sure to collect the contact details of audience and their consent for promotions, offers and newsletters.

But that’s not all; just setting up your signup forms isn’t enough to collect emails. You need to entice them to hand over their details. To do that, you can offer incentives (so-called lead magnets) like:

Members-only deals / discounts

·         Early room check-in

·         Discount for their stay

·         Hotel guide with information about the area

·         Upgrades or extras like free spa/massage

Now, you’ve got the hotel marketing plan in place. But to launch a signup form requires some coding skills. It’s not a challenge when you use tools like GetResponse to build your forms and integrate them into your website or social media platforms. Even more, you can set GetResponse to show your signup form when visitors meet certain parameters like:

·         After they spend X number of minutes on a page

·         When they click a particular button 

·         When they’re about to leave a page

These popups can be on your landing page or any standalone page that where the audience has landed from links from your social media ads.

One of the most important point to be focused here is, you should not popup the entire signup form asking the audience a lot of information about them (like name, email Id, location, company, etc.). Instead, you can ask only a single piece of information at a time. This method will likely be fetching you a significant subscription rate.

Segment Your Audience

Segmenting your audience is very important. Segmenting requires a little bit of knowledge about the audience, like:

·         Existing customer or new visitor

·         Family / vacation / business customer

·         For a business traveler, whether they expect restaurant for business lunch

·         Are they from a different location or a local citizen, etc.

The above segmentation is just an indication of the type of customer. However, you can create your own segmentation based on the facilities and the target audience. Segmentation drives your email content, offers, privileges and lot other things. So, please make a sensible segmentation.

 

Send Personalized Mails

Always send personalized emails to your audience. This is because the abandoning rate of online bookings in hotel industry is very high (over 80%). So, all the bookings are not a confirmation of stay. In this tough conditions, it is important to retain your existing customers by way of personalized offers and privileges.

Also, the existing customer will be delighted to get a welcome mail and offers that are exclusive and personalized ones. This will make the customer feel special and the hotel reservation abandoning rate will be reduced.

Even though you run an offer for all the business class customers across the board, the mail content should show as it is specifically offered to the recipient. To do this, place the customer name wherever possible in the mail content and avoid generic addressing style.

The loyalty programs or discounts that you offer should always have a time limit, expiry date or an event or season based. e.g. Halloween Offer or Returning customers month offer, etc.

Designing the email body again a skilled coder’s job. However, you can build a nice email body through existing email templates or create your own design by tools offered by tools like GetResponse. It’s an easy to design tool with simple drag & drop features, that doesn’t require any coding or designing skills.

Transactional Emails

Many times the importance of transactional email is not considered as the marketing email. But, it plays a major role in engaging your customers right from the marketing, sales to the after sales service process. It completes the full circle of the customers’ journey with your hotel. For example, let me give a possible journey of a customer for better understanding: Customer books a suite in your hotel, you send an automated, yet personalized confirmation email > send reminder a couple of days before the booked date, reminder on the check-in date with check-in procedure > share your guest manager contact details >  customer checks-in in your hotel, send a welcome mail > customers’ booking on business lunch or any other facilities, trigger a reminder mail > customer checks-out > thank you mail with customer’s rating request.

This is just a sample flow and subject to change based on your operation styles. These transactional emails completes the journey circle and gives the customer a comfort feel.  All these automated mails can be set by you without any special skills using tools like GetResponse.

Customer focused email systems plays a fair role here to automate the process right from list generation through offers, lead generation, customer retention / acquisition and after sales service. It’s time now to really pull your socks and start your campaigns and achieve new heights in the new normal and the new beginning… Don’t miss the rocket…!