Supercharge your hotel’s digital marketing with your CRM data
Streamline your marketing efforts
Your hotel CRM isn’t only the hub for your guest-facing operations. It can also supercharge your hotel’s digital marketing by leveraging real-time guest data to shape your strategy.
A CRM-augmented marketing strategy offers three powerful benefits. First, you’ll earn more repeat bookings from your best guests. Second, you’ll optimise spend across channels by putting your ads in front of the highest intent audiences. Finally, you’ll remain top-of-mind among those that may be traveling soon.
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By embedding your CRM’s single source of truth into your digital marketing, you’ll drive direct bookings, repeat bookings, and stay top of mind with travellers. Here’s how to eliminate the guesswork in your marketing by automatically identifying your ideal audiences and continually growing your list of potential guests, all based on CRM data.
Organise your CRM
To supercharge your digital marketing, you’ll need a well-organised CRM that creates clarity, not confusion. It should be a single shared source of truth that accurately aggregates customer data so that you can use it to optimise efforts elsewhere. That said, none of that will work if your CRM is disorganised or full of bad data!
Segment your data
Segmentation is the secret sauce for digital marketing. The better you are at refining your audiences, the better you can optimise your marketing’s tone, creative and placement. Not to mention that you’ll be able to craft compelling offers that speak specifically to individual segments more effectively. The more relevant, the better!
We call proper segmentation “decoding the guest print.” Each guest print is a segment that combines past stay patterns (booking value, booking frequency, length of stay) with demographics and psychographics.
Develop dynamic campaigns
The beauty of augmenting your digital marketing with CRM data is that you can develop dynamic campaigns that adjust based on various parameters. These campaigns will personalise offers, convert better, and make for a better guest experience, as guests aren’t sent irrelevant offers.
Your CRM’s guest data can supercharge three core dynamic campaigns:
Upsell campaigns: Each guest communication is an opportunity to offer a targeted upsell based on a guest’s declared preferences and past behaviour. If you know a guest often books a spa treatment during their stay, why mention booking a tee time in their pre-arrival email? It’s a missed opportunity for an upsell, and makes the guest dismiss the irrelevant offer.
Social media: In addition to upsells, use dynamic content to speak to both past and potential guests on social media. Consider adding a Facebook product catalogue, which is a powerful dynamic demand generator. These catalogues allow you to build social media marketing campaigns that dynamically insert copy, images, and prices based on each user’s demographics, psychographics, and past behaviour, such as retargeting website visitors with the exact contents of their abandoned carts. The catalogue can be uploaded in various languages and used on Facebook’s websites, which significantly expands its reach and efficacy.
Retargeting: Abandoned carts aren’t always a sign that the guest has given up. Perhaps they got distracted or are still considering the stay. In so far as you can within your local laws and platform rules’ parameters, find ways to automate dynamic campaigns that re-engage potential lost guests. These could be paired with hyper-targeted offers that entice them to book via an automated email.
Capture more non-room revenue
Your CRM can help you earn more non-room revenue by identifying guests with strong on-property spending patterns so that you can personalise communications. It’s not necessarily to offer discounts, upsells, or other promotions – although those could work if the goal is to get a high-value guest on- property by providing a deep room discount (such as at a casino hotel).
There are other ways to use your CRM data to incentivise the spending behaviour – the best being dynamic content that highlights specific things that may interest the guest:
- For a foodie, the pre-arrival email and on-property communications should focus on what’s new in the restaurant (and perhaps even promote a chef meet-and-greet for the most valuable guests).
- For golfers, it’s tips on improving the golf game (and priority tee times).
- For spa lovers, include wellness tips that they can try at home, shared by their favourite facialist (with a link to book).
You get the idea. It certainly adds another dimension to your marketing operations, but once the work is done to create content for each segment, the outreach can be automated so it’s front-loaded, and keeps delivering dividends long after the email copy has been written.
Bringing it all together
Your CRM is not just a resource for the front desk. It’s a value-generating asset for marketing. As the business world shifts towards first-party data, which is data generated from your own business and not paid, rented, or otherwise owned by another entity, your guest data is pivotal.
Tina Markowitz, VP, Global Digital Strategy, Cendyn. A digital strategy leader with a proven history of creating innovative, data-driven campaigns that deliver business results. Core competencies include Digital Media Planning/Buying (search, social, programmatic), Integrated Marketing, Measurement & Attribution, Content Strategy, and Influencer/Event Marketing.
