How Hotels Can Use Marketing Automation To Create Lasting Engagement

For hotels, staying ahead of the competition and encouraging repeat bookings are essential for lasting success. Marketing automation combines software and strategy to send individualised, relevant content at the perfect time, every time and every hotel guest.  


By HANNAH HAMBLETON
Consequently, guests are more engaged and more loyal; increasing bookings and revenue for the hotel. Streamlining marketing communications with automated software increases both the efficiency and capacity of hotel marketing.
Email automation easily adds value for every hotel guest
Adding value to a guest stay both before and after they visit is important to increase guest satisfaction with the hotel and its brand. Marketing automation makes this easy, giving hotels the tools they need to send automated and effective emails to their guests. Guests can be sent emails before they check-in such as sending directions, or asking if they need to book any hotel services such as a spa treatment or make a restaurant booking. Hotels can also use customer data to automatically send anniversary or birthday congratulations, encouraging bookings or boosting upselling opportunities for that specific occasion.  Using marketing automation software to offer this extra value personalises every experience guests have with a hotel, helping them to feel valued, engaged, and ultimately more loyal.

Increase social media engagement with marketing automation
Customers love to interact with a brand via social media, including Facebook and Instagram. And hotels are no different. Using marketing automation to underpin social media activity will amplify a hotel’s marketing, as well as help create genuinely engaged guests. Marketing automation makes the whole process much simpler for hotels, giving them the tools to understand which posts work for their audience, schedule future content and assess engagement automatically through click-through and download rates. Using automation successfully will boost levels of interaction and brand awareness, so it’s really important.

Marketing automation lets hotels accurately track and analyse guest behaviour
Hotels no longer have to guess about what their customers are thinking or doing; marketing automation gives hotels this information accurately and in real-time.  For example, data collected from guest WiFi use in combination with beacon technology and smartphones allows hotels to see how guests are interacting with every area of the hotel. As a result, hotels can then send personalised marketing messages tailored to each individual guest during their stay. Hotels can also automatically segment future marketing activity based on spend, booking history and demographic data. This automation boosts engagement and increases relationship longevity; essential for repeat hotel bookings.

Hotels will boost their essential social proof power
Great guest reviews are essential for any hotel, creating vital social proof to generate new hotel bookings and encourage repeat guest visits. Guests are often happy to share feedback on their recent stay, but asking each guest to do can be time-consuming. Hotel marketing automation makes it quick and simple to ask for reviews as soon as each guest checks out.  With automatic software, an email or push SMS can be sent asking for their feedback and highlighting how much a hotel values their opinion. As well as contributing to social proof, this is another tool to increase guest engagement and loyalty. Using software to do this automatically makes it quick and easy.

Hotel automation increases loyalty and engagement
Marketing automation lets every hotel provide people-based marketing guests now expect. In addition to essential guest data, hotels can automate individualised marketing communications too. Automating hotel marketing not only helps create a more efficient operation, it also creates lasting and genuine guest engagement.

Hannah Hambleton
http://www.beambox.com
Hannah Hambleton is the Content Manager for Beambox, a guest WiFi provider to thousands of hospitality and retail businesses, making it as easy as possible to drive loyalty. Hannah writes about hospitality marketing trends, giving businesses the tools to captivate and engage customers.alert-info
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