7 Hotel Marketing Automation Ideas To Boost Sales And Loyalty Today

Hotel marketing automation is growing. Why? Hotels are under pressure to optimize their marketing budgets and digital marketing strategy.

As a result, they need to find more efficient ways to attract potential guests from direct bookings, for example, with personalized videos. This is why I put together proven ideas to increase loyalty and revenue per guest today.

For instance, marketing automation can help hotels segment their customers and target them with personalized messages (videos, emails, images, and more). It can also keep track of customer interactions and preferences to then send effective email marketing campaigns. Similarly, they can automate loyalty program engagement to reward customers and generate more sales.

There are many marketing automation ideas hotels can execute today to boost sales and scale engagement across the customer journey. Let’s understand why hotel marketing automation helps successful hotels build solid marketing strategies and the practical ideas you can implement today.

Why Hotel Marketing Automation

The global crisis hotels and families have faced has been damaging many economies. As a result, hospitality companies are focusing on offering not only competitive rates but more importantly, a better experience.

Hence, hotels no longer sell beds; they market experiences. Marketing automation helps hotels to scale engagement before, during, and after their stay. This allows hotels to focus on creating memorable experiences for their guests, rather than simply providing a place to sleep.

At the same time, hotel marketing automation helps these companies be more efficient with smaller budgets by automating tasks that would otherwise be completed manually. For example, making personalized videos at scale to engage with the customer base.

This frees up time and resources that even small marketing teams can use to focus on more important tasks. For instance, hotel marketers can boost the hotel’s online and offline presence to acquire potential customers through new marketing channels.

Automation can also help to ensure that tasks are completed accurately and in a timely manner. This is relevant when hotels need to launch many campaigns during hot seasons.

Ideas To Boost Hotel Sales And Engagement Today

#1 Segment Direct Booking Customers

Most hotels understand the theory behind segmenting their digital marketing, but many struggle to put this into practice. Marketing automation can help.

Hotel CRM and email marketing tool Revinate found that hotels that segment their email campaigns see an increase in sales. So this is an achievable opportunity for hotel marketers to create effective email marketing to target their current email list and drive more sales.

There are a number of ways hotels can segment their audiences. Here are a few common and effective ways:

• By hotel destination. The hotel’s location is a key factor in the guests’ experience of the surrounding area. This will appeal to different types of potential customers.
• By origin of the guests. Guests coming from colder climates may prefer locations with warmer weather for their holidays. This can help them to relax and enjoy themselves more during their time away. You can reflect this in your targeted marketing.
• By the age of the kids. Hotel customers traveling with kids have a totally different mindset, wants, and concerns. That’s why our clients use this information to personalize their marketing and keep clients informed.
• By interests. For instance, let’s take pet lovers. Or customers who are interested in cultural activities.
• By average stay days. Some guests choose weekends because they are looking for a romantic weekend, while others prefer weekdays, so they can go for a family vacation. This affects budgets, and their ultimate decision.
• By budget. There are some guests who only buy when there is an offer available (for example, on Black Friday). Other loyal customers may only buy on certain dates they’ve set apart, and value a great experience more than money.
• By the type of customer. B2B hotel customers are totally different from B2B hotel guests. Your hotel’s digital marketing needs to reflect this. For instance, B2B offers great expansion opportunities for account-based marketing and sales. Similarly, B2C guests can be clients for a lifetime!

By tailoring your message to a specific group, you are more likely to capture their attention and encourage them to book a stay at your hotel. Many marketing automation tools can help you get there. However, you must craft the segmentation approaches that fit your marketing.

The lead is already on your email list. Now it’s time to generate more sales from that list, smartly. Segmentation is one of the most underused tools for getting there.

#2 Track Preferences Automatically

The hospitality industry is all about providing a unique experience for guests. This is what the hotel industry has done for centuries with face-to-face interactions.

But hotel digital marketing and customer experience bring new opportunities to deliver a superior guest experience and boost sales. This means understanding what they want and need and tailoring the experience to suit them.

There are many ways hotels can track preferences with hotel marketing automation. Most of these ways are a perfect fit for small marketing teams. Here are a few ideas:

• After-stay surveys. Use automation to send after-say surveys to customers. Lead positive reviews to a review portal. Automatically send a notification to a guest experience manager whenever there is a negative experience. This way, this person can call the customer right away. If it is a B2B customer, this will also make it easier for the sales teams also to uplift customer loyalty.
• Add a QR to the hotel rooms. Ask guests to scan an option that reflects their interest. Use automation to match their answer with the booking information and add this information to your CRM.
• Send one-click email questions. All the customer has to do is click on the answer that reflects their interest. Then, through automation, this information is saved to your hotel marketing automation software, CRM, or booking engine.
• Track navigation and customer behaviors. When possible, through a tracking system, track user behavior through the hotel’s e-commerce site. This way, you’ll know which products and services customers visit. From there, you can automatically trigger personalized campaigns.
• Use a chatbot. Chatbots are a great way to gather prospect, lead, and customer data. Add a chatbot to the hotel web to interact with visitors and ask targeted questions.

Remember, in a digital world, it’s no longer enough to just provide a bed for the night. Thus, hospitality businesses need to go above and beyond to stand out from the hotel right on the other side of the street.

By understanding their guests and providing an experience that meets their needs, hoteliers can ensure that they’re providing the best possible experience and service. This data is also relevant and can help marketing professionals create offline marketing material and collateral to support sales.

#3 Create Effective Campaigns With Personalization In Emails To Customers

It’s time to create effective ecommerce email marketing campaigns using personalization strategies, now that you are already segmenting your audience and tracking preferences. With this approach, you can craft messages that will resonate with each individual recipient.

A personalized email is one that includes the recipient’s name or other information in the subject line or body of the email. This makes the email more personal and can help build a relationship with the recipient.

Take a look at the following image. It shows an email with personalization for the hospitality industry:

Now, let me highlight the personalization tags and content in the email:

Marketing automation platforms help you scale these email campaigns even with personalization. So don’t limit yourself. Use automation to enrich your emails to customers with more contextual information based on the contact’s needs and context.

Marketing automation platforms are a great way to scale email campaigns while still providing personalization. By automating email campaigns, you can add more contextual information based on the contact’s needs and context. This makes email campaigns more effective and efficient.

For example, with this approach, you can increase email click-through rates (CTR). According to Campaign Monitor, the average email CTR in the hospitality and travel industries is 8.7%.

At the same time, it can help you deliver targeted content marketing based on the augmented buyer persona. This is a more effective way to walk with current customers and increase loyalty as you interact with guests throughout the customer journey.

Watch the following video to learn how to create personalized emails that make hospitality customers engage and buy:

#4 New communication channels

Automated marketing brings new engagement opportunities to your revenue and marketing strategy. For instance, hotels that provide chatbots can answer questions at any time and even automate the reservation process.

This can be helpful for questions that are frequently asked, or for guests who have difficulty reaching the hotel staff. Chatbots can also help to forward the most difficult questions to the hotel staff so that they can be answered in a timely manner.

The use of social media automation is increasing as well. Automating social media management can help hotels save time and money while still building a strong social media presence. Automation can help hotels post content, track social media metrics, and engage with guests globally.

Automation can also help hotels manage their reputations by monitoring social media for negative reviews and responding quickly to resolve any issues.

#5 Engage With Guests With Personalized Video Marketing

The use of personalized online videos by hotels has become increasingly popular in recent years as a means of improving conversion rates. By creating videos that are specific to each customer, hotels are able to improve the quality of the engagement for pre-stay, stay, and post-stay emails to customers.

This not only allows for a more personal experience for the customer but also helps to increase conversion rates by ensuring that all communication is relevant and tailored to the individual.

A personalized video is a video that has been created specifically for an individual viewer. This can be done through a variety of methods, but most commonly, personalized videos are created using data that has been gathered about a CRM, PMS, or email contact.

Here is an example of a personalized video in the hospitality industry:

There are many ways you can use personalized videos in your marketing. That’s why I wrote another whole article on personalized video marketing. To see more examples and learn effective ways to use video personalization in your marketing, you can read my article about personalized video marketing with examples.

There are many ways hotels can use personalized videos in their marketing. For example:

• To deliver a superior onboarding guest experience.
• To increase revenue with upselling and cross-selling products and revenue strategies.
• To boost review gathering.
• To help customers understand the booking process and details.

No worries! You don’t have to make these videos one by one. Automatic video editing is one of the things we do here at Pirsonal.

#6 Welcome Hotel Clients With Dynamic Landing Pages

Hoteliers that want to increase their direct bookings should focus on creating dynamic landing pages and videos for their hotel website. By personalizing the content and Call-to-Action (CTA) for each visitor, hotels can increase their conversion rates and drive more direct bookings.

Creating a dynamic landing page is easy with most modern website builders. Now, if you want to go the extra mile, you can also use dynamic landing pages to engage with leads that have canceled a reservation. Also, to engage with those that didn’t complete the buying process.

With tools like Pirsonal Pages, you can automatically create a landing page for each guest powered by customer data from your CRM, PMS, or similar tool.

Personalized landing pages also help hoteliers boost revenue. How? Use them to show the value of value-added products like Spa, Gym, and more, based on the guests’ buyer personas.

Some common examples of dynamic landing pages are:

• Special offers for first-time visitors
• Package deals for families
• Business traveler discounts

#7 Use Interactive Videos To Help Customers Take Action

Are you using videos in your hotel marketing? Interactive videos are the best way to help hotel customers take action right from the video. By incorporating interactive elements into your videos, you can make a more engaging and interactive experience for your viewers.

This will help encourage them to take action, such as requesting a review or upgrading to a superior room or even offering coupons. Interactive videos can be used in a variety of ways, so be creative and experiment to find what works best for your business.

Want to go the extra mile? Use personalized interactive videos. With personalized, in-video calls to action, you can create tailored CTAs based on customer data, marketing segment, buyer persona a more.

With video marketing automation tools like Pirsonal Player, hotels can automatically add personalized CTAs to any video at scale.

Marketing Automation Workflow Example For Hospitality

Hotels Can Compete With Airbnb With Marketing Automation

Since 2010, Airbnb has seen a dramatic rise in market share. Statistics from 2019 estimate that Airbnb now accounts for upwards of 20% of the vacation rental industry as a whole.

This growth is indicative of the company’s strong position within the market. It also shows its ability to attract new customers to generate sales and its strong customer loyalty. Airbnb’s marketing efforts are tremendous.

However, hotels can beat Airbnb by doubling their loyalty efforts, which is something e-commerce platforms like Airbnb, Booking, and Uber do really well through digital channels.

So, based on the current flow of direct bookings, hotel e-commerce managers and marketers need to use automation to increase the quality and number of touchpoints. In many cases, hotels can use email, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger to do this.

From there, the hotel industry should also make reward and loyalty programs more accessible and obvious. Use automation and personalization to help guests understand their current status and how to enjoy even more benefits.

This, combined with face-to-face interactions and buyer persona-based communications, allows hotels to interact with past and current customers with relevant content on a regular basis.

Do You Need A Marketing Automation Platform For Hotel Marketing?

The hospitality industry is one of the most customer-centric businesses in the world. So it’s only natural that hotels would want to leverage marketing automation strategies to create more personal relationships with their guests.

However, in terms of technology and marketing automation tools, it is extremely fragmented. In many cases, hotels can use average market software to automate their marketing. As far as they can gather and unify guest data, we are still talking about communicating with customers through timely messages efficiently.

When it comes to marketing automation, it is best to first define your goals and what processes you want to improve with technology. By doing this, you can more easily select the right software and tools to help you reach your goals.

For example, if your goal is to increase leads by 30%, you would want to select software that specializes in lead generation. Not all marketing automation software is created equal, so it’s important to select the right one for your specific needs. In my cases, there is no need to use a specialized hospitality tool if you can manage to unify or bring data from your PMS or similar tool.

In Conclusion

With hotel marketing automation, hotels can send personalized emails to guests based on their behavior and preferences. For example, if a guest books a room online, the hotel can automatically send them a confirmation email with their reservation details.

Or, if a guest expresses interest in a certain type of room, the hotel can send them tailored information about that room type.

When it comes to marketing, segmentation is key. By using marketing automation to segment your audience, you can more easily personalize your message and target your content to meet the needs of your audience.

The hospitality industry is built on customer engagement and providing an exceptional experience. Marketing automation can help hotels boost sales and engagement by automating customer communication.

Automation can help to take the guesswork out of when and how to communicate with customers, freeing up time to focus on other aspects of the business.

In addition, automation can help to create a more personalized communication experience for customers, increasing the likelihood that they will return for future business.

After all, what’s more personal than being greeted by name when you arrive at a hotel?

Most hotels struggle to make marketing automation and personalization work. At Pirsonal, we help travel and hospitality companies make their saturated audiences take action. We provide a flexible personalized video platform and consultancy services to help you win your guests’ hearts, minds, and pockets.