How a Delaware hotel boosted revenue by $142,000 by re-engaging past guests
- USE CASES
- Win back past guests
- Increase repeat bookings
- Boost direct bookings and revenue
- Property type and size
- Branded hotel, 50–100 rooms
- Region
- Dover, DE
- Solutions used
- Directful Marketing Automation
- Directful Guest Profile Enhancement
Unlocking the Power of Repeat Guests
In the dynamic playbook of hotelier strategies, re-engaging past guests stands out as an often overlooked yet vital asset for boosting direct bookings. Past guests are the hotel’s most highly converted segment, reflecting the dedicated time and effort invested in delivering exceptional guest experiences.
Surprisingly, hotels aren’t fully capitalizing on this fundamental revenue source, despite Marketing Metrics research indicating that selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70%, far surpassing the 5-20% rate for acquiring new ones.
Despite the clear benefits of bringing back past guests, only a small percentage of hoteliers have access to enough data and tools to streamline this process. Our client, a distinguished business hotel located in Delaware, recognized the need for an innovative approach to overcome several challenges:
1. Fragmented Guest Data
In the quest to re-engage past guests, the hotel encountered a major challenge—fragmented guest data. They needed an effective tool to obtain missing information, tools in place to obtain missing information when guests fail to provide complete details.
2. Tools and Techniques to Boost Repeat Bookings
To increase the number of repeat bookings, hotel managers needed to leverage the right marketing techniques and new technologies to reconnect with past guests efficiently.
3. Time-Consuming Outreach
Reaching out to past guests individually can be a labor-intensive task, particularly for hotels with limited marketing budgets or small teams. Our client sought an automated solution to efficiently reconnect with past guests without investing hours of valuable time.
Now, let’s delve into how our client utilized the Directful to address these challenges and transform their past guests into loyal direct bookers.
Solutions for Turning One-Time Guests into Repeat Bookers
1. Data Integration for Enhanced Guest Profiles
To address the challenge of fragmented guest data, the hotel leveraged Directful Guest Profile Enhancement. Directful’s advanced AI capabilities enables the creation of comprehensive guest profiles and segment the hotel’s customer base.
This complex task is achieved by collecting and consolidating guest information from various sources, the existing Property Management System (PMS), third-party sources, and platform’s own proprietary data.
As a result, the hotel successfully compiled a robust database of over 27,000 past guests. More impressively, the hotel recovered more than 4,700 guest profiles that were previously unusable for marketing campaigns. This achievement represented a pivotal step in their journey towards repeat guest engagement.
2. AI-Powered Segmentation and Personalization
Leveraging the wealth of data at their disposal, the hotel harnessed the capabilities of artificial intelligence to send highly effective, hyper-personalized campaigns that resonated with each guest.
By employing automated data analysis, AI identified distinct guest segments based on a multitude of factors. Leveraging the capabilities of Directful Marketing Automation, the hotel then delivered tailored messages to individual guests, precisely addressing their unique preferences, interests, and prior interactions with the establishment.
For instance, guests who hadn’t returned to the property within specified timeframes, such as the last 3, 6, or 12 months, were re-engaged with personalized campaigns. This strategic move resulted in a remarkable increase in repeat bookings, reaffirming the effectiveness of personalized guest engagement.
3. Revolutionizing Guest Engagement Through AI Automation
To address the challenge of time-consuming outreach, our client adopted the Directful Marketing Automation solution, seamlessly integrating it with the hotel’s PMS. The results were transformative, as this integration enabled the automated execution of marketing campaigns designed to re-engage past guests, all without requiring additional work from the hotel staff.
Moreover, Directful offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop campaign builder that allowed the hotel to leverage pre-built templates crafted by marketing experts and grounded in industry best practices. Rather than starting from scratch, the hotel used these templates as a foundation and then customized them to precisely match their specific needs.
Another critical advantage of AI automation is its capability to predict when guests are most likely to make a new booking and then re-engage them at precisely the right moment. Thanks to the Directful Marketing Automation solution, the hotel ensured that guests received personalized messages at strategic intervals, resulting in increased guest engagement and higher conversion rates.
Results & conclusion
The implementation of innovative strategies and the utilization of Directful’s solutions resulted in remarkable outcomes for the Delaware-based business hotel.
By embracing AI-powered solutions, our client successfully transformed one-time guests into loyal repeat bookers, greatly enhancing guest satisfaction and boosting revenue generation. Here are the key results achieved:
- A database enriched with over 4,700 previously inaccessible guest profiles.
- 569 past guests successfully made repeat bookings through targeted campaigns.
- A remarkable $142,000 in conversion revenue generated through these efforts.
- An impressive 22% conversion rate on campaigns targeted at past guests.
In conclusion, this case study underscores the value of investing in AI-driven solutions and personalized approaches to maximize the revenue-generating potential of past guest engagement in the competitive hotel industry.
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