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 and 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 Directful to address these challenges and transform their past guests into loyal direct 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 enable the creation of comprehensive guest profiles and the segmentation of 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 the platform’s proprietary data.
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 allows 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.
Branded hotel, 50–100 rooms
Dover, DE
Directful Marketing Automation
Directful Guest Profile Enhancement
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