As a hotel marketer, you know that managing multiple communication channels to reach out to potential guests can be an overwhelming task. With the ever-evolving digital landscape, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest trends and ensure consistent brand messaging across all channels. To make matters worse, gathering insights from guest data is often time-consuming, and manual processes are prone to errors.
What Is Customer Relationship Management Software for the Hospitality Industry?
Organizing and structuring your guest data properly is essential for improving outcomes within the marketing department and saving time, which is one of the key concerns of hotel marketers. In this regard, a hospitality customer relationship management (CRM) system is crucial for achieving your objectives.
A CRM for hospitality combines data from numerous sources and serves as a central data library for all your guest data. It differs from any other general CRM system because it considers all the important data hotels need for their business, and how it is structured makes sense for hospitality.
A CRM enables you to have all relevant data in one place, including contact information, preferences, booking history, and communication exchanges, by establishing a unified view of guest profiles. This means you can get a general overview of what is happening in your business, who your guests are, and their preferences.
According to the Customer, 76% of hoteliers claim that CRM helps them gain insights about the guests and their needs. A deeper understanding of guests leads to stronger relationships and loyalty.
But that is not all. There are four ways in which hotel CRM software can help marketers automate their workflows and uplift their marketing efforts by saving them plenty of time and centralizing their processes.
1. A Hotel CRM & the Power of Automation
Automation should not be understated when it comes to a hospitality CRM. This system can automate many repetitive, laborious marketing tasks that can otherwise consume much time and energy.
From email campaigns, WhatsApp campaigns, social media scheduling, and even entire guest journeys, these processes can now be automated in a fraction of the time it used to take.
As a hotel marketer, you know time is of the essence, and it is not a resource you can allow yourself to waste. In this sense, automation can free up your team’s resources and allow them to focus on creating high-performing initiatives rather than handling repetitive tasks.
Not only does automation save time, but it also supports consistency in messaging across different channels. How can you apply automation? Here are some tips:
- Review your guest journey and create triggers to automate specific campaigns, for example, booking confirmation, check-in reminders, and sending invoices.
- Create audiences and extract insights from them in seconds that will help you to understand where your guests are, how to allocate your budget better for paid media campaigns, and more.
- Collect data from guest interactions to understand your best and worst-performing campaigns and iterate.
- Create automated follow-up sequences to ensure no leads are missed or left behind, and everyone receives the same level of service independently of their channel (SMS, email, WhatsApp).
From wherever you look at it, you will be saving a lot of time and effort (and money) because tasks that can take up to several hours will be handled in minutes with the help of a CRM.
Is this interesting? You might want to learn about the triggers you can create with a CRM to automate your marketing communication.
2. A Hotel CRM & Personalization
Personalization is key in hotel marketing, as it helps create stronger connections and relationships with potential guests. And this is another area where your CRM can help you thrive while saving time.
The main thing you need to remember is that one of the greatest powers of a CRM has to do with the ability to analyze data and create different categories. These systems allow you to group contacts based on various criteria such as booking history, demographics, and more to identify audiences such as high-spenders, family bookings, returning guests, and more.
By understanding each guest’s demographic information and individual needs, you can deliver messages that will truly resonate with that segment instead of coming out of ChatGPT, which will boost engagement rates and conversions.
With this article, you can learn more about audiences: “9 Different Audiences You Can Create for Better Hotel Marketing Campaigns“.
Personalization and segmentation are essential elements of a successful hospitality CRM. With the ability to tailor messages to specific audiences, hotels can build stronger relationships with their guests by providing more personalized experiences.
At the same time, it will build a better guest experience since the content will be based on past bookings or preferences that are registered in your system.
3. A Hotel CRM & Clean and Centralized Guest Data
Accurate and up-to-date guest data is essential to any successful marketing campaign. Hospitality CRM platforms are designed to provide a centralized view of all guest information in one place, allowing you to access the latest insights quickly.
This helps streamline customer segmentation and personalization efforts and ensures that campaigns are based on accurate data. At the same time, it saves a lot of time by allowing you to get all the data into one platform without switching between systems to get more information.
Your hotel CRM acts as your one source of truth. Once the data is collected, cleaned, and structured, it provides a wealth of insights into customer behavior and preferences, which you can use to identify patterns, create new initiatives, or even modify your offering.
Having no data limitations and a visual way of structuring your guest data will help you better understand your customers. There is nothing that works better than a holistic view of each guest.
4. Hotel CRM & Analytics for Better Performance
Access to analytics is critical in understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The more based on data your decisions can be, the better results you will get. In that sense, your CRM will help you easily track KPIs such as open rate, click-through rate, repeat purchase, number of touchpoints, etc.
By tracking these KPIs, you can make data-driven decisions about your marketing campaigns, customer service, and other aspects of your business. This will have surprisingly different results from making blind decisions without data backing them up.
For example, if your conversion rate is low, you can use this data to change your marketing campaigns. You might need to target a different audience, change the messaging, and the image, or offer different incentives.
A/B testing is a great way to test different versions of a marketing campaign or other customer touchpoints to see which performs better. For example, you could A/B test different email subject lines to see which one gets the highest open rate.
For all these efforts, your hotel CRM will be key to saving time and giving you a clean overview and straightforward information you can use to improve.
If you are still unconvinced about how powerful a CRM can be, read “5 Ways to Increase Revenue with a Hospitality CRM“.
All of the features previously reviewed make a hospitality CRM an essential tool for any hotel business looking to increase marketing efficiency and grow loyalty through better targeting of customers.
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