Drive conversions with an omnichannel communication strategy
Inspiration. The spark that propels guests to hurry and book a stay with your hotel.
But where do they find it?
Maybe it’s the photos on your website — stunning ocean views or jaw-dropping mountain ranges right outside the hotel suite’s windows.
Maybe they’ve vacationed with you before and received an email announcing the grand opening of a new property in their home city.
Or maybe you reignited a guests’ inspiration to book when you placed an outbound call, reminding them that they inquired about your hotel’s seafood restaurant when deciding to book a night with you.
Whatever channel that inspiration comes from, it’s your job as a hotelier to capitalize on that spark, and turn that inspiration into a conversion.
Because someone is always competing for guest’s attention and looking to inspire their trips – whether it’s competitors or OTAs.
Mastering how you inspire and convert guests into loyal bookers is what will drown out the noise from other sources vying for the booking. And part of that mastery comes from your skill at omnichannel guest communication — connecting with your guests via web, email, voice, and even text to keep their travel inspiration alive.
And that’s so much easier to do with the right technology that infuses guest data into each communication channel to reach guests with the messaging that matters to them.
What you will see here
- What is the end goal of omnichannel communication?
- Driving conversions on every channel
- Understand the persona of your ideal guest
What is the end goal of omnichannel communication?
I think that sometimes we overcomplicate what omnichannel is, right? At the end of the day, it’s all things leading to your website…. I think that a mix of those channels is really around what you’re trying to achieve.
That’s what Jason Pirock, Corporate Director/Head of Marketing at Springboard Hospitality, had to say about omnichannel on the Hotel Moment podcast.
Regardless of what channel you use to communicate with your guests, the end goal is a direct booking, and most of the time, that’s going to include your website. Even when you’re chatting with guests over the phone, they had to visit your website first to grab your phone number or check out your pricing, properties, or amenities, right?
How you get guests to this end goal of booking is what omnichannel communication is all about. Because guests need a reason to book, and they need to feel inspired when interacting with yout hotel. That’s why omnichannel communication isn’t complete without personalization — they key to making all messaging relevant to each guest.
Personalization
Jason goes on to say, When I hear personalization, I do think, in a lot of ways, it is synonymous with segmentation. Segmentation can be something as simple as: Are you targeting? Is your offer relevant for a drive market versus a fly market? … How do you use segmentation to ensure that you’re being relevant to your guests?
For any channel, this is great advice.
Start with identifying who your guests are — where are they booking from and what matters to them? From there, you can go about crafting your segments to tailor offers to the right audience.
For example, maybe you want to tap into the guest history of loyal bookers use their reservation data to entice them to stay again. And if you’ve been using technology like a CDP that collects data from every interaction and builds a Rich Guest Profile, then identifying who is a business traveler and who only travels with their family can be revealed with a few clicks.
And speaking of Jason’s reference to segmenting for your drive market, Yosemite Valley Lodge did just that and drove 1,429 room nights. If you’re asking yourself how, it’s because they invested in data collection so that they’d never create a throwaway offer for their guests — they knew their segments.
Driving conversions on every channel
One thing about a CDP? Driving conversions on every communication channel is never going to be limited by third-party cookies. A CDP uses first-party data (any data that your guests share directly with you — it includes purchase history, stay data, email addresses, or web browsing behavior on your brand site) to make connections between touchpoints, identify lookalike audiences, and find the true reason guests are inspired to book.
CDP, that’s our first-party data,…How do you think about your guests? How do you communicate with them? — really using it, using the data that’s in the CDP to understand what is the best way to get them to convert, to get them to take action,
as Jason highlights how using first-party data from a CDP is key for any type communication.
A CDP is foundational for both collecting and activating guest data. By bringing in data from multiple sources, generating comprehensive guest profiles, surfacing insights, you can target guests with personalized messaging across channels.
You’re probably already familiar with utilizing your email channel to target your ideal guests with snazzy discounts, new amenity announcements, holiday and birthday offers, etc. But how well are you using your email channel to target abandoned bookers?
Here’s Jason explaining how a CDP can capture and store a prospective guest’s email address so that you can use it to send a campaign to bring them back to book.
There are things like abandon cart. I think that is really powerful because you’ve already got these high-intent users that were either in your booking engine or they’d checked out, right? It’s in their cart. But for some reason, they walked away. Likely, that is due to pricing. They went somewhere else and wanted to double-check that they got the right pricing. So, sort of coming back and, again, using nurture…Hey, come back and book with us.…We’ll give you a value add.
If you use Revinate Marketing, it has a built in tool called Shopping Cart Abandonment that can actually deliver triggered and timely email campaigns like this one from Ambiente Sedona as soon as a guest leaves the booking engine.
Voice
Nurturing, to me, means thinking about the journey, thinking about giving them reasons to book, educating them on why we’re the best place to stay, educating them on what they can do while they’re at our property or around our property in the vicinity, in the market, or the city, and getting them excited, and then getting them to convert.
Jason is highlighting the importance of capitalizing on the guest’s inspiration to book that we talked about earlier. This is where your reservation agents come in to achieve the conversion!
Using guest data stored in your CDP. things like reservations data or stay history can inform both inbound and outbound calls to add that touch of personalization to the conversation to secure that booking.
Web
The truth is, your website is getting a lot of eyeballs — whether guests are coming from social media, an email campaign, or a Google Search — and many of these guests will come to book.
The global market for mobile travel bookings has been increasing since 2021, and is expected to increase by 12.2% by the time 2029 rolls around. So how your website content speaks to each guest is critical.
With a CDP, you can consult your performance data to dictate your website design and messaging. By identifying top-performing email campaigns, you can see what campaigns resonated the most with guests and feature those offers on your website. Did restaurant and spa promotions do well? Then show off details and pictures of those on your site!
Text
Sixty-five percent of people open a text message within five minutes of receiving it. And if you’re sending texts to guests throughout their entire journey, it’s vital to connect this channel to your CDP for access to critical customer information.
Why? Wouldn’t it be great if you could include in an email campaign to your guest, Hey we know you like extra towels. They’ll be ready and waiting for your next visit.
Why do you know they like extra towels? Because they texted with you about it, and your CDP stored it. Now, don’t you think that personalized email campaign is more likely to capture their attention?
Understand the persona of your ideal guest
Omnichannel communication is futile if you don’t know your guest personas, and you don’t know why they want to book in the first place.
Jason talks about guest personas like this: I think there are ways that you can start to think about that with data that you do have, and then thinking about who you ultimately want to attract. From there, break it down to help you understand how you might want to lay out some of that mapping. Now, if you’re a brand or you’ve got multiple properties, maybe you do that with a few different properties to start to see trends that you would then ultimately figure out, ‘What are those tags?’ Or, ‘What does that mapping look like?’
Outside of rooms and nightly stays, guests accumulate many more touchpoints across your property — contributing to their overall profile and persona.
A CDP can follow the guest journey more closely and string together data and touchpoints from guests. Then when you go to segment profiles, it’s not a guessing game of which touchpoint goes with which guest — a side effect of siloed and messy data — but instead it’s the unfolding of a detailed story telling the truth about your guest personas.
Identifying and understanding the persona of your ideal guest ensures you’re not flying blind when initiating communication. The next time you decide to deploy an email campaign, follow up with a guest over the phone, or interact with them on property to encourage a future booking, you’ll know just what to say.
Diversify your channel mix
One of the biggest lessons a hotelier should learn is that restricting guest communication to one channel limits your chances to drive more direct bookings. Your guests are multi-faceted and your communication should be, too. And with tools like the Revinate CDP, you can feel confident that your guest communication sparks a connection at every touchpoint.
About Revinate
Revinate is a direct booking platform that leads the hospitality industry in driving direct revenue and increased profitability.
Our products and our people combine to give hoteliers the superpowers they need to crush their goals. With Revinate, hoteliers shift share away from OTAs and drive tangible results across an individual property or a portfolio. Our industry-leading, AI-powered, customer data platform collects, unifies and, synthesizes data giving hoteliers a foundational advantage.
Hoteliers gain critical intelligence – guest lifetime spend, stay preferences, ancillary revenue, and more. With our Rich Guest Profiles database, hoteliers don't need to guess who their most profitable guests are, or how to drive conversions across email, voice, messaging, and digital channels.
Revinate's direct booking platform and omnichannel communication technology powers 900+ million Rich Guest Profiles across 12,500+ hotels to drive over $17 billion in direct revenue.
