Guests hate to be 'sold' but they love to buy
Make use of user attributes to send personalized offers.
Overview:
Hotels/Hospitality business' margins remain under pressure due to increasing channels for distribution, increase in staff and utility costs, opportunity loss due to unsold room inventory. Thus, Hotel need to find a way to cross-sell and up-sell services to keep their margins high.
Hotels may drive incremental revenue from up-selling from range of assest -
- Premium room upgrades
- Early check-in or late check-out
- Car parkings
- Rooms with special view
Similar cross-selling opportunities exists from -
- Concierge service
- Airport Limo service
- Local attraction guide service
- Leisure club membership
The critical component for effective cross-selling or up-selling of services is to understand the right persona of the guest. Some of the typical persona types are -
- Leisure or Business traveller
- First time or frequent guest
- Premium or budget guest
- Loyalty program member
The recommendations being made should be in sync with the guest persona. Automating the recommendation program and personalising the communication for guest at scale remains a major challenge for every Hotel/Hospitality service provider. Adopting marketing cloud that help such consumer businesses should be right approach for any Retention/CRM marketing manager.
It’s important that we engage guests who have experienced our service/product. 'Frequent customers' is one such segment who should always be catered to. This journey shows how you can send personalized offers to the such frequent guests post 2 days of booking completion through channels such as email and SMS.
Industry:
Travel/Hotel/OTAs/Hospitality Services
Use Case:
Automating customized offer recommendation to frequent guests
Segment:
Frequent Hotel Guest: Has 'checked-in' more than once in past 3 Months
Events:
Hotel_booking_confirmed
Webengage.Track (‘Hotel_booking_confirmed’, {/*string*/“Email” : dummy@dummy.com,“Name” : Dummy,“Contact” : 123456,“Residential_location” :“Customer_occupation” :“Origin_city”:“Origin_country” :“Marital_status” :“Purpose_of_visit” :“Suite_type” :“Tourist_package_type” :“Payment_type” :/*number*/“Age_of_customer” :“Number_of_adults” :“Number_of_children” :“Number_of_previous_stays” :“Number_of_bookings” :“Duration_of_stay” :“Booking_amount_INR”:“Booking_MRP”:“Discount%_applied”:“Booking_time” :“Checkin_time” :“Checkout_time” :/*date/time*/ “Booking_date” : “Checkin_date” : “Checkout_date” :/*Boolean*/“User_logged_in” :“International_guest” :“Cab_service_used” :“Discount_applied” :“Availed_offer” :“Coupon_code_applied” :“Payment_completed” :“tourist_package” :/*Arrays*/“Tourist_places_nearby” : [“PLACE1”, “PLACE2”, “PLACE3”, “PLACE4” ]“Related_tour_packages” : [“PACK1”, “PACK2”, “PACK3”, “PACK4” ]})
Step by step:
- The Journey is triggered for the user on ‘Hotel Booking Confirmed’ event.
- Workflow check if the user is in segment ‘Frequent Hotel Guest’.
- If user found to be 'frequent guest', workflow fetches the personalised offers/service recommendations from CRM/recommendation engine via REST API call.
- The details returned from the recommendation engine is used to trigger personalised email with up-selling/cross-selling services details.
- On email delivery, workflow waits till the next 2 days for the user to avail any of the recommended services.
- If the user fails/forgets to avail the offer, workflow triggers a personalised SMS with similar recommendation services details with landing page url.
- On delivery of SMS, Journeys ends for that user.
Pro-Tip:
- Similar Recommedation journey can be created for Airlines services as well.
- The engagement frequency is dependent on the time left to check-in after booking is done. A user in ‘Frequent Users’ segment, having more than 15 Days to check-in may be reached out more than once.
- Other channels of engagement (such as mobile push, web push etc., automated voice calls) can be included too based on customer’s reachability through it.