4 Ways Hotel Marketing Automation Can Drive More Conversions

Hotel marketing describes the sum of marketing strategies used in the hotel industry. These strategies aim to promote the hotel’s offers, functions, and facilities. But more importantly, they aim to be inviting enough for new guests to come in and old guests to re-visit.

Of course, in today’s day and age, none of this is possible without tools to create and curate a digital experience for guests. Hotel businesses need marketing automation now more than ever, as it is a great way to cut back on costs.

Hotel marketing automation is the use of tools that automate various tasks, allowing teams to focus on more important things by saving time and resources. Any business can benefit from that use, and hotels are no exception:

Marketing automation allows hotel marketers to create targeted and tailor-made campaigns, automate the booking process utilizing all available channels, and streamline processes that will increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).

But what type of marketing automation is best for your hotel? What are the tools you can implement? In the end, how are you going to get the ROI of the graph above? 

Well, let’s find out.

How Can Marketing Automation Help a Hotel’s Conversion?

The saying “Time is money” isn’t something that’s randomly quoted from time to time, especially when we’re talking about a niche as fast-paced and profitable as tourism.

Using automation tools can benefit both the marketing automation beginner and the expert in the hotel industry. Especially, since these tools allow laser-focused prioritization of actions while simultaneously minimizing the human factor and the room for errors.

The time saved by the tools can always be invested in tackling more important problems that call for human intervention, allowing the employees to work smarter, not harder, and generate more conversions in the same timeframe.

But what are the marketing automation solutions for hotels through which you will generate more leads, aim for better conversion, and, in the end, manage to maximize your income?

1. Through email marketing

There are several marketing automation opportunities for hotels and email marketing is one of the most fruitful and beneficial ones. With an ROI of $54 for every $1 spent, email marketing can prove to be beneficial for a hotel’s earnings. 

Here’s why:

As you can see, it was the third most common direct booking channel of 2020 in Europe. This is only logical, considering an email is something personal, like a friend knocking on your door: You’re going to answer it and start a dialogue if you’re interested.

But since an email is not your website, and people can’t exactly opt out without unsubscribing, how are you going to make sure you’re not the one people are trying to avoid because they’ve got nothing to say? This should be easy: You need to invest in an email marketing and automation platform that can help you do things the way Hyatt did:

Weather conditions are essential when one’s on vacation. This is why Hyatt sent an email with its offers for Hawaii, which includes the weather forecast right at the top left-hand side.

Now, Hawaii seems oddly specific, right? How can Hyatt – or anyone, for that matter, know the destinations and offers that interest each of the prospects? 

This is where hyper-segmentation and email autoresponder tools come into play. Hyper-segmentation tools allow marketers to create tiny segments that will correspond with each prospect almost on a one-on-one basis. On the other hand, autoresponder tools will help marketers create an automated email campaign for prospects to receive after a specific action triggers it.

An automated email marketing campaign will keep the name of your hotel at the forefront of a new lead’s mind, especially if they receive an email that utilizes the information they were interested in just a minute ago. Potential guests will be amazed, and repeaters will be encouraged to re-visit your resort and, perhaps, leave a good review. 

Let’s assume that a prospect is checking out your spa’s services. You can use this as a trigger and send them an email with all of the spa offers available. This will be enticing enough and relevant to the information they seemed most interested in, giving you a better chance at a booking and, in the end, better ROI and conversion rate.

Of course, none of the above is possible if you’ve got a non-pruned email list to begin with.

Your email list should contain people that are interested in your industry and what you have to offer. Throwaway email addresses, “dead” or unresponsive addresses, unsubscribers, and people who mark your marketing messages as spam can harm your deliverability rates. 

Make sure to regularly clean and prune your list before investing in any segmentation, personalization, and automation tools for email marketing.

Your marketing message may be perfect and incredibly informative; you might be able to create an email that will supercharge your customer experience metrics by allowing the prospect to book directly through your email without ever leaving their inbox. But if your potential guests not interested, they won’t interact with it. This is why a well-curated email list is essential.

2. Through an automated booking process

Phone bookings are very close to becoming obsolete, especially when platforms like Booking.com have led hotels to create booking platforms for themselves that provide online payment options and offers.

Marketing automation allows potential and future guests to take initiative. Imagine seeing a post on social media and clicking on it. You may go straight to a well-curated landing page that will showcase all of the information you need to go ahead and purchase your next trip. This landing page might as well have an AI-powered chatbot. Like Booking.com did.

The leading platform created virtual assistants that helped users through every step of the way by gathering data and creating what they called a “Cyborg Assistant” that could do the following:

The customers could chat with the customer service team when the booking assistant had no answer to the user’s query, allowing the customer service team to deal with the real issues instead of wasting time.

This is one of the advantages of marketing automation in hotels. Because of the extra interaction and engagement, it encourages your users to visit your website, social media pages, blog posts etc. all of these will be boosted.

Furthermore, using marketing automation to sort out your bookings will also help you cut back on the extra cost of being featured on a platform that can – and will – ask for commission on bookings. Not to mention, how marketing automation will help you form and automate a booking procedure that will allow your booking and customer support teams to intervene through phone calls, or even a live chat option, strictly when they need to.

This procedure will, eventually, minimize friction. Potential guests will be able to just hold their card in their hand and pick and choose their ideal destination at their leisure – and speed up the process – one confirmation email later, your potential guests are fully booked and ready.

3. The Difference Through Data

Hotel marketing automation can make all the difference by gathering data and “training” the hotel’s systems to operate using them. Which is why investing in AI and machine learning is always a good idea.

As the example with Booking.com above shows, hotel guests need to save time as much as the hotels themselves do. So, they’re looking for bite-sized, on-the-spot available information that will push them further down the funnel.

Knowing what bits and pieces will help your case and boost your conversion comes from data. Provided you use automation tools in a manner that will make sense and allow you to create meaningful campaigns to promote your services.

For example, a well-curated landing page that will feature everything a prospect wants to see, in terms of copy, content, visuals and information, will allow for better lead generation and more bookings.

Here’s an example:

This landing page features just what a prospect needs: Information on the various amenities and activities and a way for the potential guests to book their ideal dates – nothing more, nothing less.

By using data to create the perfect marketing message, you’ll manage to ace hotel marketing personalization. Further, you’ll be able to cover all potential requirements and laser-target your marketing actions.

After all, more data means more segments; more segments mean specific marketing messages, and specific marketing messages lead to hyper-personalization. This works beautifully, as families with children need different amenities from those who travel solo.

Not to mention how appreciated personalized marketing messages really are:

Your data will also benefit your performance by allowing your resort to adopt a customer-first approach. And that applies to the customer’s journey, all the while enabling you to understand your pain points and improve them.

4. Helps You Save Time

Personalization is fantastic and all, and laser-targeted marketing messages can really save the day by generating more bookings; however, if you need a reason to use marketing automation, you should keep that one: It helps you save time.

Through the use of hotel marketing automation, your hotel’s teams will avoid all of the mundane tasks. They’ll also be able to focus on optimizing your conversion rate by resolving serious issues and providing the perfect vacation experience.

Imagine having enough time to look at your next guest’s data and prepare a nice surprise for them, instead of looking if their confirmation letter has been sent or not. Which one of the two actions will earn your hotel a five-star review?

Hotel marketing automation can help you increase your guests’ LTV by optimizing their experiences and building rapport with them. By sending optimized, tailor-made emails, promoting just the services they need, and having your support team at the ready, customers will feel valued.

So much so that they will promote your resort to their circle, allowing you to create a referral circle, and, by extension, your first affiliate marketing program. That way, you can tap into affiliate marketing by giving incentives for any referral. This will automatically turn your loyal guests into brand ambassadors, and you will find yourself with leads that will be interested without you even trying.

Again, your data will show you the right way to create your strategy and your loyalty program.

And lastly, I will repeat the most important thing about data and automation: 

Using your data and marketing automation tools to generate your reports will help you identify the points of friction in your strategies and better your sales cycle.