If you could increase engagement with your customers with one simple tool, would you? If you’re in the travel and hospitality industry, that answer should be “yes!”
According to a recent report, 80% of guests at hotels consider it important to set personal preferences.
If you want to maximize loyalty and nurture your relationship with guests and travelers, then using personalization in your marketing strategy is a must-do.
Solutions that drive customer engagement allow travel and hospitality businesses to compile data on preferences and history to drive engagement and intimacy, as well as anticipating expectations and needs.
This, in turn, helps to develop proper campaign segmentation for more target — and results-oriented — campaigns.
Segmentation is Key for Travel and Hospitality Businesses
Segmentation is nothing new. Marketers have long understood its importance in driving engagement — and revenue.
In fact, marketers who employ segmentation as a part of their email campaigns find a 760% increase in revenue.
For businesses in the tourism, travel, or hotel industries, market segmentation can help allocate marketing dollars more appropriately and improve customer engagement at the same time.
Typical segments for these businesses may include:
- Geographical location
- Destination preference
- Age
- Gender
- Weather patterns
Zeroing in on your customers touchpoints, such as prompting them to join self-selected newsletters, is a great way to garner a positive user experience (UX) — and increase loyalty.
For example, in the hotel industry, different market segments tend to have unique booking behaviors.
Your marketing team can use this information to pinpoint offers that result in sales through increased click-through rates and conversions.
Which brings us to personal preferences.
Setting Personal Preferences Helps Increase Customer Experience and Loyalty
Personalizing campaigns with dynamic content is a great way to fine-tune your customer profiles — and segments — to increase the experience for your customers while using just one email format.
As mentioned above, most of your guests appreciate having the option to set customized preferences so they can get what they really need — and want — fast.
In order to provide this kind of escalated user experience, your marketing plan needs to include some ways of collecting the data you need to craft an outstanding experience for your guests.
You can find pertinent touchpoints about your guests by:
- Engaging on social media
- Offering pertinent content
- Conducting surveys
- Monitoring purchasing habits
Any bit of information you get takes you one step closer to creating the perfect marketing plan to reach customers who buy.
Making It Personal Makes It Work
Plenty of studies show that personalization increases your return on investment. And, personalizing your email can increase open rates by 26%.
More personalization across all marketing platforms helps increase your relevance with your customer base.
More relevance means more revenue.
And, for email marketing and other online marketing strategies — staying relevant keeps your emails, content, and social media outreach from being deleted, tossed in the spam folder, or blocked.
Finally, increased relevance also translates into increased customer loyalty — the “secret sauce” for success in the hospitality and travel industries.
Source: 5 Ways to Personalize Travel & Hospitality Campaigns by Campaign Monitor
