Your guests all have unique needs, and it’s important to use what you know about them to build effective campaigns. Segmentation and audience building can be as simple or dynamic as you need, using different combinations of variables to identify how, when, and where guests have interacted with your resort.
When you use sophisticated segmentation and audience building, you can speak to your guests based on their preferences and their history with you. Here’s how a guest data and marketing automation tool can help you filter your guests, build custom audiences, and provide an exceptionally better experience.
Data Cleansing Through an Advanced Hygiene Engine
To truly understand your guests, your data needs to be clean and unified. You have data coming in from across your resort, including eCommerce, point-of-sale, PMS and lodging, spa and/or golf bookings, pass scans, and much more. Without a way to consolidate these data, you end up with messy data silos and lack of insight into your guests and their time spent with you.
That’s where data cleansing comes in. With the help of an advanced hygiene engine, your data is combined, de-duplicated, and cleansed to create a guest “golden record”. For instance, you may have three separate data points of the same person because they live in your PMS system, rental system, and booking engine. A hygiene engine can take those three entries and parse and standardize addresses, compare them to National Change of Address, and reference against the USPS address database to provide you with the most accurate and up-to-date information.
The system then matches your data based on different variables — there is custom matching, phonetic matching, individual & household matching, and email matching. Your guest database is then enhanced with 50+ aggregates, such as demographics, date of last visit, lifetime spend, number of emails you’ve sent them, and RFM score (recency, frequency, and monetary value).
Using a guest data and marketing automation platform provides you with more accurate and reliable information, as your guest data are run through the hygiene and matching engine on a nightly basis.
Segmentation and Audience Building
With crisp, clean data at your fingertips, you can now easily create guest segments and build unique audiences for your omnichannel marketing campaigns. Using the Audience Builder, you can create segments based on guest behavior (i.e., local pass holders who have not yet scanned their pass this season.) You can even combine fields and use “AND” or “OR’ functions to identify multiple factors, such as gender and age range.
Using guest demographics, email history, purchase history, and other behavioral data, you can create strategic audiences for various marketing channels such as email, phone, SMS, or direct mail.
A few of the top-performing campaigns created from audience segments include:
- Pre-arrival campaigns — send your guests an email immediately after booking to prepare them for their stay
- Day-of-Arrival updates — notify your guests of important information during their stay, such as events, snow reports, information about their reservations, how to check-in, etc.
- Lapsed purchase campaigns — if your guests haven’t booked with you or purchased from you in a while, follow up with them to encourage return visits
- Promotional guest retention — offer special promos or upgrades to your guests
- Post-stay campaigns — keep your audiences engaged with you even after they leave by thanking them for their stay, offering promos or discounts for future visits, and sending surveys to get guest feedback and improve future experiences
Build Audiences with Confidence using Ascent360
The Ascent360 guest data and marketing automation tool is built for resort and hospitality marketers to help them cleanse their guest data, organize it into impactful segments, and build audiences with ease. Take the guesswork out of your marketing with up-to-date guest records that help you understand exactly what your guests need, when they need it, and the best way to reach them.
To learn more about our platform and see your hospitality data in action, sign up for a custom demo of Ascent360 today!
