Hospitality marketing teams come across many roadblocks in data management and keeping guest data up-to-date, clean, and accurate — particularly because hotels and resorts have to manage a wide variety of systems. Plus, guest data is constantly being brought in from multiple different touchpoints. Without the right technology, manually ensuring the accuracy of your guest database wastes time and resources that can (and should) be devoted elsewhere.
According to Experian, 40% of marketers say their biggest challenge with personalization is linking to data-related technologies, while 34% struggle with poor data quality. That’s why the use of the right customer data platform is so important — it integrates the data from all your systems into one comprehensive dashboard, cleans and de-dups guest records, and gives you the ability to enhance personalization in your marketing.
Breaking Down Data Silos
When you have too many data sources across your hotel or resort that don’t “talk to” each other— such as bookings, marketing, sales, Food & Beverage, etc. — it creates barriers for your teams to collaborate and optimize the guest experience. It also makes it difficult for marketers to get a 360-degree view of guest data that they can use to segment, personalize, and drive revenue.
If data is hard to find, inaccurate, duplicated, or has errors, those silos will have a severely negative impact on your ability to understand your guests and provide them with a personalized experience. And according to Evergage, 92% of marketers say customers and prospects expect a personalized experience, up from 85% in 2019.
By using the right customer data platform, you can easily break down those data silos by consolidating your disparate data management systems into one holistic dashboard. When you can see all the data in one place — and use the tool to eliminate errors, identify inaccuracies, etc. — you will gain access to extremely actionable insights on guest behavior, purchase history, and what guests are likely to need next. With the right customer data platform, you can also ensure that you’re adhering to SPAM Law Authority and remaining compliant with federal regulations (i.e. only emailing guests who have explicitly consented to receive communications from your hotel or resort).
Creating A “Golden Record”
Having the details about your guests’ history within a clean database creates the opportunity for sophisticated segmentation. Before building segments, it’s important to have “golden records” for each of your guests. This means that their information is complete, cleansed, enriched, and actionable. Once compiled, you can also see which records are missing key information, such as addresses or emails, and create a plan to obtain them. Accenture reports that 74% of consumers would find “living profiles” like these valuable if they could be used to curate the experiences, offers, and products they receive.
With those golden records, you now know exactly how to target them. For instance, you could have a group of guests who haven’t visited in a while, or some you may be able to upsell with offers like in-room complimentary services or additional activity bookings. Within the customer data platform, you can build out those segments as you see fit for your business, then schedule automations to get the right message in front of them at the right time.
The Results
Streamlined data management in hospitality not only results in a clearer understanding of your guests, but the personalization also results in greater guest engagement, increased guest satisfaction and loyalty, and a significant boost in revenue. Some resorts like Mirror Lake Inn have driven $200K in revenue from a single promotional guest retention campaign and a 76% email open rate on a pre-arrival campaign.
99% of marketers say personalization helps advance their customer relationships. -Evergage
With Ascent360’s customer data and relationship management platform, your hospitality data management problems are a thing of the past. See for yourself—request a custom demo today!
