How do you turn a wedding guest into a repeat booker?
Your customers come dressed for one occasion. How do you get them to come back and visit when they are wearing a different outfit?
Do you treat weddings as a one-off booking? Once the confetti has settled, do they hear from you again?
They may well have been a wedding guest, but what’s to stop them being interested in coming back for a spa day, special lunch, restaurant booking or gym membership?
Why shouldn’t your beautiful venue be part of their everyday as well?
That same wedding guest could now be enjoying a facial in the spa, or having a birthday lunch with someone special in a recommended restaurant or packing for a weekend break with the girls out in the country.
In a recent survey, when hospitality marketers were asked to list their top objectives, nearly all were focused on generating repeat visits from returning customers and upselling beyond a hotel room (spa, restaurant, bar, etc).
So how do you ensure that you are their destination of choice for all those occasions?
Different day, different outfit, same customer.
The solution is one that combines data and skill to create an efficient and effective machine that harnesses your data for increased sales and brand engagement.
Who are your guests?
Is the person who booked the room staying, or are they booking on someone else’s behalf? If you don’t know, then you might be sending follow-up marketing to someone who won’t ever come back anyway. Make sure you maximise the opportunities by collecting contact information for all stayers as well as bookers. The person who made the booking for 20 rooms, may be unlikely to visit themselves but there could be many opportunities to expand the relationship with your guests.
What’s their profile?
Are they a first-time guest, repeat customer, corporate, leisure or local food and beverage visitor? Understanding who they are and the purpose of their visit is just the beginning of the process. We then use sophisticated analysis and data modelling to plot out their potential value and the journey that you need to take them on to maximise that potential.
What happens after they’ve checked out?
This is key – if you know which behavioural cohort of customers they fall in to, whether that be spa lover, frequent visitor, diner, first time guest etc, then you can tailor the communications to be relevant to their recent stay and longer-term potential.
On many occasions we have been able to prove that a tailored, relevant approach is an effective way to increase the return from communications. When we worked with HMV, we made changes to the basic approach to targeting of communications and we saw up to 50% increase in engagement, plus a 10-fold increase in purchase rate.
With Thorntons, we set up a differentiated communication programme that resulted in a 20% uplift in purchase rates and a 30% increase in engagement.
We can apply this same approach for businesses who want to explore customer retention for business growth.
Get in touch and ask us what we can do with your customer data.