What makes a vacation unforgettable? Sure, the hotel room must be impeccably clean, the food must be delicious, and the staff friendly. But, there is something else, too: your favorite spa treatments offered to you before you even ask, the ease of booking the best room. A feeling of being welcome that extends far beyond the stay itself. It is this feeling that makes a guest not only enjoy their stay, but return next year.
When done right, a customer engagement strategy can help any hospitality brand achieve just that. However, there are a few challenges that hospitality professionals face which may prevent them from getting the most out of their customer engagement platform.
In this blog post, we cover a few of these challenges, as well as how Braze – the leading customer engagement platform on the market – can help you solve them. With success stories of clients such as TUI, Skyscanner or Luxury Escapes, Braze has a solid footprint in the hospitality industry. It is a true cross-channel platform, seamlessly bringing together various communication channels and unifying data across diverse sources in real time.
LeverUP is a team of marketing technology experts that you can trust. As certified partners to notable customer engagement platforms such as Braze, we have been delivering exceptional implementations to clients all over the world for over four years now, and have quite a few tips up our sleeve that we would like to share with you.
Keep reading to find out how to turn guest stays into loyalty with Braze.
Challenge 1: Fragmented Guest Data
Imagine this: you book a vacation, but an important conference comes up at work, so you need to cancel it. On the day you were supposed to check out, an email from the hotel arrives in your inbox, thanking you for your stay and asking for feedback. No offer to re-book your trip: just a small, but bitter reminder of what could have been. This is a result of the disconnect between the booking system and the marketing automation platform, and therefore between the different sources of guest data.
That is when Braze comes in. Instead of replacing booking systems, it acts as an orchestration layer which links them to other sources of guest data, such as website and mobile app activity or social media, thus creating unified guest profiles that capture everything your guests do in real time. With the Braze Catalog feature, lists of offers can be created and matched with guest profiles based on their preferences.
As a result, your marketing team now works with live behaviour instead of static lists, and can adapt the promotional communication to the wishes of each individual guest. Here is how this works in practice.
A potential guest browses the website of a luxury resort, looking at the Sea View Suite and a spa package. Normally, this information would not be registered in the customer engagement platform, but with Braze, it is captured and transported directly into the platform. A customer journey is then triggered. The guest receives an email asking them if they are still considering booking the Sea View Suite, and proposing an offer for the spa. If a week or two pass without the guest booking the room, they receive another email, informing them that the availability on their desired dates is low, and urging them to book as soon as possible. Once the sources of guest data are interconnected, hospitality businesses can give their guests offers that truly matter.
Challenge 2: Surface-level Personalization
Have you ever booked a vacation as a surprise for someone else, only for all promotional email offers to address you by their name for years afterwards?
That is what happens when the personalization stays on a surface level – same exact emails sent to each guest, with only their names switched out. This kind of personalization is not suited for the wide variety of use cases that the hospitality industry faces, and does not do the guests any justice.
With Braze, it is possible to go beyond these simple attributes, adding two more layers of personalization on top of it.
- The first layer is behavioral personalization. What types of rooms does the user browse most often? How often and for how long do they stay? What is known about them from their previous stay – do they prefer ordering room service or going out to the restaurant, do they stay at the spa all day or go out to explore? This data is collected from sources such as website activity, or bookings and transactions made on location.
- Based on this, a second level – messaging personalization – is constructed. By means of dynamic content blocks and liquid logic, every message can be adapted to the behavior of each particular customer in the very moment in which it is sent. This results in more meaningful and personal offers: for instance, foodies will receive an offer for a dinner with complementary starters at the hotel restaurant, and explorers a discount on the tour of the nearby nature park.
Rather than just personalization, this kind of customer engagement can best be described as recognition: something that makes the guests want to return.
Challenge 3: Proving ROI
It is a common belief among hospitality leadership that the efficiency of customer engagement platforms can hardly be traced. A lot of the KPIs are simply vanity metrics that do not reflect the real revenue, and therefore cannot be used as a basis for any strategic decisions.
Braze brings a much-needed change into the leadership conversations. It ties the communication and customer engagement efforts of the marketing team to the revenue, therefore proving its ROI.
How does it do this? Aside from customer data, Braze records transactional data, such as the amount of revenue and property values per booking. This allows for easy measuring of lifetime value and tracking of journey-level conversions. Conversions can be divided into categories like monetary value, segment or campaign, which demonstrates exactly how much revenue each campaign and each journey is producing.
Another helpful feature which Braze offers is control groups. For every campaign, there is a small percentage of guests that are deliberately excluded from any communication. This allows hospitality professionals to compare the conversion rates of general guests against the control group, thus measuring the incremental uplift, not just the correlation.
For instance, a guest on a pre-arrival upsell journey receives an upgrade offer with a spa package. Once the offer is sent, Braze measures the upgrade conversion rate and additional revenue per sale, as well as comparing the revenue from the exposed group to that of the control group. It thus provides the marketing team of the hotel with insights on how successful this customer engagement campaign has been.
Braze takes customer engagement reports from open and click rates to real statistics, and real incremental revenue per guest. It is a customer engagement platform that is not a cost center, but a revenue engine instead.
Challenge 4: Scaling Across Markets
Once the previously discussed challenges are out of the way, it is quite easy to personalize guest experiences for a smaller hotel group that operates in only one market. But, what to do when the business inevitably expands – when there are twenty new locations opening across ten different markets, each operating in a different language and catering to a different customer base? How to keep scaling the customer engagement strategy without starting from scratch each time around?
What often happens is a lack of alignment between the central and local teams, resulting in the central team losing control while the local teams are still not empowered enough to run the operations on their own.
Braze can help overcome this complex phase by scaling intelligently, but without losing the warmth and personal touch, all thanks to its dynamic messaging features. Dynamic content blocks enable property-specific messaging, while multi-language personalization ensures that every guest can read the communication in the language they are most comfortable with. Additional features such as frequency caps prevent over-messaging and ensure that the content is timely and relevant.
AI-powered optimization features come in handy here, too. Braze AI intelligently optimizes send times and communication channels based on what channel each user is most likely to engage with and when. This means that, instead of building an individual journey or campaign for each of the twenty properties, a hotel chain marketing team can simply build one modular journey and let AI take care of the details.
Let’s say that a guest books a stay at the Swiss Alpes location of a ski resort that operates in multiple countries. Braze can adapt the messaging to the specific property and the location, providing the guest with up-to-date weather forecasts for the Swiss Alpes. If the weather is not safe for skiing during their stay, they can receive offers for alternative on-site activities, such as wine tasting at the hotel bar. Braze AI can further adjust the communication to include only in-app notifications once every two days, if that is what the guest responds best to.
What the guest sees is thoughtful and timely communication, while the process behind the scenes is automated, scalable, and efficient.
Challenge 5: Low Adoption
The last challenge usually occurs once the implementation of the customer engagement platform is over, and the system is up and running. The customer engagement team – which, in the hospitality industry, usually consists of only two or three people – gets pulled into a routine of manual tasks, inevitably losing their inspiration. As a result, the team ends up heavily relying on the help of external agencies. We call this challenge low adoption.
This may sound a bit counterintuitive coming from a customer engagement consultancy, but we believe our goal is to make our clients fully independent, not trapping them in the relationship forever. It is only like this, after all, that our clients can truly make their customer engagement platforms work for them. However, there is often pushpack – marketing teams tend to be a little afraid of data and technical points.
Braze helps put an end to this fear. Its simple, intuitive interface helps bridge the gap between the marketing and customer engagement teams and technical topics, thus empowering them. It gives the marketing teams all the data they need to make progress independently, without relying on an external partner.
It is necessary, however, to start small and scale afterwards. For a successful adoption of your customer engagement platform, begin with a maximum five high-impact journeys such as abandoned booking, win-back, or pre-arrival upsell. The marketing team can focus on these journeys, perfecting them over time and learning from their mistakes. Once they have these journeys mastered, they can build new, more complex ones, while also adding on to the original ones.
It helps to think of customer journeys as Lego blocks: modular, made up of a certain number of reusable components that can be arranged in any way. When the journeys and the content are modular, the marketing team never needs to start from scratch. The team itself must be trained properly, too, with hospitality professionals encouraging and supporting certification and knowledge sharing.
As the engagement platform with the highest adoption rate, Braze helps marketing teams in the hospitality industry move past boring batch campaigns onto complex, real-time guest journey orchestration.
Conclusion
The real journey is not limited only to a guest’s stay at a hotel. It begins much earlier, with the first Google search, and if the guest feels truly valued and welcome, it never really ends. Customer engagement platforms help achieve this, but there are a few challenges that may stand it the way.
Braze, as the leading customer engagement platform on the market, helps eliminate these challenges. It connects guest data from various sources, thus preventing it from becoming siloed, and uses it to expand the personalization beyond the surface level. It helps hospitality professionals adapt their communication to various markets, and empowers marketing teams by tracking ROI and making the technical side of customer engagement more accessible.
With Braze, you can craft journeys worth staying on, and turn every customer into a real guest.
Need guidance in elevating your guest engagement with Braze? Reach out to us.
