Yearly family vacations, romantic anniversary dinners, exciting solo trips – the mission of every hospitality business is to make these experiences as special as their guests want them to be.
A customer engagement platform is what helps them achieve this.
Engagement platforms help brands overcome some of the biggest challenges of the industry, such as achieving one-on-one interaction with thousands or even millions of guests, finding a way to centralize guest data, or completing routine marketing tasks in a more time-efficient way. In this blog, we discuss the solutions to these challenges engagement platforms can offer such as personalized communication, unified customer data, automated guest journeys and many more.
LeverUP is a team of marketing technology experts that you can trust. As certified partners to notable customer experience management platforms such as Braze, we have been delivering exceptional implementations to clients all over the world for over four years now. While working with clients in the hospitality industry, we gathered quite a bit of knowledge that we would now love to share with you.
The success of customer engagement platforms speaks for itself. According to Braze, businesses that use engagement platforms have seen a 34% increase in booking conversion rates, with their repeat booking rates quadrupling.
Let’s see how Braze can help you secure your customers’ loyalty and make your business thrive.
Meet Your Guests Where They are with Journey Orchestration and Cross-Channel Messaging
As a hospitality professional, you may find yourself wondering: what is it that my guests really want? It’s easy to make assumptions and to look towards past experiences, but in a world where trends constantly shift and audiences quickly transform, generalizing just won’t cut it.
So, how can you know what your guests’ needs and preferences are when it comes to traveling, dining, or going out? How do you reach out to them with the right offer, without pushing them away?
Customer engagement platforms such as Braze offer automated cross-channel messaging and customer journey orchestration options, which may be the solution you are looking for. Here is how they work, and how they help solve this challenge.
Orchestrate Personalized Customer Journeys with Confidence
With Braze, you can orchestrate complex and unique customer journeys that are tailored to the individual desires of every customer. An intuitive interface allows you to quickly map the journeys and edit them according to real-time insights from every touchpoint.
For instance, a hotel group may use Braze to track how guests interact across its website, booking engine, mobile app, and in-stay touchpoints. Guests who repeatedly browse spa treatments but don’t book are automatically placed into a wellness-focused journey, while business travelers engaging with late check-out options receive a different path. As these journeys evolve in real time based on browsing behavior, bookings, and on-property actions, the hotel gains a clear picture of what each guest values – whether that’s relaxation, convenience, or upgrades – and can continuously refine the experience.
Reach Every Guest with Perfectly Timed Cross-Channel Messaging
Braze ensures that your guests receive personalized promotional communication through a combination of their preferred channels, at their preferred frequency and times. This process is fully automated, adjusting the communication to real-time response analytics and freeing up your marketing team’s precious time.
By using Braze, hospitality brands can automatically deliver personalized offers across email, push, and in-app messages based on guest preferences and engagement patterns. A leisure guest might receive a pre-arrival email promoting breakfast upgrades, while a frequent guest gets a timely push notification for a loyalty-only room offer during their preferred booking window. Braze optimizes channel, timing, and frequency using relevant performance data, ensuring each message feels relevant and drives higher repeat bookings and on-property spend.
Knowing what your guests want out of their experiences is the true key to success in the hospitality industry. Braze allows you to learn this from their data, and shape customer loyalty journeys accordingly.
Braze AI-Powered Personalization – Your Trusted Journey Companion
While automation and cross-channel communication ensure that a guest sees your offers at the right time, personalization is what makes the offers themselves right.
You can make sure that every message feels relevant to your guests, and does not go unnoticed. For instance, a restaurant may use personalization to adjust the content of their newsletters to the preferences of each guest, sending those that make reservations later in the day offers for dinner, or a monthly schedule of special events such as wine tastings or live music nights to those that have browsed these on the website in the past.
However, coming up with a personalized offer for each customer segment can be a lot of work for your marketing team. What happens when there are time constraints, when there are too many overlapping customer segments to cater to, or when creativity simply runs dry.
BrazeAI is a welcome addition to a hospitality brand’s engagement strategy– it helps your marketing team engage with your guests meaningfully and with ease, at all times. This is how:
- Real-time personalization: With AI, personalization can go beyond simple segments. It learns from real-time information, triggering personalized messages and journeys on each touchpoint, and uses customer data to predict future engagement patterns. For instance, an AI-agent can include product or service recommendations in newsletters that are based on the customers’ purchase history, and update after each new purchase. According to this Braze case study, a business that adopted this feature has increased its purchase conversion rate by 35%.
- Enhancing creativity: When inspiration is scarce, your marketing team can use BrazeAI to help them with creating copy aimed at different segments, or even with optimizing the strategy. They can describe the type of copy that needs to be written, and AI agents will produce it in accordance with your brand’s tone and customer segments that it is targeting. They can also use the analytic features and insights of BrazeAI to enhance the marketing strategy.
- Boosting efficiency: Whether it is personalized copywriting, journey orchestration or customer segmentation, AI is capable of performing these tasks in a matter of seconds. With the help of BrazeAI, your marketing team will be able to save time on repetitive or technical tasks and dedicate themselves more to complex issues instead.
BrazeAI is a companion you want to have. By personalizing content in real time and optimizing the productivity of your marketing team, it will help you steer every customer’s journey towards success.
Data-Driven Guest Journeys – Unify Customer Data
The real-time activation of customer journeys is crucial to meaningful guest engagement in the hospitality industry. Hospitality businesses must constantly adapt their communication with each and every guest based on insights about preferences derived from data, otherwise they risk losing their interest.
The only issue is, where does this data come from? And how to put it together into coherent customer profiles? While prevalent in other industries too, in hospitality this is an even bigger issue, as customer data comes from so many different touchpoints – from card transactions and menu orders to website activity and social media engagement.
This is how Braze solves this issue:
- Unifying customer data across touchpoints: A guest of a hotel will have a large amount of touchpoints with the brand along their customer journey. They may discover it on social media, browse a few of the sections on the website, make a reservation online, pay for their dinners with a card and book SPA treatments at the reception. Braze collects data from all these steps, unifying them into one comprehensive customer profile from which you can learn all about their preferences.
- Keeping customer data safe: It goes without saying that data should only be collected in a way that absolutely respects the customer’s privacy. Braze upholds very high standards for customer data safety, ensuring that it is not used for any purpose other than enhancing the guests’ customer experience. All data within Braze is encrypted by means of industry-accepted products, and defenses against cyber-attacks are tested regularly by independent third-party firms. Braze is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certified, and complies with GDPR. More information on how Braze helps keep data safe can be found here.
- Real-time journey activation: The guest data gathered across online and offline touchpoints drives the real-time activation of personalized customer journeys. For instance, if the data of a guest indicates a diminishing interest in the brand, a win-back campaign is triggered, sending special offers designed to preserve customer loyalty. This travel company achieved a 78% increase in holiday sales by implementing an engagement strategy that leveraged real-time journey activation.
A customer engagement platform ensures that none of your guest data goes to waste, serving instead as fuel for meaningful, personalized journeys that are activated in real time, keeping your guests engaged.
Optimization Without Limits – Gather Insights and Increase ROI with Braze
In the hospitality industry, even the most sophisticated engagement strategies are not safe from the changing tides. As the audiences and trends shift, the efficacy of cross-channel campaigns may vary, which is why it is crucial to keep an eye on their performance and optimize them when needed.
A good engagement platform platform will help you solve challenges such as finding a bigger picture view of all performance results, using insights to optimize strategy in real time, and – most importantly – staying cost-efficient while increasing the ROI.
Here is how Braze makes this possible:
Customizable dashboards and reporting: With the Report Builder features, you can create your own dashboard that provides a clear overview of all ongoing campaigns and their performance. If, let’s say, a marketer of a hotel chain needed to evaluate the performance of summer holiday campaigns, they could use Report Builder to bring all these campaigns together and generate a clear report to show their team lead in just a few clicks.
Campaign and canvas performance analytics: Sometimes, the bigger picture itself is not enough – you need to zoom in on the details. Braze offers performance analysis features for individual campaigns and complex customer journey canvases alike. From your custom dashboard, you can access metrics for each campaign or canvas such as conversion rates, unique recipients or total revenue, and compare the performance against your goal.
Impact and revenue optimization: Once you have gathered the insights on the performance of your engagement strategy, you can use them to optimize it, thus increasing revenue. For instance, a marketer at a hotel chain can change the default communication channel from SMS to email if they notice that SMS is not driving enough engagement, or emphasize different offers in their messages. A continuous optimization of campaigns and canvases based on insights and analytics will lead to a greater impact, and as much as a 50% increase in conversions.
Knowing and understanding the impact of your engagement strategy is the quickest way to success. With reporting and analytics features offered by hospitality CRM platforms such as Braze, you can leverage performance insights to optimize your strategy and achieve an ROI beyond your goal.
Summary
Keeping customer loyalty in the hospitality industry can sometimes be challenging. Between the constantly changing trends and thousands of different preferences, it can seem impossible to keep each guest satisfied, to make them feel truly seen and welcome.
Braze can be an easy, cost-efficient solution to this. Braze offers a range of features with which you can automate messaging across different channels, personalize content to each audience segment while optimizing it with AI, unify customer data into comprehensive profiles, or analyze and improve the performance of your campaigns and customer journeys. Proven efficient across case studies, these features help you make every guest feel like a regular, and achieve your highest business goals.
Need guidance in elevating your guest engagement with Braze? Reach out to us.
