Braze

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. Image source: Braze 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. Image source: Braze 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