It’s all about connection in marketing and building a brand these days. When the brand connects in personalized ways with their customers, the likelihood of repeat business with that buyer group increases by as much as 65% according to a recent Accenture newsroom survey. The trick is how to help your target customer feel that way about your product or service.
We live in a Big Data world, where our preferences are logged and stored, but accessing the right information and using it effectively requires research and effort, in part because there is so much information available.
For those in the travel and hospitality industries, pertinent data includes patterns of behavior, places traveled, level of service experienced, price ranges they usually pay, how often they travel, and more. Connect all of those details along with demographics, online patterns, and affiliations and it becomes easier to see what type of offers and connections fit particular customers and will grab their attention.
Using those finding, Kimpton’s does promotional emails that have fared very well with their customers for increased business. Kimpton tracks the information and then engages customers with personalized emails showing surprise benefits and amenities that meet the criteria for those customers. If a customer loves high-end spa vacations, then receiving an email about a new location opening in a beautiful locale with special grand-opening treats could be just the incentive for an immediate booking.
Alternatively, adventure junkies might receive an email with information about global travel in unexpected places offering unique and tailored experiences for that customer to choose from a menu of possibilities. However, if you don’t know the habits and patterns, the best you’ll do is a generic list of travel opportunities. Which is likely to get the best results?
How to Start Information Gathering
The first steps are easy: collect and gather information about actions and behaviors using many channels and traditional web metrics including device usage, clicks, page views, etc. After that, add in modeling techniques from second and third-party data. Once those have been factored in, then it’s time to use them to create multi-point personalization.
Delivering the Message
It’s not just the specific and personalized emails. You’ll use this information in content and make sure content targeted to an adventurer gets to them, and the spa addicts get their content. But remember it’s not just about the story in the content, but the delivery as well. Adventurers won’t respond as well to a low-key, harmonic, and peaceful presentation. They want action and excitement.
You’ll need optimized and consistent content and messages using digital interfaces for your brand. Creating protocols to keep new stories and images consistent with the goals become important, even creating a tool to run content through before it’s posted to social media or a website. But make that as simple as possible so your people can spend more time finding and developing new offerings and content giving more life to the customer’s experience with your brand.
If the data filters are part of the website, then when a customer comes to the page, the internet pulls up the information from this customer. If they almost always travel for business reasons to just a few locations, then the page adjusts to show places to travel in those areas where there are conference and business facilities attached to the hotels. For someone who travels to Europe on business several times a year and also loves beach vacations, it might show beach facilities near some of the centers where the customer travels for business.
One way to personalize that experience is intercepting beacon data using mobile apps to identify the customers, so they receive messages and offers relating to their location. Just as some dating apps let people know that another member of the site is nearby, these inform the customer of nearby restaurants, services, and spas.