It’s less difficult, and less expensive, to generate a booking from an existing guest than it is to convert someone new, yet this simple fact often gets overlooked in the race to reach a wider audience online.
Hotels can retain more guests and save money and resources in the process by focusing not only on securing new business, but on creating an engaging post-booking experience that naturally makes your guests want to come back to you time and time again.
Post-Booking Engagement
Establishing a routine of personalised correspondence, both post-booking and post-stay, can help you forge stronger relationships with your guests, leading to repeat bookings, better reviews and even recommendations to friends and family.
As a hotelier, you have several basic but effective email engagement strategies at your fingertips which should not go untapped. These include:
- Booking confirmations
- Discount offers
- Thank you messages
Each of these message types presents a valuable opportunity to create a more enjoyable, more personalised experience for your guests.
Strategic Post-Booking Communication
As well as letting your guests know that their online booking has been completed successfully, post-booking emails communicate that you care about more than just acquiring their business. Here’s just some examples of post-booking emails you can easily incorporate into your guest correspondence, both before and long after their check-in date.
- ‘Welcome’ email – Get guests excited for their break with a ‘welcome’ style email including check-in details, local transport info/travel directions and possibly links to great attractions nearby.
- Guest satisfaction survey – Ask your guests to fill in a brief survey about their stay. This gives you an opportunity to engage further with the guest, while perhaps gathering some new and useful feedback to improve your customer service strategy even more.
- Review request – On a similar note, you can remind your guests how much you value their feedback and ask them to provide a review for your property.
- Service/attraction recommendation – Recommend a local service, event or attraction that may be of interest to your guests while they’re in town. Show them that you appreciate their booking and are busy thinking of other ways to help them get the most from their stays.
- A ‘We Miss You’ email – Acknowledge a guest that hasn’t booked for awhile in a personal way and remind them how much you value their business.
No matter what kind of post-booking message you’re sending out to your guests, the key strategy is to keep engagement frequent and fresh while encouraging feedback and incentivising future bookings.
By focusing on improving and personalising your email engagement strategies for existing guests, you can build stronger guest loyalty, set your property apart from your competitors and drive repeat bookings. eTourism’s email marketing tool Guest Connect is designed to help you target specific guest groups and reach out to them with more personalised, more effective email campaigns. To find out more, get in touch today.
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