Home is where the heart is and it’s also where people feel most comfortable. When guests stay at your hotel, they are disconnected from these comforts so the more you can make them feel “at home” the more favorable their stay—which results in repeat visits and word-of-mouth recommendations.

How can you make your guests feel more at home? Here are some marketing tips:  

Personalized promotions

Personalization marketing is an effective strategy used in emails, website searches, and wherever businesses want to establish a stronger connection with consumers. Since each hotel guest will have unique personalities and desires, creating a more personal experience can make your guests feel more important and happier overall.

Inject some personality into your hotel marketing. Here are some ideas:

• If any guests frequent your hotel on specific holidays, to encourage future stays, offer a discount to these loyal customers to come back and visit you again on the same holiday.
  
  
• Leave a special welcome note personalized with the guest’s name on the bed to greet them when they arrive.

Create a loyalty program

According to the book Marketing Metrics, the probability of businesses selling to an existing customer is 60% to 70%, while this number drops to 5% to 20% when selling to a new prospect. Loyalty programs leverage existing customers and provide incentives to compel them to book in the future.

Loyalty programs provide your customers with special perks and deals as a thank you for booking. Many programs offer an accumulative point system that rewards members with special perks and additional deals. 

In keeping with the benefits of personalization marketing, loyalty programs also provide you with insight on what patrons like and dislike and their preferences so you can get to know them better. This data provides you with key information you can use to offer a more personalized experience and deliver prime value. 

Interactive voice response (IVR) Solutions

One of the keys to making your hotel customers feel more at home is improving customer service. One of the most cost-effective and easiest ways to facilitate this is by using an interactive voice response solution. 

Interactive voice response is an automated call routing system that facilitates efficient customer service for inbound and outbound calls. It provides a seamless customer experience and eliminates employee-wasted time by automating specific queries and FAQs and routing customer calls to the appropriate channel. With IVR solutions, you can transfer your customers to the right extension with a keypress or voice response. Use IVR solutions to also help customers book reservations using the keypress menu. 

In addition to phone trees, use interactive voice response to gather valuable data from customers. Send incentivized surveys and ask them questions about the quality of their stay and what they would improve. Use IVR solutions to also send important notifications via phone messages to all of your customers. These messages can help provide a more personalized experience as voice calls provide a human touch that written messages cannot.

CallFire’s hosted IVR solutions for hotel marketing are easy to set up and get started. Simply sign up for a free account here, and we will help you get up and running. A veteran in the industry, CallFire has been helping the hospitality industry personalize the customer experience for years to help them save money, get more efficient and improve customer service and retention.