Know Your Guest: How Preference Centres Help You Collect the Right Data from the Beginning
81% of consumers prefer companies that offer a personalised experience (Hyken), so why aren’t we offering that to them? Hoteliers have more opportunities to collect customer data than other types of businesses. Just through making a booking, you collect a name, address, email, and hopefully a phone number. But there’s so much more that you can learn about your guest if you just ask them. How do you ask them? It all starts with preference centres!
In this blog, we’ll cover the following.
- What is a preference centre?
- What are the benefits of a preference centre for hoteliers?
- What kind of information can you collect in a preference centre?
- When do I send a preference centre?
- What’s possible with a preference centre?
- How a CRM takes knowing your guest even further!
What is a Preference Centre?
A preference centre allows your guests to manage their communication preferences and data sharing choices. It’s most often used in the context of email marketing, privacy compliance, and user experience personalisation. Think of it like a buffet where your guests can self-select what they’re most interested in!
What are the benefits of using Preference Centres as a hotelier?
Picture this: You’re booking a stay at the Mountain View Hotel. At checkout, you opt in to receive marketing communications from the Mountain View hotel. You get added to a general marketing list and receive a generic marketing email a week later. What will you do?
- Read through the whole email and purchase if I find something I like!
- Scan the email, but click away quickly if there’s nothing that jumps out at me.
- Ignore it. Maybe they’ll send me something better later.
- BORING! If there’s no value to me, I’m unsubscribing.
Sure, if it’s something they’re interested in, maybe you’ll click through and purchase. If now isn’t the right purchase time, you’ll still be likely to open a future email. However, if it’s not something you’re interested in, you might hit unsubscribe (at worst) or ignore any future marketing emails from this hotel.
81% of consumers said they ignored messages that felt generic (Attentive)
So, by engaging with your guests early in the process, you’re making them more inclined to open the marketing that you will send. But a preference centre doesn’t just provide an opportunity for your guests to opt in to communications. It gives them the power to engage with your hotel and tell you exactly what they want to hear about. Read more about this below!
Build Your Guest Relationship from Day One
Preference centres help you start on the right foot with your customers. By giving your guests control of what communications they want to receive, you’re helping build a solid foundation.
Only 46% of brands collect zero-party data through sign-up forms or preference centres (Dotdigital), so by integrating one into your data collection process, you’re getting ahead of other hoteliers.
Think of it like being a match-making service for your guests and offerings. The more you know about your guest, the easier it is for you to make them “swipe right” on your marketing with the right messaging for them!
Enhance compliance with privacy laws like GDPR.
Preference centres don’t just build trust with your customers. They ensure compliance with privacy laws like GDPR or CAN-SPAM by providing clear, user-controlled opt-ins. By using preference centres, you’re keeping your business safe with documentation showing when and how consent was given or updated.
Does GDPR apply just to companies in the EU? No, it applies to any companies collecting data of EU residents. Since hotels can capture guests from all around the world, it’s important to keep with up with data protection rules such as GDPR.
Avoid Unsubscribes
Brands have found that implementing preference centres has reduced unsubscribes by up to 30% (Impact Digital). Because you’ve engaged your guests in the process of selecting their marketing, they are less likely to see emails that they’re not interested in. Sure, you might not be sending as many emails, but more importantly, you’re sending emails that people are more likely to click and convert on.
What kind of information should I collect in a preference centre?
A preference centre allows you to get to know your guests’ favourite marketing channels, amenities, demographics, travel preferences, and more! We’ve detailed some of the most popular below that may be the most valuable to you as a hotelier.
Do you need to include everything we’ve listed in your preference centre? No. If you overwhelm your guests with too many options, they’ll either not check anything (which means no marketing) or check everything, which means they’ll receive information that isn’t important to them, and you risk them unsubscribing.
Consider what information is most valuable to you that you can turn into actionable marketing communications.
Preferred Marketing Channels
Start with the basics: how do your guests want to hear from you?
When you think of marketing to your guests, your instinct may be to focus on email marketing, but have you considered SMS? According to Forbes, 64% of consumers believe that businesses should use SMS.
73% of brands aren’t collecting SMS numbers (Dotdigital), yet this can be a powerful channel to communicate with your guests.
Here are some examples of preferred marketing channels:
- SMS
- Push Notifications
What do you have to offer?
Think about what kind of things you’d like to share about your property. Some people may just want to hear about your spa deals, while others will want to be updated every time your restaurant menu changes.
Here are some examples of what information you can collect here:
- Stay
- Spa
- Golf
- Dining
- Events
Who are your guests travelling with?
Guests may be looking for different amenities and activities based on who they’re travelling with. Give your guests the opportunity to opt in to communications tailored to them:
Here are some examples of what information you can collect here:
- Couples
- Family Friendly
- Business Traveller
- Dog Owners
Travel Time Preferences
Everyone’s optimal holiday time is different. Families may be planning their travel around the school holidays, whereas older travellers may be looking to book during the off-season. By getting to know your guests’ travel preferences, you can target marketing to capture them when they are most likely to book.
Here are some examples of what information you can ask guests regarding travel preferences:
- School Holidays
- Easter
- Summer
- Valentine’s Day
- Christmas/New Year’s Eve
- Off-Season
Bonus: Add their birthday to your calendar!
Ask your guests for their birthdays so you can send targeted offers ahead of their special day! We recommend sending this 6-8 weeks ahead of their actual birthday to target them during their decision-making phase.
When do I send the preference centre to guests?
We recommend integrating the preference centre into your booking process or as an email directly after they book. You can also have a version of this on your website to entice people in the pre-booking phase with targeted marketing.
But preferences change over time, so you can resend preference centres to your guests on an annual basis so you can capture updated information.
I’ve collected the data… now what?
Now that you’ve built that trust, don’t send the generic marketing communication anymore! Create communications tailored to your guests’ preferences.
And preference centres don’t just benefit your guests. Zero-party data is free insight into what your typical guest looks like and what they’re interested in. As you build data, you’ll be able to recognise patterns and create unique segments and guest profiles.
If you notice that you have a lot of guests interested in hearing about couples’ activities and not a lot of families, that might inspire you to invest more resources towards weekend getaways and spa activities catered to couples.
How For-Sight’s CRM Platform helps you take knowing your guest further!
For-Sight’s CRM and Marketing Platform is an Independent CRM Solution that merges data from your Property Management System (PMS) and other core transactional hotel systems, including Spa, Golf, Reputation Management and WIFI registration to create a 360 view of your guests. By gathering data across your tech stack, we can create complete guest profiles that allow you to effectively segment and automate your marketing campaigns.
Curious to see how For-Sight can help you increase bookings, drive revenue growth, and grow guest loyalty? Book a demo with our team to see what we can do for you!
