Increase Sales With Your CRM And Marketing Automation

Marketing automation on its own is powerful. However, when backed up with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system hospitality businesses can take their revenue and customer loyalty to the next level.

This clever tech pairing comes with significant opportunities to engage and retain customers, drive conversions and significantly boost profit margins.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what marketing automation fueled by a CRM system means and review some best practices as well as real-life examples.

What is marketing automation?

1.1. Definition

Marketing automation is a tool for businesses to streamline their marketing efforts and effectively communicate with their customers using personalisation and targeted messaging.

The driver behind this automation is customer data, which is collected and stored in the CRM solution. Many CRMs now include a marketing automation feature, allowing for easier campaign management and tracking.

Emails and SMS campaigns are sent out automatically using pre-defined triggers, such as specific customer characteristics or interactions. 

Plus, automation saves staff a lot of time and also reduces the risk of human error. 

1.2. Trigger-based campaign examples

Here are some trigger-based campaign examples hospitality venues should implement.

• New newsletter subscribers – a simple welcome message drives engagement and encourages revisits.
• Win-back lost customers – attract them back with a special deal.
• Birthday surprise offer – shows that you value your customers and helps strengthen your relationship.
• Online review booster – an automated post-visit review request email will keep guest feedback flowing. 

The required customer data for those campaigns can easily be extracted from the CRM through segmentation.

4 key reasons to implement marketing automation

Marketing automation benefits hospitality businesses in a number of ways.

Firstly, it allows nurturing customers towards long-term loyalty through personalised and targeted content. Customers are more likely to feel valued and appreciated when the messages they receive resonate with their specific interests and needs. 

Secondly, personalised emails have proven to be more relevant and therefore have a higher conversion rate. In fact, they have a 2.5 times higher click-through rate than a generic email.

Thirdly, marketing automation also provides businesses with additional sales and upsell opportunities based on historic customer interaction in-venue and online.

Finally, once the setup is complete, automated campaigns don’t require much work as they run automatically. This allows your team to focus on other areas of the business.

Best practice tips

Marketing automation has become an increasingly important tool in the hospitality industry. However, to be truly effective, some best practices should be considered. 

Firstly, input from various data sources through your CRM is crucial. By collating data from your tech tools, such as Guest Wifi, loyalty scheme and table booking platform, you can build a comprehensive customer profile.

Furthermore, to make the best use of the data, it’s important to segment it into distinct customer groups. To make it easier, use the pre-defined data segments provided by CRM solutions.

Finally, operators should regularly check their triggers to ensure their automation work effectively and that customers still receive relevant and timely communications. 

How hospitality operators succeed with marketing automation

Here are some real-life examples from hospitality businesses that have used their CRM to automate their marketing processes.

Bar Tonic has seen astonishing results from their automated birthday emails, offering customers a martini on the house. So far, they’ve generated over £10,000 return visit ROI from it. 

Another marketing automation usage example comes from the Signature Pub Group. By automating their review request emails, they’ve managed to collect more than 12,000 reviews in a short period of time.

Marketing automation not only increases sales but is also a real time-saver. For example, Birdhouse London is able to 2 hours per week since implementing it.

Takeaway

There is no doubt that marketing automation are an essential tool for any hospitality operator that wants to increase customer loyalty.

By laying down the foundation with a powerful CRM system and then leveraging it with personalised messages tailored to specific customer segments, they can make sure that their guests are engaged and keep coming back.