Learn all about the wonders of hotel website personalization
In recent years, a change has taken place in consumer behavior. Consumer demand for customized products and experiences has increased significantly, and thanks to recent technological advances businesses are able to deliver exactly just that – personalization.
Personalization is the secret weapon of Netflix. They have become masters at leveraging user data to deliver personalized experiences that translate into unparalleled user engagement. They’re not the only ones betting on personalization. Spotify has become a leader in music streaming, in part thanks to their expertise in this area. Using advanced technology, the platform shows hyper relevant content based on the preferences of each user.
Travelers today also expect a personalized experience and are looking for companies who are able to customize their offerings to individual preferences. OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) and other third parties are already using personalization to create experiences tailored to travelers’ needs to nudge them towards a reservation. To compete effectively, more hotel brands should also be leveraging the power of personalization.
Personalization applies throughout the entire guest journey, from the research stage and online booking to the guest experience on-property and the post-stay stage. Today, we are going to focus on the booking phase, bringing you the secret formula to deliver a unique online experience that makes it obvious for visitors that your hotel is the right fit for their stay.
Generally speaking, hotel websites only convert 2% of traffic on average. This means that for every 100 visitors visiting your website, 98 leave without booking a room.
This represents a clear opportunity for hotel marketers and revenue managers. By optimizing your website and delivering the online experience that potential guests are looking for, you will be able to retain more visitors and nudge them towards a reservation, positively impacting your website conversion. What is the easiest way to achieve this? Through website personalization.
First things first, let’s talk about personalization. This term refers to the adaptation of a product, service, home, etc., to the personality of the person for whom it’s intended.
Within hospitality, integrating personalization into your online marketing strategy entails providing a unique browsing experience to each one of your website visitors, with messages and offers tailored to the characteristics and needs of each individual. It’s about understanding your users, giving them what they are looking for, guiding them, and then showing them that booking through your hotel’s direct channel is the right choice.
Download our guide: 33 website personalization terms every hotelier should know
In 2020, Dassault Systèmes unveiled the results of a study dedicated to service personalization. Consumers, especially the younger generations, are overwhelmingly in favor of it and ready to pay for these services and share their data as necessary. This demonstrates that personalization represents a real opportunity for businesses.
Consumers want a unique online experience tailored to their tastes and preferences. With so much choice available to travelers, from competitor hotels to other booking options for your own brand such as OTAs, it’s critical to highlight what makes your property unique the instant a potential guest lands on your website. Visitors need to know exactly why they should select your hotel, and why they should be completing their reservation through your direct channel. Providing them with that tailored offer they are looking for while highlighting the benefits of booking direct will help you engage with your online guests and drive direct reservations.
Forbes recently launched a study showing the power of personalization:
Utilizing personalization to build relationships and create a better user experience pays off for hotels too. In a world where the vast majority of companies, hotels included, are investing more in personalization, companies that don’t are risking getting left behind.
To survive and thrive, hotel brands need to build a strong direct channel. Doing so reduces reliance on third parties, lowers costs while generating a higher ROI, and enables hotel brands to regain a direct relationship with guests. Client hotels of The Hotels Network have seen an increase of 32% on average of their direct bookings when personalizing their website experience.
THN’s unique targeting system with 40+ preset or custom targeting rules to choose from
Nowadays, website personalization is a requirement in hotel marketing; but do you know how to introduce it on your hotel website? Let’s take you through the basics…
1. Understand your audience: Are your guests families or solo travelers? Do they come from your online campaigns or social media? Are they browsing from your local destination or overseas? Use your data and analytics to build up a clear picture of who your website visitors are so you can deliver tailored messages that truly resonate.
2. Identify opportunities to improve: To be able to prioritize where to take action, it’s important to analyze your hotel’s website results at different stages of the booking funnel. Benchmarking your direct channel against the market and competitors will let you pinpoint exactly where your website is under or overperforming. Perhaps your biggest challenge is driving users from your homepage to the booking engine? Or maybe you need to focus on improving the conversion rate on mobile devices?
3. Choose the optimal website message format: Creating powerful campaigns is best achieved by using a variety of display types and formats. For each message, select the most appropriate format based on the goal of the campaign, such as nudging visitors towards the booking engine or persuading abandoning visitors to stay on your website, and then customize the content and design to suit your own brand. Effective message formats include Layers, Smart Notes, Inliners and Exits.
4. Target your messages correctly: Personalization is all about delivering the right message to the right user. Today, segmentation rules within personalization tools make it easy for you to target your messages accordingly so they are only shown to relevant users.
5. Display messages at key stages of the booking process: Personalization isn’t only about the message, but also the timing – it’s essential to deliver the message at the right time, at critical steps of your guests’ reservation journey to effectively nudge them down the funnel.
To help you understand how to put this into practice, here are some real examples of how hotel brands are personalizing the website experience and boosting direct bookings.
To create powerful campaigns, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd. An effective strategy is creating packages around key calendar dates. This can be a local event taking place in your destination, a national festivity or even a holiday period. Linking your marketing campaigns to appealing calendar dates presents a fantastic opportunity to boost your direct reservations.
The key is showing relevant content based on the stay dates users are searching for. And if you don’t want all your website visitors to see the message, use segmentation rules to define who is able to view it. For example, you can present your Valentine’s offers only to couples searching for a double room on dates close to the holiday.
Discover how you can leverage key dates on your hotel website to ensure your offers are as relevant as possible for visitors.
With last-minute booking behavior on the rise, who wouldn’t like to capture a higher share of these guests? Create and promote irresistible last-minute deals on your website to encourage instant bookings and boost your conversion rate. This is something extremely easy to do thanks to THN’s targeting tools.
The best part? YOU decide on the booking window. For example, this hotel has carefully crafted an offer for those super last-minute bookers. Shown to users who are looking for a stay on that very same day, the property is providing them with an exclusive rate and a complimentary welcome drink. Tempting, huh?
Driving traffic from your social media channels to your website is not enough, this traffic needs to actually convert. A quick win to generate bookings from your social media campaigns is by providing them a warm and personalized welcome, an exclusive discount just for them, or even re-promoting your campaign.
Jumeirah knows it well. In line with their social media campaign targeting families, they showcase the offer details to everyone who lands on to the website through that campaign. This has become our new favorite example for targeting families - easy, quick and effective!
Having a clear understanding of where your visitors are browsing from and carefully curating special offers to grab their attention is a powerful strategy to leverage personalization to encourage more reservations.
For example, if your hotel website gets a high volume of international US visitors, you can create an offer around key dates such as the 4th of July, or offer them exclusive benefits that they can enjoy such as free airport shuttle, complimentary concierge recommendations or even discounted rates for your destination’s main tourist attractions.
More and more visitors are using mobile devices when searching for a hotel, making it essential for hoteliers to provide a smooth and personalized mobile experience to increase reservations from this audience.
Identify mobile visitors returning to your website, and provide them with a tantalizing offer that will make them book in the moment. Looking for more ideas to boost your hotel’s conversion rate on mobile? Click here.
THN-developed feature CRM Targeting enables hotel brands to apply advanced targeting rules based on user profile data stored in their CRM. Hotel marketers can now use everything they know about their guests to enhance the online booking journey and create a totally personalized website experience.
What’s more, these can be combined with any of THN’s existing behavioral targeting options such as booking dates or length of stay. With this powerful combination, website visitors can now be shown hyper-relevant messages at critical points throughout the booking funnel, helping to nudge them towards a reservation and ultimately boost direct conversions.
The concept of improving the user experience and increasing hotel revenue simultaneously by leveraging technology is known as Predictive Personalization. Taking this approach enables you to dynamically display the most relevant offers based on each user’s likelihood to book.
Introducing this innovation on your hotel website, you can bid farewell to unnecessary discounts for high-intent users and say hello to higher conversion rates for those that need an extra push to finalize that booking.
Click to discover more stories
In a world where consumers are inundated with choices on where to stay and where to book their accommodation, personalization within the first touch-point is key. Hotel brands who embrace the latest technological advances and make personalization an integral part of their marketing and revenue management strategies are able to engage better with potential guests, resulting in more effective customer acquisition as well as a stronger long-term relationship with guests.
The Hotels Network’s suite of hotel website personalization tools work on any website for any hotel brand or accommodation provider, no matter who your technology provider is. The only requirement is that you have a booking engine. Installation is super simple: just add a line of code to your current website, no surgery required. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to personalize your hotel’s website and turn it into a well-oiled direct booking machine.
There’s no risk. If you like what you see, you can try our software for free for 30 days and from day one you will be able to observe how your direct channel starts growing.
-1.png?width=130&height=145&name=Direct%20Booking%20Tools%20Badge%20(2)-1.png)
.png?width=130&height=145&name=Direct%20Booking%20Tools%20Badge%20(1).png)
Built with care and wanderlust in San Francisco & Barcelona
© 2024, The Hotels Network
