Hoteliers are yet to realize the power they can harness with a customer data platform (CDP), which helps them collect guest data across all touchpoints, deliver personalized offers, acquire new customers, and improve the guest experience.
What Is a Customer Data Platform?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a marketing tool that collects and unifies opt-in guest data across all channels. Using CDP, hoteliers can gain a complete view of individual customers based on the data they provide over time on hotel websites, CRM, point-of-sale, social media, direct email, review sites, and other forms of communication.
CDP is effective for personalized guest communications and services, email marketing, marketing automation, loyalty programs, business intelligence, and other strategies that drive more bookings, yield revenue, and increase efficiency.
CDP Advantages for Hoteliers
Can CDP help hoteliers? CDP consolidates a hotel's own first-party data from all sources and disparate data silos. First-party data has the advantage that hoteliers will no longer depend on third-party data from Google, Facebook, etc. On the other hand, third-party data presents many privacy concerns, and Google is already working to build a privacy-first world, gradually phasing out all third-party cookies from their services:
"Developing strong relationships with customers has always been critical for brands to build a successful business, and this becomes even more vital in a privacy-first world. We will continue to support first-party relationships on our ad platforms for partners, in which they have direct connections with their own customers."
Regardless of the size of their operations, hoteliers can benefit from using a customer data platform:
- Create a unified profile for every guest. Go beyond CRM functionality, as CDP unifies each customer's opt-in data from all the hotel's first-party data: CRM, hotel site, social media interactions, emails, PMS, POS, and other customer feedback, online or offline.
- Refine customer-centric marketing strategies. Hotels can no longer afford to rely on faceless, nameless customer personas. Instead, they now must prioritize customer-centric marketing and focus on the individual rather than the brand.
- Use personalization strategies that meet travellers' expectations to build mutually beneficial relationships between the hotel and guests.
- Understand guests across all channels. Hoteliers must focus on more than the customer journey - they must understand all the activities guests engage in, their likes and dislikes, behaviours, and more.
- Build better customer experiences beyond loyalty programs that serve the hotel rather than the guest.
- Improve guests' satisfaction from when they start researching information about a hotel until they end their stay and even beyond the point they leave a review.
- Increase customer lifetime value (CLV). Satisfied guests will continue to recommend a hotel to family and friends a long time after a visit. They may even become faithful brand ambassadors and returning guests.
A robust CDP will enable hotels to identify their best customers, getting to know more than their booking preferences. Hotels can also find their guests dining choices, the social media channels they use the most, favourite leisure activities, etc. Access to such in-depth information about each guest will lead to more meaningful relationships between hotels and guests, better communication, personalized marketing strategies, and other programs that improve profitability and the hotel's bottom line.
VerityGuest CDP for Hoteliers
VerityGuest offers one of the most advanced customer data platforms on the market. It has all the features you need to make the best out of your CDP and integrates with all your hotel's tech stack, including PMS, POS, website, mobile apps, concierge, surveys, SPA, etc
The Single Customer View tool gives hotel staff across all departments access to individual guest data and metrics. Users can see all the information about a guest: contact details, social media profiles, and activities like check-ins, hotel website logins, bookings, email opening rates, etc.
Moreover, VerityGuest has sophisticated statistical model algorithms and catalogues for standardization, normalization, matching, and deduplication that enable hoteliers to align marketing, IT, and analytics departments with a shared data glossary.
Where privacy is concerned, VerityGuest CDP is fully GDPR, ISO, and CCPA compliant, synching and managing guest preferences across all communication, communication, data usage, and data consent forms.
Of course, VerityGuest is not the only CDP on the market, but it is robust and reliable, offering access to a multitude of tools. Moreover, it updates its integrations based on the hotel's needs.
Will You Need CDP in the Future?
If benefits and advantages are not enough to persuade you that you must invest in CDP now, some market statistics probably will tell you that such platforms are here to stay and grow:
- The global CDP market size will likely reach $20.5 billion U.S. by 2027 (Research and Markets).
- 63% of businesses use customer data to influence product offerings, while 43% run a loyalty program that ties incentives to more than purchasing. (Treasure Data)
- 63% marketers use CDP to personalize digital campaigns. (Treasure Data)
- 67% marketers use CDP for customer value, 61% for retention, and 57% for acquisition. (CDP Institute Use Case Generator, 2021)
- 43% marketers said CDP brought significant improvements to ROI/ROAS. (Treasure Data)
