CRM Meets Email Marketing

Libra OnDemand does a great job at tracking all of your customer profiles, their preferences, survey results (feature released last month) and stay details. This is all great, but now that we have a wealth of information about each guest and their stays, what do we do with it?

Email campaigns have always been a popular way to communicate with your customer base and market your product. But so often it’s been shots in the dark, sending out standardized mass email communications to hundreds of thousands of addresses. This no longer has to be the case. By combining rich CRM profile data with email marketing tools, you can segment your entire database by multiple criteria such as stay patterns, guest preferences, survey results, demographics data, spend history and others. You can then create highly targeted email campaigns that will have a high chance of striking home with their intended recipients.

You can also engage in direct, one-on-one communications with your customers, responding to their particular reservation details, stay requirements and profile preferences. If you know that your guest is arriving tomorrow, why not send him or her an upgrade invitation or an email describing local points of interest and attractions? If the guest has just departed, wouldn’t you want to get their feedback on how the stay went? And if your property is hosting a wine festival, why not invite all your past guests who you know are wine enthusiasts (captured through the preference tracking feature in Libra OnDemand) to come and stay at your property during that event?

Our team has been working hard on integrating CRM with email marketing for the past weeks, and we are happy to announce the release of email marketing functionality as part of the Libra OnDemand CRM application. We have teamed up with Vertical Response to create a tight integration between VR email marketing platform (using very robust VR APIs) and the Libra OnDemand application and its underlying force.com platform.

One of the key components of this new feature is the ability to create and manage email marketing lists directly in Libra OnDemand, using Reservation and Contact profiles and any other related objects. For example, you can create a list of all your customers that stayed in your hotel in the past year and booked a spa package. Email lists are compiled using all of the available profile data as criteria. You no longer have to deal with manual queries, data exports or file uploads.

Another great feature is the ability to create Dynamic lists that compile based on reservations and guest profile data at the time when the mailing is sent out. Dynamic lists, along with the scheduling capabilities of email campaigns, are the basis for pre-arrival and post-departure email messages.

Since we now have the ability to use every aspect of the guest stay in email marketing communications, dynamic email capabilities have several interesting use cases. For example, consider sending out an automatic email to every guest who filled out a post-stay survey with a satisfaction score of say 90% and higher. This campaign can contain an invitation for the guest to review their stay on TripAdvisor and, since you already know that the guest was satisfied, great ratings are guaranteed!