Marketing consent - how to manage them properly

Even the best database and the most ingenious marketing will be useless without the consent themselves. You should collect them from your guests properly. Now you can do it automatically, thanks to the new Profitroom CRM functionality.

Each of your "current" guests is also potentially your ‘future’ guest. Therefore, it is worth doing everything to let the person come back to your facility. This important task involves acquiring marketing consent, thanks to which you can communicate with the guest freely and in accordance with the law. Although the subject of the GDPR stopped appearing on the first pages of newspapers, the rules still apply to you. This means, among other things, that your email database should contain information about marketing consent that your guests have given.

Secure database

The most important and basic assumption of keeping your guests' data safely is to have a secure database. Each email address should be stored there, whether you got it via a web form, email or in any other way. Profitroom CRM provides such a base.

Remember that any failure in exercising due diligence in securing the guests can be a reason to impose a penalty onto your facility in the event of any breaches. And a brach can happen quite easily when everyone has access to data.

A secure database also means that only those responsible for contacting guests may have access to their data. It also means that marketing communication can only be sent to guests who agreed to receive it.

Use the data according to the purpose

In case you have ever wondered if and what kind of communication you can send to your guests because you lacked information about the consent you have collected, then you know how important the right tool is.

Each of your contacts should be properly described, it should have information about the type of marketing consent that the person has given, and have recorded dates for which you can send such communication. All this is required from you because of GDPR.

Profitroom CRM comes in handy with your guests segmentation, it stores dates by when communication can be sent to each of the guests and sends mailing only to guests who have agreed to it.

Collecting consent

From now on, in the Communication > Automatic Messaging section, you will find a automatisation that allows you to enable the option of obtaining marketing consent after booking. When turned on, it will send an email to each of the guests who booked a stay through OTA. The email will contain a ‘thank you for the booking’ note and an additional offer of a welcome pack. The package may contain:

• a glass or a bottle of wine,
• chocolates,
• free parking,
• discount for the stay or a promotional voucher,
• any combination of the above options.

This package is to be picked up by the guest, provided that he/she clicks on the "Receive a gift from the hotel" button. The guest will then be redirected to the hotel's website and will see a popup in the appropriate language version, allowing to receive the package after providing the email address and agreeing to receive marketing communication.

When the guest gives his/her consent, the email address will be automatically added to CRM entry with a corresponding marketing consent. The contact is tagged to show that it comes from one of the OTAs. The tag can be used to filter contacts and to create further guests segments.

Further steps depend only on you and your creativity regarding the communication you want to send to a given guest segment.

Informing the employees

However, in order for everything to work as it should, you have to prepare your reception to handle the bookings containing the welcome pack. First of all, inform your reception desk or employees handling check-in, that you have the function activated and that guests can ask for the welcome pack. Secondly, make sure that you have the bonuses at the reception desk in sufficient quantity to handle your current reservations.

The reception desk can check if a guest should get a package by searching for it in the Contacts tab in CRM. So you can easily verify whether and which package has been assigned to the guest asking for it.

Also inform the employees responsible for mailing in your hotel about new segments and new tags that they will see on the list in CRM. Now, make use of the growing database of your contacts. 

If you are interested in other functionalities of Profitroom CRM, please contact us.

Author: Olga Gajewska