As a marketer or eCommerce owner, you know the fierce competition in travel and hospitality. The industry is surging from everyone stuck at home and finally establishing the plan they used to have before the pandemic. Travel is great for data because the industry is built on providing experiences.
To stay ahead of the curve to keep up with the latest trends after COVID-19 and best practices using new technology. This blog post will outline five best practices for implementing a customer data platform (CDP) that meet the online sales models for travel and hospitality companies. Keep reading to learn more!
Data is the new oil, and your company needs to be ready for its sequel. CDPs can recognize churn risks before you realize it by picking up on curious behaviors that might indicate a customer has left their account behind in favor of another brand or is shopping online– but don’t worry! These same tools also offer actionable insights, so marketers never lose touch with loyal followers again through personalized experiences designed just right according to how each individual prefers receiving messaging across all channels.
What is a CDP?
Real quick: a customer data platform is a powerful tool for marketers when they need access and organization of their customers’ information. This will allow them to create profiles with shared data, going out into other applications in the business while also aligning it amongst teams – making this an essential component in any company’s marketing strategy!
Here are five benefits of including a CDP in your tech stack
Customer feedback loops: The customer feedback loop can be repeated at scale with the help of a cohesive experience and reinforced data sharing. Providing opportunities to provide customer feedback means that your customers are engaging with you. This feedback creates more engaging experiences for all individuals on your store site, one they’ll want to enjoy again! Now let’s see if your service meets their expectations.
Cost savings from operational efficiencies: The game-changing power of robust pipelines is now in the hands of enterprise brands that handle millions. From a cost perspective, it makes sense to have one platform for collecting data, segmenting audiences, and managing your campaign/rewards – but there’s even more reason why this approach will benefit you operationally! Integration reduces lag time by eliminating steps between collections; however, what makes things better than ever? Marketers can analyze customer behavior in real-time because everything has been seamlessly connected, so adjustments are quick when needed.
Innovative customer experiences: The CDP in the future needs to support innovation as it integrates new and emerging technologies like AR, VR, or IoT that contribute more data. Even for travel and hospitality. IoT devices are placed in rooms, and virtual reality is applied to airport lounges for relaxation.
The 360-View of the Customer: All the data builds a 360 Degree view of the customer. Loyalty programs offer retailers a massive amount of transactional, behavioral, and demographic data they can work with to update and innovate on their campaigns. A CDP-layered loyalty system can quickly sync and unify this data with other non-loyalty-generated sources like POS, email marketing, etc., to create a far richer customer profile that you can personalize quickly and easily. Imagine what you can learn with customer insights. Ex.how many business travelers are there on flights into New York? How many people utilize the wi-fi on the plane and in the airport lounges?
Campaign ROI & Engagement Optimization: The CDP-driven loyalty program helps marketers analyze the effectiveness of a campaign, promotion, or incentive in real-time. Real-time capabilities can be useful for fixing issues around high acquisition costs and content ineffectiveness because it allows them to measure results against a baseline. Hence, they know if something needs to change before your next big push! In addition, long-term success will also depend on how well you predictively make decisions based on these metrics, ensuring nothing gets left undone when preparing messages ahead of time.
Now that you know what a CDP is for your very direct-to-consumer experience. Let’s graduate into those Best Practices in using a CDP to grow your business.
1 Identify At-Risk Customers
New customer acquisition is 25 times more expensive than retaining your existing customers. And on average, current loyalists are 50% less likely to purchase from you than new ones! In other words, it pays big time if we can figure out which of your clients might be at risk of churning out. Convince them to stay around with retention strategies like personalized content tailored just right for their needs – because every single one deserves quality service after all those years spent paying for your subscription service.
2 Optimize Post-Purchase Engagement
Keeping your customers happy and engaged is crucial for retaining them. When they return, it’s important to focus on what will make the customer feel special, so they’re more likely to stay than go elsewhere!
You can orchestrate connected journeys with personalized recommendations based on products purchased before or reminders in case someone leaves their shopping experience short because you never know how long people have been thinking about buying something else.
Personalized recommendations for customers from products they have previously purchased and abandoned cart reminders when necessary based on their journey’s specific needs can increase repurchase by upwards of 30%. That’s pretty significant.
3 Helpful customer experiences grow relationships
Travel experience forces you to change perspective and take on an array of journeys that can be measured by how it grows customer relationships. Knowing the insight about who they are for companies wanting to succeed, implementing CDPs allows taking ownership over this relationship as opposed to having nothing at all happen simply because there’s no other option available; using them like reminders while planning trips or avoiding purchases which would lead high churn rates among other things such adding onto strategies resulting into better trip experiences through targeted upgrades/add-ons plus creating mobile app personalization—all help make sure people receive excellent customer service every time.
4 Initiate Omnichannel Loyalty Programs
pandemic has caused consumers to be more willing and eager than ever. A recent McKinsey consumer survey found that “customers are twice as likely to try new brands, experiences or stores because of COVID-19 – 75% surveyed said they changed their shopping habits during the last two months! This is vital for companies who depend on customer loyalty; now there’s competition within your satisfying base.”
The best way businesses can firm up these relationships with customers? Focusing not only online but also through every other means possible: providing them an enjoyable omnichannel experience where no stakeholder feels overlooked or unappreciated.
5 Empower Your Customer Support with Customer Data
Customer experience is everything, and your company’s customer service platform can help you provide customers with the best product or experience. Integrating their profiles in one place across multiple departments like marketing & sales will create greater productivity internally while giving support teams insight into issues with each account they might have never been able to before because it broke down silos!
It isn’t just people who need personalization; we should also consider different platforms such as social media, where users share very intimate details of themselves online to help you match these different details.
Implementing a CDP can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Following these five best practices for getting the very most value from a customer data platform will help you stay ahead of the curve in the travel and hospitality industry. If you’re looking for more expert advice on using data and technology to improve your sales, reach out to our team of experts. We’d love to help!
