Repeat bookings: How to re-engage and upsell customers with personalised engagement

The webinar opened with a discussion about the excitement that’s building for those that are ready to reopen after 16 months of lockdown and restrictions. Restaurants and bars especially are having to adapt to new regulations surrounding outdoor and indoor dining. The pre-booking process for these types of places is currently of utmost importance.

The topic of where exactly does your customer data come from and what systems are most commonly used at the moment to utilise it came up. 

We identified the two key ones; the booking tool and the point of sale system. Most operators cannot function without these two, and together they are an essential means of collecting transactional and behavioural data, which the Xtremepush platform stitches together to help deliver a range of customer engagement use cases.

Use Cases for the Hospitality and Leisure Industry

The core focus of the webinar was around using the customer data that you have to create automated, personalised communications pre and post-booking. Here are the key use cases we have identified in this regard. 

Getting More Conversions via On-site Messaging

Firstly, we looked at the benefits of using a/b testing in your campaigns, and also how simple it is to use on the platform. 

Following on from this, when creating your on-site message campaign it’s important to set your message to pop up when a particular event occurs.

This means that your onsite message is delivered to the right person at the right time. As well as this, it means that the user won’t be bombarded with loads of different messages all at once, enhancing the user experience.

Finishing off this particular case, we explored how to use the segmentation tool to target different customers with different messages.

Enhancing Experience/Upselling

This use case kicked off by using the customer journey builder tool to identify what upsell message to send to the user. In the leisure and hospitality industry, this would generally be used to send additional products and experiences that are relevant to their booking. 

Sending a message about some add-ons, like booking a parking space or pre-ordering drinks for the user’s arrival are just a few examples of how we can use channels for upselling.

Finally, we explored how best to use the data available to you to send your message at the best time possible. For example, if you know the date of the booking, a good time to send your message might be the day before.

Post-Booking Journey

So what happens after you’ve gone through your pre-booking campaigns and the customer has had their experience?

We talked about the importance of communicating with customers in the few days after their booking, and the best ways to go about it, including when to do it. Thank you emails with links to review sites are a great way to re-establish contact with customers, and also creates the opportunity to give your business a better online look with good reviews.

Some other messaging to stay in contact with previous users is to send updates on what’s happened or been added since they last visited. This increases the chances of people returning to your site and reducing churn.

Cancellations

Unfortunately not every booking comes to fruition and sometimes falls through.

In this use case we covered one approach to dealing with cancellations. There was a discussion on what kind of message should be sent, and it was agreed that a “no hard feelings” approach would be best.

To get these customers through your doors at a later stage, offering a discount or a free drink if they book again would be sure to grab their attention.

Memberships

The final use case was all about membership schemes and how best to set them up.

People need to see the benefit of always going back to you. Setting up a membership scheme is a good way for people to see some sort of reward for being a loyal customer. You can handle memberships with association management software (e.g., Impexium).

We showed how our intuitive email builder can be used to create an email about a members club, and then used our segmentation tool to make an informed, data-driven decision on who to send it to.

In general, you would want to send this type of message to users that have visited your site a lot as they are more likely to be your most valuable customers.

Key Takeaways

If there’s anything you take away from this webinar, it should ideally be these five.

• Don’t sit on your customer data, it needs to be activated and used to full potential
• It can be helpful to segment campaigns into two categories: pre and post-booking
• One or two successful automated campaigns can have a significant positive impact on your bookings
• Don’t be afraid to start small with these campaigns
• A multichannel approach will deliver better results