The Thank You Email

They have booked! Great news. A non-refundable rate and they’re arriving in a month. Everyone at the hotel is looking forward to seeing them then.

This month is probably the most wasted month in the whole buyers cycle because the conversion has happened and the hotel quite often sees that as the end of the marketing funnel. Traditional funnels stop here and this is then used to calculate the conversion rate along with the subsequent ROI.

The inbound methodology of marketing, pioneered by Hubspot takes a very different view by adopting a Flywheel approach to marketing which is all about “delighting” the prospects AND customers. This approach holds at it’s core, the notion of giving the right message to the right people at the right time irrespective of where they are in the booking journey.

With this in mind, the period between booking and the stay offers an amazing opportunity to “Delight” and the confirmation email is the first step on this journey. If we have mapped out our personas correctly, we can map out the “Jobs to Be Done” i.e. the key considerations for each type of guest that they need to make prior to their experience. By directly addressing these jobs to be done, we set ourselves up for both a higher conversion rate pre-sale and also allow us to provide meaningful information in this pre-stay, post-purchase period of time as well.

The Romantic Weekend Away will have different considerations for their trip than the corporate traveller and it is by identifying these differences and tailoring our pre-stay content around them that we can really excel. For instance, let’s just take 2 (of many other) personas and just brainstorm pre-stay content.

This content can either be sent in one email or over a period of time before the stay – it’s really important now to be able to connect this booking information at this level with CRM. If it’s only the email and name, we’re really missing a trick. Tools like Revinate and Guestfolio can really help this by providing an out the box integration but should you not be working with these guys, we can assist in custom CRM integrations that will allow you to craft the perfect pre-stay automation to “delight you guests”.