What is Hotel Remarketing?
With traditional online marketing, you drive traffic to your hotel website and try to convince visitors to make a booking. This effort encompasses hotel website design, search engine optimization (travel SEO), online advertising (like Google AdWords), and social media outreach. However what happens when a person planning a stay in your destination reaches your website and does not book right away? That is where remarketing kicks in.
Hotel remarketing is how you deliver your message to past visitors to your website who were not ready to make a booking decision. These warm leads are likely to be interested in staying at your hotel. Reminding them afterward to return and make a booking is your best call to action.
The most common form of remarketing uses costly pay-per-click banner ads on the Google Display Network or social media sites. There are budget-friendly options that take advantage of the effectiveness of email marketing. These include email newsletter automation as well as travel remarketing tools like the Book Later Button.
Hotel Booking Conversion Funnel
The direct booking funnel is familiar to all hospitality businesses. This summarized view of the sequential process will make it easier for hotel marketers to visualize what is missing.
During the “Awareness” stage, you leverage every online marketing method to make consumers aware of your hotel brand. When they are planning a trip and looking to book lodgings, your hotel website should be familiar, have a positive reputation, and be easy to reach.
Once visitors reach your hotel website they become “Prospects.” It is the job of your site to convince them to make a reservation before they browse elsewhere. Therefore visitors must be convinced that your hotel is the place to stay by leading them down the conversion path.
Finally “Bookings” are the successful result of the hotel conversion funnel. Measurements of your online marketing return on investment (ROI) are based on how well you can turn lookers (prospects) into bookers.
Hotel Remarketing Funnel
All is not lost when a consumer likes your hotel but decides for any number of reasons not to book right away. With remarketing, hotels get a second chance to convince travelers to return and book later. Here is the same funnel with hotel email remarketing in the mix.
With remarketing, you capture the email address of a visitor that expresses interest and asks for a booking reminder. Through the use of hotel remarketing technology, they will receive a timely email in their inbox. This opt-in reminder reinforces your hotel brand, delivers your hospitality marketing message, and is an effective way to get warm leads to click back to your site.
With email remarketing, you are proactively capturing leads that cost money to attract to your site. Without remarketing, you are putting all your eggs in the instant booking conversion basket when it is reported that as much as 97% of people do not book travel on their first visit. By remarketing to leads, your hotel can continue the booking conversion process and not lose customers to the competition.
Hotel Remarketing Technology
Hotel websites have several options to add an email remarketing campaign, all of which could be obtained for free. These three options require a small amount of time and basic website editing skills, so you may need to work with your hotel web designer or IT staff for help.
1. Hotel Email Me Contact Form
Create a new contact form with name and email address fields to keep it as small as possible. Title it “Email Me About Your Hotel” or something similar to get the point across that you will email hotel information and a link to your site. Add this form to the pages where your call to action is “Book Now” to offer an easy to agree to an alternative. Once you receive their email request, reply with a well-crafted welcome message and why the recipient should return and book later.
2. Hotel Brochure Newsletter Sign-Up
For those hotels that already have an email newsletter provider, set up a separate hotel remarketing list. Create a sign-up widget to capture email addresses and label the subscribe button “Bookmark Hotel” or “Get Hotel Brochure” for example Configure the list to automatically send out a booking reminder with an e-brochure. Use email marketing best practices to avoid spamming the lead by sending one message only.
3. Book Later Button Widget
To save time and gain powerful travel remarketing features, consider getting the Book Later Button. After placing the widget near your “Book Now” buttons (and on analytics exit pages), visitors will be able to request a booking reminder with privacy and security. Your custom hotel remarketing email message will automatically get sent out on schedule. Best of all you can track the results for the greatest ROI.
Summary
Since it is evident that capturing and remarketing to hotel leads will deliver more repeat traffic and reservations, the question is not whether to introduce remarketing but how. As you can see from this article it can be as simple as a contact form, segmenting your email newsletter, or a robust packaged solution such as the Book Later Button.
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Guest Article
Booking Conversion Optimization is at the core of everything done at BookingCounts™. They publish travel content and deliver software tools to optimize travel marketing online and help you get more visitors to book now or later (when they are ready).
Scott Petoff is the owner and President of BookingCounts™. Just like myself, Scott was inspired by his father’s unique way to identify travel reference points.
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About the author
Are Morch is the founder and owner of Are Morch – Hotel Marketing Coach. Get more from Are on Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Pinterest | Instagram| Podcast
