SMS Marketing for Hotels

Within the hospitality industry, you are free to send mass texts to not only previous customers but also to current guests. You can use it to enhance their user experience. In this industry, you only have a selected number of rooms at your disposal. So, you can also use hotel SMS marketing to send last-minute offers and confirm and remind the guests regarding their reservations. This is how you add a sense of personal touch to your business.

There are various categories under text message marketing for hotels that you should be aware of before curating a campaign for your own hotel business. They are as follows: 

• Opt-in text

This is usually the first type of text a business will send to its customers. It asks for explicit consent to keep sending them promotional texts in the future. This is required by law in order to protect consumer privacy. You can’t move forward without getting this step out of the way. Many businesses don’t proceed until asking their customers to double opt in before adding their name to the final hotel SMS marketing list. 

• Welcoming new customer

Every time a new guest books a room in your hotel, it is considered common decency to welcome them by sending an automated text. It is your duty to remind them of their upcoming reservations, share information about local sights and seeings, and ensure they are in the loop about events at the hotel.

• Concierge response

Save your concierge team some work. They probably have to answer the same questions every day. Add in the feature of automated response to questions asked by hotel guests. You can enable this by creating a system that identifies certain keywords and responds using templates accordingly. 

That way, if someone is wondering what local events are happening nearby, the system will focus on the keyword ‘local event’ and send a list of nearby events. 

• Discount offers

There are many different facilities offered by restaurants. You can use this feature to promote it while your guests are on stay. You can cross-sell or upsell them. For instance, you may consider offering special discounts that are limited to SMS subscribers only. This will make the message receivers feel like they’re part of an exclusive few. 

Keep the following tips in mind while curating your campaign. It will strengthen your campaign by a long shot:

• Length of the text

SMS has a limit of 164 characters. You need to draft a comprehensive message that crisply conveys all the necessary information. In the lead of a newspaper, writers use the trick called ‘5Ws and 1H’. This means who, what, when, why, where, and how. Try to answer these six curiosities within your message to ensure proper communication of information. The reader must be able to understand the gist of your message just by glancing over it. 

• Frequency of texting

If you spam your customers with constant updates, they’ll be less likely to open your texts in the future. Strategically timing your texts is the way to go. But feel free to text them during festivities, when you are offering discounts, on their birthday, etc. 

• Timing of the text

You need to be smart when you approach your customers. A lot of subliminal thinking goes behind every advertisement you come across. For example, as a hotelier, you can’t text your customers early in the morning when they are getting ready for work. This is because booking a hotel or going on a vacation will be the last thing on their mind at this time of day

Here are some of the reasons the SMS marketing approach is so successful for hoteliers:

• Accessibility

Hotel guests come from all over the world. A text message can be sent wherever you want with no restrictions. SMS Marketing for hotels is the most accessible form of marketing as it is direct and quick.

• High open rate

Amongst all communication channels, SMS has one of the highest open rates and a high open rate is directly in line with a high click-through rate as well.

• Cost-effective

The high open rates and click-through rate represent a great opportunity for hoteliers to successfully carry out their marketing campaign at a much cheaper cost when compared to other traditional marketing options.

• Time-efficient

Unlike many other types of campaigns, an SMS campaign doesn’t take too long to make. All you have to do is gather the contact information of the people you want to target, draft a small text, and you’re good to go. There is no time spent in designing or over-accessing this campaign. Its swiftness plays a key role in its popularity. 

Although the pros far outweigh its cons, the following are a few challenges faced when curating an SMS Marketing for hotels campaign:

• Customer consent

You are not permitted to send these mass texts to just whoever you want. People need to consent to receive your texts, otherwise, you can get into legal trouble. This acts as a barrier in approaching a new audience. Through hotel SMS Marketing, you can only target your old customers and can’t contact potential customers. This holds back the business in expanding its horizons to new territories.

• Building a customer base

It takes a while to build up a considerable amount of a strong customer base. It doesn’t help when people give you fake or unused numbers as well. You need a decent number of opt-ins to be able to launch your SMS campaign to its full potential. You are also required to clean your database regularly. You need to remove contact numbers that bounce your texts off so that you don’t spend time and money on them again.

• Faux personal touch

Through hotel SMS Marketing, businesses try to play on the idea of personal touch. But customers know all too well that they aren’t getting a personalised text, but a mass one instead. More than most are aware of the use of templates. This makes the entire process seem cold and mechanical.

Our solution specialises in conducting communication between hotels and guests, with the recently launched brand new SMS campaign feature. Here is why we have been getting amazing results with our SMS Campaign feature:

• Direct communication

HiJiffy doesn’t act as a third-party intervention. When speaking to customers, you’ll retain the face of your company. HiJiffy simply acts as a branch that interconnects communication between your business and the consumer, without meddling in it. The feature helps deliver the message in a simple and optimized way by retrieving information faster and with greater efficiency. 

• Centralises communication

Under HiJiffy’s console, all communication will be centralized. This will help your business get a better view of its data and interactions. Moreover, it will provide a global vision and staggering insights. 

• Elevates guest’s experience

SMS marketing allows your business to form a sacred personal bond with your consumer base. This elevates your brand image. Hotels usually gain popularity through sheer word of mouth. HiJiify ensures your guests have nothing but good to say about your hotel. 

• Records valuable data

HiJiify’s stellar algorithm notes down consumer patterns and behavior. By analyzing these patterns, we can gather critical information about the guest’s preferences. Hoteliers will find this information very useful while configuring strategies.

• Launching marketing campaigns

HiJiffy will build a flawless automated text messaging system for your hotel. It will be curated personally for your brand keeping in mind the different services you can facilitate to your customers. You can communicate your special promotions, newsletter, surveys, etc. directly through the hotel’s text messaging system.