ZDirect Bringing Hotel Marketing Automation and Big Data to ITB Asia

ZDirect is unveiling new tools for hoteliers across Asia Pacific at ITB Asia that will radically change the way they market their hotels online. Hospitality's global email service provider recently enhanced its ZMail® solution to equip hoteliers with new ways to optimize their limited resources using hotel marketing automation and leveraging big data. Hotel marketing automation streamlines workflow by removing redundant tasks and improving labor management, making marketing staff more efficient.

ZMail, ZDirect's eCRM database, centralizes hotel data, creating the foundation for a hotel's marketing efforts. This gives marketers a 360 degree view of guest booking data, stay preferences and purchasing behavior. ZDirect then augments that with unstructured data, such as clickstream data, social media activity, and large public data sets. Using advanced analytics disciplines, such as predictive analysis and data mining, ZDirect crunches all the data and uncovers the hidden patterns and unknown correlations to help hoteliers make sense of it all. This gives hotels a competitive advantage over their rivals, more effective marketing and ultimately increased revenue.

Hoteliers interested in improving eMarketing strategies for 2014 should visit ZDirect at ITB Asia in Hall 401, Booth B39 at the Suntec Singapore Exhibition & Convention Center, 23 to 25 October.
 
ZDirect will showcase solutions at ITB Asia that address the following eMarketing/operations challenges and concerns:

• Bookers that abandon the booking process
• Management complaints about low occupancy
• A need to increase overall guest satisfaction
• Mass email marketing campaigns that do not drive enough bookings
• Surveys that aren’t completed
• A need for different messaging for different guest segments
• A need for dynamic content and personalization in stay-related emails
• A need for guest behaviors to be tagged for future marketing endeavors
• A need for marketing campaigns to be measured more effectively

“Big data is changing eMarketing processes in a big way," said Martin Chua, ZDirect director of sales for Asia Pacific. "Hotels have a tremendous amount of data coming in from a vast number of disparate systems. Add in data that is being generated from the growing number of social media channels, and hoteliers can easily become overwhelmed. ZDirect combines the power of big data with profile and behavioral marketing to create campaigns that increase occupancy, revenues and loyalty. Once equipped with this knowledge base, then, and only then, can marketers create promotions campaigns that are personalized to each guest or prospect and entice them to engage with the property."

In June, ZDirect became the purveyor of hotel marketing automation solutions for hospitality. Hotel marketing automation enables hoteliers to track and analyze guest comment trends (known as semantic analysis), both negative and positive; offer room upgrades based on the real time room availability via a room upgrade engine; and recover lost reservations from guests who started the online booking process but didn’t complete the reservation by implementing a website Booking Cart Abandonment Engine.

"Drip Marketing -- a part of the Hotel Marketing Automation process -- is assisting hoteliers in engaging with guests at the right time," Chua said. "Because the booking cycle can be complicated, hoteliers need to provide the right information to the right people at the right time with the right medium. If a hotel has limited resources, or its staff has limited know-how, this process -- which is very simple with Hotel Marketing Automation -- can be extremely challenging. To turn prospects into guests, hoteliers need to streamline tasks related to demand generation and lead management. This is where Drip Marketing is most effective."

Instead of just sending out one email and hoping it will be opened, read, and acted upon, ZDirect will send out a series of emails in "drips" to keep travelers interested and always communicating with the hotel. Using drag-and-drop technology, emails can be automated based on predefined business rules. For example:

Two days after check out, a guest satisfaction survey is automatically sent. If after seven days the guest hasn’t filled out the survey, a reminder email is triggered and automatically sent. The guest fills out the survey so another email is triggered and the message is sent to the guest requesting that a review be posted on predefined social media and online travel sites.  OR . . .

The day of check out, a guest satisfaction survey is automatically sent to a VIP. The VIP fills out the survey on their mobile device and rates the hotel with a score of 2.7 out of 10.  An alert goes to the General Manager about the poor review and an email is automatically sent to the guest apologizing for the negative experience and offering them 10% off their next stay. The General Manager personally calls the guest and remediates the bad experience. The guest is so impressed by this personal touch that he or she books another reservation.

Mobile Marketing Suite

ZDirect will also be showcasing its mobile suite at ITB Asia, comprised of Mobile Passport - a service that enables hotel guests to access a hotel's most in-demand amenities, services and upgrades directly from their web-enabled mobile device; On-Property Text and SMS Messaging - the most convenient and comfortable way that mobile travelers can communicate with the hotel, and vice versa.