WhatsApp marketing involves using WhatsApp Messenger to market your hotel services and products, and, ultimately, increase your revenue.

Offering the highest open rate in any marketing channel, WhatsApp has become an integral channel for any business. It gives you the best reach, lets you engage in personalized communication, and, therefore, helps you increase your revenue.

So, as far as marketing channels go, WhatsApp marketing is perhaps your best channel for direct bookings. In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into what WhatsApp marketing is, why it’s so essential, and some of the best tactics you can adopt right away.

Hotel WhatsApp Marketing: What Is WhatsApp Marketing for Hotels?

Hotel WhatsApp Marketing, sometimes also called WhatsApp Marketing for hotels, is the strategic use of WhatsApp Messenger to promote your products and services over chat, facilitate excellent customer service, and ultimately, drive more revenue for your hotel.  

Boasting more than 2 billion active users, WhatsApp is one of the most prominent social media applications in the world today, as this report by Backlinko confirms. 

In other words, hotel WhatsApp marketing is all about reaching your guests where they are, and, more importantly, where they’d be more attentive to you. And while there’s a lot you can do with WhatsApp, your individual tactics will vary depending on what exactly you’d like to achieve.

Benefits of Using WhatsApp Marketing for Hotels   

While we've already talked a bit about the massive reach of WhatsApp, let's look at some other remarkable benefits of it:

1. As a report by Kubbco puts it, more than 60% of respondents would prefer to buy from a brand that they can connect with on messaging.
2. WhatsApp helps you with personalized communication, letting you reach an audience that’s more likely to see and engage with your messaging.  
3. It’s an excellent channel for increasing your direct bookings. Remember, quick responses or follow-ups to guests' inquiries are crucial for your hotel sales, especially today when 40% of travelers expect a response within the first hour and 79% expect one within 24 hours, as this report by BCV shows.
4. ‍Personalized Discounts and Offers: While WhatsApp is a great channel to improve conversion from your inbound inquiries, it can also be helpful for your outbound marketing activities too. You can use it to offer personalized discounts and bookings to your past guests based on your own data.‍
5. WhatsApp is Now More Commerce Friendly: WhatsApp is now more commerce-friendly than it ever used to be. With the maturation of WhatsApp Business, their business-focused tool, the company has doubled down on facilitating more efficient B2B or B2C transactions, of businesses, both big and small.

Here are a couple of ways WhatsApp towers over other channels:‍

1. Carousal Messages to Showcase Your Rooms and Amenities:

‍A feature exclusively available to WhatsApp business users, Carousal messages are an attractive way to offer new products or services to your guests, old or new. Despite what you might have heard in pop-culture science, or even perhaps in your own intuition, a lack of a variety of choices is a bigger problem than choice overload, as this study by Behavioral Scientist shows.

Carousal messages let you effectively display your products or services in about 10 cards in a horizontal carousel. Here, you can do everything from promotion of new booking packages or cross-selling or upselling to existing customers to answering queries of curious or existing guests.

2. Flow Messages for Capturing Info Like Check-in and Check-Outs

‍Flow messages are another handy feature in WhatsApp Business, offering brands a customized way to communicate with their customers. Earlier, you might have had to go back and forth during your messages or perhaps take them to an outside portal or website, but now with WhatsApp flow messages, you can do everything practically from the app’s interface itself.

You can, for example, capture your guest’s check-in and check-out timings when their booking date is near, and prepare well in advance for their arrival. 

There’s more, though. With WhatsApp flow, you can also:
1. Get new bookings
2. Showcase all your offerings and amenities
3. Take customer feedback

All of this is possible from a more straightforward, richer messaging interface.

Use Whatsapp for Customer Acquisition

With a surprisingly high open rate of 98%–even higher than email or SMS–WhatsApp is one of those marketing channels that will give you the best bang for your buck. Indeed, as stats by SmatBot confirm, WhatsApp right now offers a conversion rate of somewhere around 45-60%.

So, let’s look at a few ways you can use WhatsApp for your business:

1. Seamlessly Connect Your Ads on Whatsapp

The WhatsApp business app connects with all your Facebook and Instagram ads very well, landing any inquiries or clicks straight to your WhatsApp Business accounts’ interface.

We are, of course, talking about the Click-to-WhatsApp ads. What happens is that as soon as any interested user or traveler clicks on one of your Facebook or Instagram ads (stories, news feed, marketplace), they will instantly be redirected to your chat; executed well, this is an effective nudge to increase your bookings.

2. Use WhatsApp for Customer Retention

As Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at HubSpot, once said, if your retention is poor, nothing else matters. Years of business studies and research point toward something similar. Even a 5% customer retention has been shown to lead to a growth in profit from 25% to around 95% in a period of time, as Forbes puts it.

WhatsApp can aid you well in customer retention. Here’s how:

2.1. Make Use of Your Captured Data

If you are already following a well-laid-out marketing strategy, chances are you have already captured critical data about your guests or potential guests.

Personal information about your guests–date of birth, their name, check-in, and check-out dates, the reason for their stay, and even their occupations–will leave you with a solid customer persona. Having this type of information in your books will not only help you tailor your approach to your guests at the property but also inform the tone and voice of your future promotions and messaging for them.

2.2. Use WhatsApp Broadcast List

Have a segment of customers you’d like to message a promotion or coupon at once? You can do that with a WhatsApp broadcast list. Another feature of WhatsApp business, broadcast lists, lets you reach multiple customers in your list at once.

2.3. Use WhatsApp for Promotional Messages

Provided you have already carried out the above two activities–captured informational guest data and creation of broadcast list–promotion will be a cakewalk for you.
A few ways for promotion:

1. Personalized communication, especially on special occasions such as festivals and birthdays, can definitely foster a connection between you and your customers. With a high open rate as that of WhatsApp, nowhere else will you get as complete attention as you will except on WhatsApp.
2. With the data you’ve collected, you are well-equipped to send personalized coupons or offerings to your guests, especially for occasions like long weekends or birthdays.  
   

So, to sum it up, go heavy on WhatsApp for your customer retention strategy. It’s been well known to offer one of the highest ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), so make sure you craft your communications right and make the most out of this channel.

Use WhatsApp for Upselling 

Upselling is the practice of pitching a premium version of a product or service to your customer. As it stands, upselling is serious business. No, you don’t have to take our word for it. 

As a 2022 HubSpot research puts it, a combined upselling and cross-selling strategy can very well lead to an effective 30% increase in your net revenue.

In the hotel business, upselling is pervasive and includes everything from room upgrades, cab facilities, health and wellness retreats, and so on. Here’s how you can use WhatsApp for upselling:

1. Before your guest’s arrival, you can offer early check-ins and late check-outs.
2. Send them promotions or coupons for room upgrades.
3. Send personalized promotions based on user data. For example, if the booking consists of young 20-somethings, you pitch access to your bar and hotel services for a discount.

Use WhatsApp for Guest Reviews 

Reviews and testimonials are an essential part of any essential hotel marketing strategy. As penned down by Robert Cialdini in his infamous book, Influence, social proof is an essential element of persuasion and helps in bringing down skepticism or uncertainty. Your reviews and testimonials are nothing but a small part of this social proof.    

WhatsApp can be super helpful here because of the following reasons:

1. Because of its high open rate, far more guests are likely to see your feedback or review request in the first place.
2. Most people are more comfortable sharing their feedback in a private, closed communication way. WhatsApp offers that.
3. With the help of generative AI chatbots like Brance, you can also immediately take note of any negative reviews, and then the chatbot can reply to them to prevent escalation.

Read Also - Best Ideas for Welcoming Hotel Guests

Using WhatsApp Marketing for Your Hotels

With rapidly decreasing attention spans and the noisy life of the 21st century, marketing channels like WhatsApp are only going to become more and more prevalent. 

As a hotelier, WhatsApp stands as an untapped resource for your marketing strategy, offering you the best ROAS, a high open rate, and personalized communication–all features that are almost impossible to achieve in any other channel.

Implementing these WhatsApp marketing tactics will put you miles ahead of your competition. However, there’s always scope for improvement. One of the ways is to adopt generative AI solutions like Brance, you can automate everything from customized promotions to reviews and testimonials, and cut back on all missed business opportunities otherwise caused by a lack of 24/7 business. 

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