Direct sales through your own website gives you significant competitive advantages over selling through third-party channels. For example, your own website can be used as a platform to mount proprietary marketing tools such as customer-loyalty programs and cross-marketing campaigns, two highly effective methods to drive direct bookings.
The first sale to a given customer is important, but not as lucrative as the second, fifth, or twentieth sale. Marketing data indicates that the cost of sales to existing customers can be as little as 30 percent of the cost of acquiring a new customer. In addition, existing customers of a hotel can spend up to 70 percent more at time of booking, opting for more expensive rooms and non-room products and services. It is clear that customer loyalty pays off -- and loyalty programs rapidly pay for themselves.
Cooperation is as important as competition in raising market share. With cross promotion, a hotel partners with a related merchant such as a restaurant or tour operator to promote each other’s businesses. This powerful and inexpensive approach allows you to tap into an already established community and acquire high-quality leads. Done properly, cross marketing can build your brand by creating strategic alliances among businesses in a given location.
Individually, loyalty programs and cross-promotion campaigns are powerful marketing tools. Working together, they can give a business an unbeatable competitive advantage. This is what Loyalguest provides.
Loyalguest is a customer-loyalty program for independent hotels and related businesses. Loyalguest members earn and redeem reward points at hotels and merchant partners, reducing travel expenses and amassing benefits that encourage repeat bookings. Hotels and related businesses joining this community of travel-service consumers are similarly rewarded with greatly enhanced marketing opportunities and the boost in revenues that comes with increased direct bookings.
