Mautive’s guest contributor for today’s marketers spotlight is Mrs. Radka Konigsmarkova, the General Manager of Botique Hotel Seven Days.
Please tell our readers about your business and where you are located.
We are a 4 Star boutique hotel located in Prague, Czech republic.
Since you are in the hotel / service industry what made you decide to start using email marketing?
There are several reasons we decided to start using email marketing. As the most important, I consider keeping communication with our guests and improving the overall impression of our services and care. The other reason was to find the best way to offer other services of our hotel such as airport transfers, spa & wellness, restaurants to the guests before their arrival. Especially to those who booked through some online reservation portal like Booking.com.
With the Hotel industry being so personal, what are some of the marketing tools outside of email marketing you feel are valuable to companies in the Hospitality industry?
Today it is all about the online marketing. We try to use all online tools that we find useful to build our online presence – blog, social media etc. We concentrate on our website, as I consider it as one of the most important marketing tools and we constantly optimize it to increase the number of direct bookings as they are the key to the success of the hotel.
What are a couple of the features within Mautive you use in your email marketing and why are they important to you?
I really like the possibility to set up Auto Responder Campaign and Date Base Campaign as both types enable us to send the campaigns just at the right time without much effort. Once the campaign is set up, we just need to provide data and the rest is done by Mautive.I also find the reports very well done, user-friendly and clearly showing all important information. You can see an example of an autoresponder campaign which relies heavily on personalization tags below.
Providing shelter for patrons has been around for thousands of years. What are some of the things that have been changing in more recent times, and how does your Hotel adapt to these changes?
One of the things I have to mention is definitely the power of online reviews and ratings. I do not believe that with bad reviews and low score any hotel can be successful and profitable as the online reputation has a direct impact on the hotel revenue. I believe that our hotel deals with reviews very well, we read all of them and react to them. I am very happy that our guests appreciate what we do.
What are some of the steps you take with your marketing to set yourself apart from the competition?
We have guests on our minds whatever we do. We focus on guests and their needs in every stage of the booking proces, during their stay, and even after they leave. We do our best to offer our customers a value and offer only what we are really able to fulfill.
Do you have any words of advice or tip for other customers who might be in the service or hospitality industry?
It would be the same as what I have just said: Focus on guest and his needs in every stage of the booking proces, during his stay and even after the departure. Make everything easy for your guest – easy to find you, easy to book, easy to contact you, easy to check-in etc.
