The hospitality industry demands tools tailored to its unique challenges. In this sector, where every interaction can turn a traveller into a loyal guest, the quality of customer relationships is a real growth driver. Targeted, personalised marketing becomes essential to stand out and optimise every opportunity for conversion and loyalty.
Experience CRM offers a revolutionary approach specifically designed for hoteliers, while generalist solutions like Mailchimp reveal their limitations when faced with the hospitality industry’s unique demands.
The Basics
Mailchimp is primarily a marketing SaaS software specialising in email sending. It offers templates and the ability to easily create custom designs with drag-and-drop blocks. Its promise: to enable the quick creation of attractive emails that meet professional design and technical standards, with simplified result tracking. Recently, Mailchimp added an automation module to its offering.
Experience CRM provides similar features but goes further. Our solution also integrates an email builder within our hotel CRM. We offer hotel-specific marketing templates and the ability to easily create custom designs with drag-and-drop blocks. A significant advantage is the free access to a royalty-free image platform, eliminating lack of inspiration and commercial image rights trouble.
Automation for Operational Efficiency
In an environment where attention must remain focused on the physical guest experience, marketing process automation is a crucial challenge.
Experience CRM is built on intelligent automation that frees hoteliers from time-consuming tasks. The CRM enables precise segmentation, communication dispatch, review collection, and personalised offers. The pre-configured automations align precisely with hotels’ daily needs.
In comparison, using generalist tools like Mailchimp paradoxically turns automation into an additional workload. Their structure forces hoteliers to manually build each workflow and painstakingly define relevant segments. This “DIY automation” ends up consuming valuable time that hotel teams could devote to enhancing the guest experience.
Technological Integration: The Cornerstone of a Digital Strategy
A hotel’s ecosystem includes many interconnected software solutions. The smooth flow of data between these systems directly determines operational efficiency.
Experience CRM plays a central role through its native integrations with leading hotel systems. This connectivity ensures automatic data synchronisation, keeping all guest information up to date and easily accessible.
Generalist email marketing solutions favour e-commerce and standardised integrations. As a result, they sit on the periphery of the hotel ecosystem, creating silos that complicate processes. Integrations with hotel-specific systems are usually absent or require costly, technical developments, forcing manual data transfers.
Personalisation at Scale
Personalisation has become a core expectation for travellers. In hospitality, it must be based on a deep understanding of each guest’s preferences and history.
Experience CRM revolutionises hotel personalisation by intelligently analysing all available data. For instance, a guest who previously booked a room with a view and used the spa could automatically receive an exclusive stay and relaxation promotion to encourage their return.
Generalist tools limit personalisation to basic field insertion, like a first name. This superficial approach may fail to meet travellers’ expectations and does not leverage the full richness of available data.
Thanks to our automated translation tool, it’s also possible to send multilingual email campaigns or newsletters with a single click. No more client lists segmented by language!
Direct Revenue Generation
With the pressure from OTAs and their high commissions, increasing direct bookings is a strategic goal for every hotelier.
Experience CRM was designed with this objective at its core. Every feature aims to maximise direct bookings: pre-designed campaign templates, dynamic widgets, personalised offers, etc., all work in synergy to create a powerful direct revenue engine.
A major advantage of Experience CRM lies in its advanced tracking capabilities. The system allows precise, automated booking tracking without requiring complex installation on the client’s side. This feature offers a dual benefit:
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Significant time savings for hotel teams, who don’t need to manually set up tracking systems.
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Clear result visualisation, for continuous optimisation of return on investment (ROI).
These sophisticated tracking tools enable hoteliers to understand exactly how effective their marketing campaigns are and adjust strategies in real time to maximise direct bookings.
In comparison, platforms like Mailchimp offer marketing tools that could theoretically boost direct sales, but these features are not designed for the hotel booking cycle, limiting their effectiveness. Furthermore, their tracking systems, less suited to the hospitality context, may require complex, time-consuming configurations without guaranteeing the same booking and ROI tracking precision.
Customer Service: Local Proximity vs Distant Support
Experience CRM stands out with its French and English-speaking customer service, based in France. This geographical and linguistic proximity provides considerable advantages: availability during european working hours, a deep understanding of local hotel markets, and the ability to quickly resolve issues without language barriers.
The time difference with France – Europe (6-9 hours depending on the season) further complicates obtaining help during European working hours. Additionally, phone support is only available to Premium subscribers, while other users are limited to chat or email.
Customer reviews reveal concerning satisfaction levels, with Mailchimp’s customer service scoring an average of 1.6/5, and only 5% of users stating their issues were fully resolved. For a sector like hospitality, where responsiveness is crucial, these limitations can have direct consequences on daily operations and guest satisfaction.
Moreover, our data is stored on european servers, benefiting from European regulatory protections.
Price Comparison
Let’s take the example of a 3-star Parisian hotel with 60 rooms. With multiple mailing lists in a database of 500,000 clients and some marketing sends reaching 20,000 recipients, using Mailchimp would incur costs 20% to 45% higher than Experience CRM.
Additionally, the client can easily track results: thousands of euros generated by both one-off and automated sends, with over 40 pre-designed automated campaigns (like birthdays or Mother’s Day).
Conclusion
Experience CRM is much more than just a tool — it’s a strategic partner designed to support hoteliers in their daily challenges. Its deep understanding of the hospitality ecosystem makes it a transformative solution for establishments of all sizes, whether independent hotels or larger hotel group.
Generic email marketing software, despite its popularity in other sectors, shows fundamental limitations when faced with the specific demands of the hotel industry. Their universal approach ironically becomes their biggest weakness when dealing with the complexity of the hotel guest journey.
