5 Benefits of Scheduled Notifications on Hinfo
These notifications have several different use cases, including SMS, social media, emails, instant messaging, alarms, weather, reminders, calendar events, tracking orders, ride sharing and food ordering just to name a few.
Our Hinfo Guest Digital Compendiums allows properties to scheduled notifications to appear on your guests own devices, which provides a next level of communication with your guests during their stay.
5 Benefits of Scheduled Notifications
By integrating scheduled notifications into your property's operations, both your management and your guests can take advantage of these 5 benefits.
Not Internet Dependent
Getting slightly technical for a minute, there are two different types of notifications, push notifications and local notifications.
Push notifications are automated messages sent to only a single device via the internet. Common examples of these are instant messaging including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram Direct Messaging. Each of these are triggered for example, when another person sends you a message.
Local notifications are pre-set on your own device(s) to appear at a set time. Common examples of these are timers, alarms, calendar events and reminders. These notifications always appear at the pre-determined time, even when you are on an airplane or if the phone network goes down briefly in your area.
By using local notifications for promoting your property and local area services, you are increasing the reliability of your guests receiving the notifications every-time.
Schedule Multiple in Advance
Hinfo allows your property to schedule up to 20 unique notifications at a time to appear into the future.
This is great from a time perspective, where you can dedicate up to an hour to setup these notifications for your guests (depending on the quantity you want to use), instead of going into our Hinfo CMS, every single time you want to send a notification to all of your guests at the exact moment.
With lots of various use cases for these scheduled notifications, setting them all up at the same time when on your mind, is more efficient and effective, knowing that you have covered every service your property and local area can offer to your guests.
Daily Limit and Digital Wellbeing
Our service has a limit of 2 notifications per day.
From our own research, we found that the likelihood of smartphone users disabling notifications for a single app and not tapping on notifications to view more details, significantly increases with 3 or more every day.
To make sure all of your guests are interacting with your notifications, having a limit increases the level of engagement for each of these notifications and make them more meaningful compared to being spammed with dozens every-day.
With Digital Wellbeing features becoming more mainstream these last two years, we have to make sure all of your guests get a great balance between receiving informative notifications and enjoying their stay.
By informing guests there is a limit of 2 per day when they opt-in to these notifications, this will give your guests more confidence in control of the app, knowing they will not be spammed constantly and that they can opt-out at any time.
Repeat Notifications Weekly or Weekday Equivalent Each Month
It is highly likely that many of the notifications you would schedule in advance, would also need to be set to be repeated frequently.
In addition to repeating the notification at the same time every week, our Hinfo service offers a unique benefit in this field, even compared to other types of apps.
If you wanted to promote the local food and crafts market that is on the first Sunday of every month, a standard repeat weekly or monthly feature would not work, since the first Sunday of every month is not the same day of the month.
To use 2021 as an example, the first Sunday of every month falls on:
3rd January
7th February
7th March
4th April
2nd May
6th June
4th July
1st August
5th September
3rd October
7th November
5th December
As illustrated with the dates above, Sunday occurs on the 7th day of the month 3 times in 2021. The 1st, 2nd and 6th day of the month occurs only once each on a Sunday in 2021 and repeating on the same date every month would not work.
To assist with scenarios like these, when a notification has expired and needs to be updated to know when to occur next, our Hinfo app determines the weekday occurrence for the following month for you automatically, if enabled. E.g. 1st Sunday, 2nd Tuesday, 3rd Thursday, 4th Friday of Every Month etc.
Appears in a Timely Manner Wherever Your Guests Are
None of these notifications would be valuable to your guests, if they do not receive it at the respective time.
With guests not staying in their rooms/apartments 24x7, allowing the notifications to appear on your guests own smartphones, wherever they are during their stay makes the details of each notification more valuable, compared to when guests get back to their room/apartment and see it appeared a few hours ago on the in-room hotel tablet.
Imagine being out at a local attraction in the morning and your guest receives a notification late morning for a cafe you recommend they visit for lunch, you are helping assist your guest's decision-making process for what to do next, wherever they are.
4 Use Cases for Scheduled Notifications
All of these benefits apply to all of the various use cases for utilizing our scheduled notifications feature, including for the following:
Promote In-House Restaurant Before Lunch or Dinner
If your property has an in-house restaurant, you may decide to publish a scheduled notification to appear one hour before your lunch and dinner hours.
This would help bring more awareness to your in-house restaurant, with the ability of increasing sales and spending per guest internally.
Allowing guests to view your lunch/dinner menu and phone your restaurant directly to book a table, also helps with increasing the chance of conversion per guest.
Promote Event Available Locally
You may have an upcoming event locally that you want to recommend to your guests, including a local market that happens monthly, New Year's Eve parties etc.
You can set these types of notifications to appear as a one-off or on the same weekday occurrence each month.
In addition to these scheduled notifications, the events you provide in the Near Me section can also have an alert that each guest chooses to receive if of interest to them, if you provide a start date for the event.
For example, if an on-stage theatre season starts during the week any of your guests are staying at your property, they can enable the notification for the event and receive a notification at 8:00am on the day the event starts.
Promote a Local Tourist Attraction or Restaurant
In addition to promoting any in-house services, you can also use scheduled notifications as a form of marketing for local attractions and restaurants your property recommends.
This also introduces the ability for you to subsidize the cost of our cost-effective Hinfo membership, with timely relevant alerts, compared to static information in a paper compendium that may not be timely relevant.
For example, if the restaurant around the corner has a specials hour (e.g. Happy Hour) with discounted drinks and snacks starting at 5:00pm, to incentivise people to take advantage of the early evening offer, you may want to promote this offer to your guests at 4:00pm, for those that haven't determined what to do for dinner by that time of day.
Promote On-Site Activities
If your resort has several on-site activities you would like to upsell to your guests or increase guest satisfaction, our scheduled notifications feature makes this process much easier.
If you sell spa and massage related packages, you can schedule a notification to appear early morning for example, to incentivise guests to book a dedicated time slot for that day or the day after.
Scheduled notifications also help to put details from any of the scenarios above, to be front of mind, even when your guests do not have the app opened on their phone.
All of the benefits and use cases for our scheduled notifications feature, is only possible via a mobile app on smartphones and tablets.
Mobile web browsers for technical reasons, do not allow for local notifications and regardless of the type of notification, they also require your guests to have their web browser opened on their smartphones and tablets all the time, to make sure they are delivered in a timely manner, which is impossible from both a usability and battery perspective.
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