Wyndham Hotel Group: Starting with New Member Recruitment to Build an Exclusive Member "Reservoir"!

### Project Background

Wyndham Hotel Group operates in over 80 countries and regions across six continents and owns approximately 9,200 hotels, making it a global leader in hotel brand franchising. With around 817,000 rooms, Wyndham meets the accommodation needs of frequent travelers and excels in the economy and midscale lodging segments. The group is also a trusted provider of hotel management services, directly managing over 400 hotels.

The award-winning Wyndham Rewards program is the group's customer loyalty initiative, offering over 77 million registered members worldwide the opportunity to redeem points for rewards at thousands of hotels, vacation club resorts, and vacation rental properties under the Wyndham brand.

Wyndham Hotel Group uses a unified global hotel membership operating system called eDesk, which aggregates extensive membership data centrally managed by the U.S. headquarters. Front desk staff manually enter and assist members with registration. Against this backdrop, the Wyndham Rewards China team aims to create a more flexible and effective member data pool tailored to the Chinese market. Their goals are to accelerate the growth of new member data, enhance member loyalty, and lay the groundwork for future multi-channel automated member marketing. This strategic initiative is intended to give Wyndham a competitive advantage and drive performance growth in the Chinese hotel market.

### Project Goals

1. By focusing on commonly used communication tools and social commerce scenarios for hotel consumers, Wyndham can create engaging activities that resonate with consumer habits. This approach helps the hotel attract more new members and activate existing ones.
2. Strengthen Wyndham Hotel Group's WeChat service account as a hub for member services, helping the brand's business coverage expand from B2B to B2C.
3. Optimize the previous member registration process, which relied on front desk staff manual entry, to simplify internal workflows, improve efficiency, and enhance guest experience. Ensure that new members are subsequently managed and operated in a unified manner.

**Project Key Points and Challenges**

As an American company, Wyndham Hotel Group must comply with the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This requires informing and respecting users' privacy rights and protecting users' data security in the process of recruiting new members. Moreover, as data serves as a crucial basis for subsequent member marketing, it is essential to obtain more valuable member data, marketing preferences, and other information within the bounds of data security regulations. Additionally, obtaining members' consent for marketing promotions is required.

A strategic plan needs to be developed to attract and recruit more new members. The issues that need to be addressed include:

1. The selection and evaluation of activity channels and methods. For example, the pros, cons, and risks of conducting activities based on WeChat and mini-program platforms.
2. In the absence of existing member historical data, it is necessary to properly handle various unknown issues such as duplicate registrations of existing members, membership benefits, and accumulated points when recruiting new members.
3. Strategies must be employed to maximize the proactive enthusiasm of employees for making recommendations and to increase the interest and willingness of guests to join.
4. Hotel managers and employees who are directly involved in guiding the member registration process must receive detailed training and education on the activities beforehand to ensure that the objectives and processes are fully understood.

### Strategy and Execution

Through a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of project objectives and key challenges, the omnichannel intelligent membership marketing service provider Webpower, centered around Wyndham Hotel Group's WeChat service account, initiated a "Wyndham Rewards Program - WeChat Mini Program New Member Recruitment" campaign. This campaign utilizes H5/Mini programs and personalized QR codes that are broadly applicable to various social commerce scenarios:

1. Centered on "membership," transform the WeChat public account into a new member registration portal.

The WeChat public account of Wyndham Hotel Group has been redesigned and customized, with an overall optimization of the menu interface. Centered around membership needs, it has established member service features and a long-term loyalty program based on the service account, covering aspects from branding to booking and the rewards program. Features such as member registration, membership plans, room reservations, and my orders have been added. This strongly guides users to become members on the WeChat end, while also using WeChat as a service window and tool to provide members with a more convenient and faster service entry point.

2. Boost the membership rewards program and guide guests to conveniently and quickly register as members in-store.

After conducting promotion and execution training for employee enrollers, they become proficient at recommending the membership process to guests. Leveraging Wyndham Hotel Group's official WeChat as the entry point, the rich membership rewards program sparks guest interest in joining. For interested guests, using Wyndham's official WeChat and mini-program as the membership registration portal combines brand trust and operational convenience, making it easier to complete the membership registration process and effectively promoting conversions.

At the lobby of a Wyndham hotel in Suzhou, Elsa is checking in. The staff asks if she is a Wyndham member and introduces her to the benefits of the Wyndham Rewards Program. The staff then presents a printed QR code, guiding Elsa to open WeChat and scan the code. After scanning, Elsa first clicks "Follow Wyndham WeChat Official Account," then navigates to the public account menu. With the staff's guidance, Elsa taps "Member Registration" in the menu to access the membership registration page.

On the membership registration page, after clicking the register button, Elsa is first asked to allow Wyndham to access her WeChat personal information such as nickname, avatar, region, and gender. Then, Elsa fills in her detailed personal information including name, phone number, email, and address, checks the privacy consent and marketing permission boxes, and completes the registration process.

Looking at the registration process, the steps are simple but each has a clear purpose. Obtaining the members' social and personal information and acquiring their marketing consent in advance build a foundation of data for subsequent member marketing and set the stage for future initiatives.

On the registration completion page, include "Member Activation" and "Promotions" buttons to guide members to immediately activate their membership and encourage conversions. A "Personal Information" button is also provided to allow users to easily update their personal information in a timely manner.

After completing registration, members can go to the public account > Membership Plan menu > Member Activation, or directly visit the official website to access the member activation page. On this page, they can enter their already generated membership number, verify their email or phone details, and complete the activation process to enjoy more benefits.

3. SCRM Multi-Channel Communication to Accelerate Member Conversion

During the membership registration process, we obtained user information and marketing consent through legal and effective means. Establishing timely and effective communication with new members is key to conversion. Webpower customizes lifecycle marketing plans for members, using WeChat notifications, email reminders, and SMS to push H5 promotional activities. By combining these with effective user engagement strategies such as discounted room rates, points changes, points redemption, and the latest offers, we reach users through multiple channels and touchpoints to achieve conversion.

With the integration of Wyndham Hotel Group's own data in the future, Webpower's Dmartech intelligent marketing platform will aggregate data from multiple brand channels, including WeChat, SMS, EDM, and the in-house CRM database. This will create a super SCRM member center. Based on this membership data center, the brand will be able to achieve multi-level marketing objectives:

• Optimization of WeChat management, including features such as member center, points redemption mall, booking management, content management, personalized QR codes, etc.

• Customer management, including customer value analysis and member segmentation profiles.

• Omnichannel communication, including how to conduct omnichannel marketing and develop user lifecycle strategies.

• SCRM data insights, including member evaluation, sales performance, activity reports, etc.

### Highlights and Innovations

• With the increasing awareness of privacy protection and information security among society and consumers, Webpower has specifically set up privacy inquiry and marketing permission pop-up options during the user registration process. This ensures users are aware of their data privacy rights and protects their privacy. The lawful collection and use of data also reflect Wyndham Hotel Group's brand integrity as an internationally renowned company.

• The creative initiative for online member recruitment and registration represents a transformation from the traditional, labor-intensive and inefficient manual member registration process in the hotel industry. It improves internal workflows and saves hotel labor costs. Users go from passively providing information to actively submitting it, resulting in more accurate data and a more convenient experience.

• A dual-reward strategy for both the member side and the employee side significantly increases the likelihood of member registrations. For the member side, the rewards program enhances the chances of membership enrollment and interaction. For the enrollers, a reward mechanism is established to motivate employees to actively recommend membership to guests. The more proactive the employees are in guiding guests to become members, the more guests are likely to join. Consequently, employees will receive more performance rewards. This will create a new, healthy closed-loop model within the hotel.

• The campaign successfully achieved the precise acquisition of user data and the early obtaining of member marketing consent. This enables the brand to conduct subsequent member marketing through multiple channels, enhancing member engagement and loyalty.

【Project Outcomes】

Currently, the WeChat Mini Program member recruitment campaign for Wyndham Hotel Group is in trial operation at five Wyndham hotels. It will be fully rolled out subsequently.

According to relevant statistics, there are approximately 250,000 hotels in China. As a traditional service industry, membership is the lifeline on which hotels depend for survival.

On one hand, as hotel homogenization becomes more severe, competition in the hotel industry intensifies, leading to insufficient attraction for consumers and a further decrease in member loyalty.

On the other hand, with the rise of the middle class in China, people's spending on travel is increasing, and consumers expect hotels to offer higher quality and better service.

In the new market environment and in response to evolving consumer demands, it is essential to rethink and innovate membership operation models. By integrating data resources, like Wyndham Hotel Group, one can build a modern and efficient proprietary member "reservoir" that adapts to the times. Continually expanding the member base and enhancing membership service capabilities, along with upgrading management levels, will help companies achieve higher occupancy rates, average daily rates (ADR), and revenue per available room (RevPAR), thereby gaining a true competitive advantage.

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