Email marketing emerged years ago as a powerful way for organizations to build and nurture relationships. And even as new channels such as social media, SMS, and chat compete within the market, email has continued to hold a prime role.
What makes email so special? Here are a couple things to consider:
US consumers report that it’s their preferred channel for interacting with businesses
Given its preferred status among both marketers and consumers, email marketing is here to stay. Thus, it’s essential for hotels to understand what it is and how to effectively use it.
In its simplest form, email marketing is the art of sending emails to customers. The recipients might fall anywhere in the funnel from prospective customers or loyal evangelists, so messages should be tailored to the right audience at just the right time. Preference, motivations, and pain points all come into play as marketers strive to create emails that avoid the spam folder.
Email marketing for hotels and hospitality requires special skill, due to unique challenges within the industry. For starters, it’s an extremely crowded market that is being further diluted by vacation rental platforms and third-party hotel reservation platforms. Other issues include low retention rates and inconsistency in customer acquisition periods.
But the marketing opportunities available for your hotel are substantial. Consumer trust is rising after the massive disruptions brought on during the pandemic. And as stability in the travel industry increases, so does the rate of early bookings. The latest research indicates that nearly 30% of Americans book their travel further than four months out. An additional 46% are booking between one to three months prior to departure.
This trend is great news for hotels, as it brings a longer nurture period. You can use this time to reinforce what makes your brand stand out in the crowded field, promote your other offerings, and provide valuable resources such as travel guides for your area.
In this next section, we’ll look at how to develop the strategies and content needed for email marketing success.
Just as it takes a dedicated team to keep a hotel running every day, email campaigns involve many crucial pieces. And, as with most successful things in life, it all starts with a plan. Here are the seven steps to delivering exceptional email marketing for hotels and hospitality.
The only way to accomplish goals is to identify them. Your marketing plan should include clear strategies you’ll use to achieve what’s most important for your hotel. As your campaigns launch and evolve, this plan serves as the ultimate guidepost. If a new tactic aligns with the plan, you’re good to go. Otherwise, it probably shouldn’t be considered.
Remember to make everything in your plan measurable. Identify the key metrics and share them with everyone on your team involved with the campaign. By tracking your progress, you’ll be able to identify strengths and make refinements where necessary.
Even the world’s most popular brands have to use lead magnets to attract followers for their email lists. In our modern world of online risks, it’s simply not worth it for people to give out their personal contact information unless there’s a compelling reward. Successful examples of lead magnets include:
Travel guides
Sample itineraries
Discounts on future bookings
Discounts with partner businesses
These lead magnets can be promoted on social media, within blog posts, and elsewhere. You then either need a sign-up form within the content or must create a dedicated landing page that builds the customer’s trust and efficiently collects their contact info.
As your email list grows, so does the need for effective management, so make time for quarterly list hygiene. Be on the lookout for:
Typos and other errors
Duplicates
Obsolete information
Inactive users
The fact is that your email lists begin degrading the moment they’re assembled. More errors mean more undelivered emails, which hurts your reputation with email providers. Therefore, it’s essential to keep things running smooth with effective list management.
Messages rarely resonate with recipients unless they’re personalized. You likely experience this on a daily basis, as generic emails hit your inbox looking like they were written by a robot that then randomly sent to thousands of people. In a world of mass-produced marketing, personalization is like a cool drink of water on a summer day.
To create ultra-relevant messages for your recipients, divide your lists into segments based on similar preferences, interests, characteristics, and behaviors. Potential segments include:
Geographical location
Level of experience with your brand
Business or leisure travelers
Budget or luxury travelers
Date of future bookings
By delivering the right messages to the right people, you’ll improve your email statistics and build loyalty with your audience because people who feel understood and valued are much more likely to become long-term customers.
This is the step that often seems most intimidating, as you might not have enough designers and writers on your team to create all the content necessary for your campaigns. Thanks to technology, much of the work is done for you. For example, the best email marketing software for hotels includes pro-grade templates that enable you to drag-and-drop design elements with the click of a mouse.
While the visuals are crucial, don’t slack on the core of the message. There are also lots of AI tools available to assist with writing subject lines and body text. Just be sure to check all the copy for errors, while also looking for ways to inject your own unique voice.
You’ll also find that email marketing software for hotels includes all the automation tools necessary for scheduling your email sends. Simply choose the dates, times, and segments, then let automation handle all the details.
A recipient who reads your emails should never be left wondering what to do next. Ensure that every message focuses on strong CTAs that support your marketing goals. Provide value that not only answers the question “What should I do now?” but also “Why should I do this?”
Your audience segments are crucial for crafting the right CTA. For example, let’s say you’re targeting individuals who have visited your website in the past six months but haven’t made a booking. You could offer a special promotion and then have a clear “Book a room” CTA like in the example below:
Not only do strong CTAs get better results in the near-term, but they also establish a reputation of relevance. Your followers will know that any message you send is worth their time and has a clear purpose.
Stay close to your campaign’s performance. Each key metric should be analyzed so you know how well you’re following your plan and achieving your goals. This focus on metrics also supports testing, so you can run multiple subject lines or CTAs and find the winners.
While metrics such as open rate and bounce rate are important, your ultimate goal is usually to drive conversions. So pay close attention to everything that moves your audience closer to bookings and upsells.
Your focus on tracking will inevitably lead to exciting discoveries. Every time you learn something important, go back to the marketing plan and see how this new information can be incorporated. And be sure to record it so you can apply the knowledge to future campaigns.
Each brand is different and every team has its own workflow. Consider these seven steps as the foundation from which to build your own optimal processes. Each campaign will illuminate new strategies and provide insights for the future, so be sure to stay adaptive.
Our team has spent years developing tools to support the best email marketing for hotels and hospitality. With Twilio SendGrid, you get a vast library of email templates and drag-and-drop builder tools. Within minutes, you can have a professional-looking email ready to roll.
Using our Marketing Campaigns tool, set up the perfect automation for your campaign. Our technology never takes a sick day, so you can rest assured that every email will go out right when you need it to. If you ever want to check on the status, the system has a centralized view that makes it easy to review the schedule.
You deserve to have comprehensive support from the spark of an email idea all the way up to delivering it to your audience (we offer the industry’s highest average inboxing rate, by the way). Simply create your free Twilio SendGrid account today to get started.
