Email marketing is a component in marketing that is often overlooked, however it can be an excellent way to nurture your hotel’s relationship with its guests, which can cause them to come back time and time again.
In fact, on average, email marketing efforts drive $36 for every $1 spent. Not only that, but the ROI is 4 times higher with email marketing compared to other marketing efforts such as social media or search campaigns, better yet if you take the time to test these campaigns it’s boosted by a further 28%.
So now we know the quick wins of email marketing, let’s delve in on some simple steps you can take to make sure you’re getting the most out of your hotel email marketing.
This is considered a foundational process for email marketing in the hotel industry, so if your hotel hasn’t segmented their data already, we’d recommend you doing so.
If you’re not quite familiar, segmentation is the process of dividing and separating email subscribers into groups or segments based on criteria. For hotels, this would mean gathering data from email subscribers that would commonly include age, location, purpose of travel (business or leisure), and preferences (room preferences, dining, etc.) and then analysing and identify any trends that occurs amongst them, to then put them into segments of shared qualities.
An example for hotel segmentation could be: Business travellers, couples, families, or perhaps loyalty programme members.
By carrying out audience segmentation, you will be able create more bespoke approaches with your hotel email marketing strategy, email campaigns can be made more personalised based on the audience segment it is intended for.It might sound really simple, but the time in which you send off your email campaigns can really effect the amount of engagement you gain from your customers.
Some email marketing platforms actually show you the optimum send-times for your business in particular based one previous campaign performance, the last thing you want is to put loads of effort into well thought out email campaign for your hotel, for it to then not perform very well because you sent it out two hours too late/early.In order for your hotel to have a successful email campaign, the design of the campaign needs to be logical and easy for your audience to understand. Better yet, the design of your email can be utilised to improve engagement, bookings, and traffic to your hotel’s site.
It goes without saying that your email marketing efforts should reflect your company’s branding, so make sure you’re consistent with elements such as colouring, fonts, and logos so your audience can easily recognise your hotel’s branding.At the end of the day numbers don’t lie, so it’s essential that you keep track of the stats that follow from your hotel email campaigns. A lot of email marketing platforms have reporting tools that allow you to track essential performance metrics such as:
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