Having a hotel email marketing plan is an essential part of any modern sales and marketing strategy. A study from DMA found an average $38 return on investment (ROI) for every $1 spent on emails. In short, it’s cost-effective.
99% of people check their email every day making it a great way for your hotel to communicate with your customers and promote your business.
If you haven’t already read our blog post covering the basics of hotel email marketing, click here to check it out. That blog reviews how to get started with email marketing and how to create an email marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll look at ways to improve your hotel's email marketing tactics. To be clear about what the difference between tactics and strategy is, let’s look at the definitions:
- Marketing strategy: The strategy is the overall plan. It looks at the big picture of marketing and how your hotel will approach it. Email marketing is usually (and should be) part of the marketing strategy and has its own set of goals and measurements of success.
- Email marketing tactics: Email marketing tactics include the individual steps and action items that feed the strategy. It’s a more granular focus on how you achieve your goals.
So keep reading if you’re looking to get inspired and reignite your hotel’s email marketing and bring in more leads, increase sales, and build relationships with your guests.
Tactics To Excel Your Hotel Email Marketing
1- Send Targeted, Segmented Emails
If you’re not segmenting your emails, you’re missing a huge opportunity for your email marketing to perform to its fullest potential.
Targeted emails help your hotel build trust with its guests. It’s natural for people to want to feel understood so it’s no surprise that segmented emails are good for increasing sales. A study from DMA found a 760% in email revenue from segmented email marketing.
Unsegmented email blasts can be detrimental to your email marketing strategy. If you’re sending customers irrelevant information, they’re more likely to unsubscribe from your email list. Losing subscribers is bad for revenue-building.
Helpful ways to segment your emails could be based on things like demographics like gender or a customer’s geographic location. They could also be based on interests. Clients may be interested in emails regarding business travel promotions, group bookings, leisure travel, or weddings. Of course, your segmentation should be based on the services and features your hotel offers.
It can also be a bit of a balance trying to find the right amount of email segments. Having too many can be tough to manage so try to discover what works for your hotel. Refer to data from your CRM or from testing out different emails and looking at the results.
2- Automation
Automation is a targeted email or series that you can set up for automatic distribution.
For hotels, this can include emails for pre-arrival or post-visit.
Pre-arrival email series provides your guests with information that is relevant to their visit and is also a useful tool for upselling. It would make sense that guests are more in a mindset to spend before they arrive at your hotel and want to be informed about their visit.
Studies confirm the value of pre-arrival automated emails. According to a Revinate report, upselling in pre-arrival emails has a conversion rate of 13%.
Post-visit emails are a good way to re-engage your audience and collect feedback from them. You can send out surveys to better understand your guests and their needs and improve your guest experience.
3 - Optimize Your Send Time
Communication pieces need to be sent to the right person at the right time.
Relevant emails are a good start but, to maximize your result, you’ll need to make sure they reach people at the right time as well.
Basic email funnels can break down into four parts:
- Awareness: Your audience is aware of your brand or familiarizing themselves with it. This could take shape in the form of a welcome email,
- Consideration: When people begin to think about making a booking at your hotel or are comparing it to competitors.
- Decision: A user’s decision can be made based on an array of factors. To facilitate this, consider sending promotion emails, or special offers.
- Follow-Up: This stage would be once your guests have already booked with you. These emails could be feedback surveys, pre-arrival emails, or upsell emails.
In summary, what email you send to your customers depends on where they are in the sales cycle.
4 - Benchmark Your Emails
The only way you’ll know if your overall email strategy is working is if you track your results.
Looking at how different emails perform compared to others gives you data to make better, more informed decisions. The data that you assess should also relate to your main goal.
If your goal is to engage your audience, for example, you may want to use email click-rates as your measurement. Other metrics include conversion to website traffic, open rates, or if you include a survey, how many of those have been filled out.
Data on the travel industry shows that the average open rate for email is 25.88% and the average click rate is 3.33%. Since these are two common metrics, consider using them to benchmark against your hotel’s performance.
Overall, how you track your email marketing should be relevant to your strategy and company goals. Look at the data but don’t spend too much time overanalyzing it!
Final Thoughts
As the data suggests, hotel email marketing tactics are incremental to your overall marketing strategy. Take some time to think about your big-picture hotel marketing strategy and how you can implement different tactics to achieve your goals.
Email marketing tactics need to be uncomplicated. When in doubt, keep hotel email marketing straightforward and easy to manage.
