Business To Many My WordPress Blog
Related Articles
Email marketing is a reliable and cost-effective digital marketing strategy widely used by companies since the 1970s. Since then, the popularity of this inbound marketing tool has seen an upward trend.
In the era of social media, you may think traditional tactics like email marketing would be useless. However, the reports suggest otherwise. On average, email marketing returns almost $40 for every $1 spent, giving it a return-on-investment advantage compared to other marketing channels.
This proves that despite the emergence of other digital marketing strategies, email continues to be one of the most profitable marketing channels.
Email Marketing Strategies for Hotels
In the fiercely competitive hospitality industry, hotels must continuously work to keep their guests coming back. Email marketing can be a hospitality business’ ticket to repeat stays and effective, long-term hotel-guest relationships.
Email marketing should be a key pillar of your hotel’s digital marketing strategy alongside content, SEO, and social media that your hotel digital marketing agency might already be using. In this article, we’ll share a couple of steps to perfecting your email marketing strategy.
1. Lay down your email marketing goals
Whether you’re a small B&B owner or a large hotel business, email marketing allows you to reach and achieve the following goals:
- Reach and engage new and previous guests
- Drive direct bookings
- Building brand awareness and loyalty
- Nurturing leads and turning prospects into customers
- Upselling hotel packages and offers
- Make repeat guests book again
- Retain existing customers
The question is, which of the aforementioned goals are relevant to your hotel needs? The first step to crafting an effective email marketing strategy is to define the desired outcome of your efforts. An email newsletter intended for new customers will look different from the one you’ll send to upsell a previous guest.
2. Understand your target audience
Email marketing has moved away from spammy, one-size-fits-all mass mailing. Today, the most successful email marketing campaigns focus on segmentation, personalisation, and consent. Getting to know your audience is a vital step, not only for defining your goals but also for making sure your campaigns are targeted.
Understand your audience by creating buyer personas. This refers to a generalised character based on data about your target audience’s interests, needs, and habits. Gather demographic data about relevant target customers and collect their preferences through interviews or surveys to understand their specific buyer journey.
3. Build your email databases
Do you have a list of email addresses you can send your content? Never miss a chance to collect and use customer data. To build a good email database, you may do the following:
- Implement a signup form on your homepage or footers of key pages
- Create a separate sign-up for your blog
- Request previous guests to opt-in or ask current guests to sign up in person
- Get sign-ups from social media pages
- Offer a free valuable incentive to guests who use the signup forms
4. Pick the right email marketing service
Email marketing includes sending hundreds to thousands of emails weekly and collecting data on each one. Luckily, there’s a wide array of email marketing services that make such tedious tasks more manageable. Unlike typical email service providers, email marketing software provides email marketing automation, marketing templates, and data collection.
Here are some of the top email marketing service providers:
- Constant Contact
- ConvertKit
- GetResponse
- Mailchimp
- Substack
- Drip
- Campaign Monitor
5. Send the right kind of email
No one likes spammy and useless emails, so make sure you treat your recipients with content that’ll add value to their lives.
There are different kinds of emails, such as promotional, informational, and re-engagement emails. The best kind of email to send to your email subscriber’s inboxes is the one that’ll help you achieve your goals:
For increasing conversion rate:
- Acquisition emails (discounts and attractive offers)
- Upsell emails
- Promotional emails (announcements about a new service, hotel feature, or event happening within your property or local area)
For boosting engagement:
- Newsletters and helpful content (news or information about your hotel or destination which may be in a form of listicles, guides, and reviews)
- Welcome emails/kickback emails
- Re-engagement emails or retention emails
For growing traffic to your official website:
- Newsletters
- Syndicated blog posts
- Content roundups
Also read: 6 Unique Conference Venue Hires in Dublin Where You Can Meet and Drink
6. Make it short, personalised, and catchy
Your email may contain a hotel deal of a lifetime or a well-written travel guide, waiting for lucky subscribers to open them. But if your email subject looks spammy and/or generalised, it may easily end up in the trash. The same goes if the content is lengthy.
Take time to create personalised, unique, yet straightforward email subject lines that capture your audience’s attention and relate directly to their needs and preferences. Also, keep in mind that the average effective marketing email is just 125 words. That said, make sure you use valuable and punchy copy that’s enough to engage your customers in a short amount of space.
7. Evaluate your success
The only way to measure the success of your email marketing campaign is to keep track of the data. Monitor the essential metrics including the open rate, clickthrough rate, and unsubscribers. You may also use A/B testing to see which changes can give you a higher open rate and a lower unsubscribe rate.
Other hotel email marketing tips to consider:
- Target repeat customers whenever possible
- Send targeted emails in peak travel seasons
- Always include call-to-actions
- Include catchy images and infographics
- Optimise your send times
- Personalise and send emails that relate to your target audience’s needs
- Put yourself in your reader’s shoes
- Don’t spam or send emails too regularly
Author Bio: Carmina Natividad is a web content writer during the day and a foodie, musician, coffee connoisseur, and plant mom when her day shift is over. She enjoys sharing her insights about blogging, web design, SEO, and other forms of digital marketing. To know more about digital marketing, check out the blogs of SPRINT DIGITAL Agency Dublin.
