Email marketing can be an excellent way to promote and increase bookings at your hotel, building customer loyalty while driving revenue growth for your accommodation.
Promotional emails are automated responses that are sent in response to specific events or customer actions, such as booking confirmations, room upgrades or offers of special interest.
Identify Your Target Audience
Identification is the cornerstone of an effective email marketing campaign. By understanding customers’ interests, demographics and buying habits, you can craft targeted content that resonates with target customers and drives engagement and conversions. Establishing relationships with target guests allows for more meaningful email campaigns as well as long-term relationships to develop with visitors to your site.
Customer surveys can help you to quickly identify your target market by collecting demographic data, including age, gender, location and occupation of current customers and their needs. With this knowledge in hand, it will become much easier for you to create emails that resonate more with these individuals – ultimately leading to sales increases.
An effective way of identifying your audience is through developing buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and existing customers, helping you tailor email content directly towards meeting the needs and interests of your audience – leading to increased engagement rates and conversion rates.
Identification of your audience allows you to segment your email list and create more targeted campaigns for specific groups of people. For instance, use segmentation to send offers for family-friendly weekend getaways to previous guests at your hotel, or special packages that highlight local events and attractions to business travelers.
Once you have identified your target audience, the next step should be expanding your email list. One effective strategy for doing this is strategically placing opt-in forms on your website – either as pop-up windows when users visit certain pages, or by including subscription boxes during booking and check-out processes where visitors can subscribe directly.
Make it Relevant
Emails that directly target the needs and interests of your guests are much more effective than generic promotions that target a broad audience. Your guests joined your email list for specific reasons; if they feel disappointed when your emails don’t meet those expectations they will quickly unsubscribe. Email segmentation and personalization come into play here: by segmenting and personalizing email lists into distinct groups according to factors like demographics, travel purposes or past booking history you can create highly targeted email campaigns that encourage more people to book your hotel.
To increase occupancy during an otherwise slow weekend or season, send an email offering a special discount or deal such as free breakfast coupons, spa treatment discounts or hotel room upgrades. This can encourage both new guests to book with you while simultaneously strengthening relationships with existing ones.
Add value to your hotel and encourage people to book longer or more expensive stays by sharing blog posts about local attractions, tours, or events that you offer through email marketing. Doing this may increase business.
Remembering the ease of selling to existing customers over new ones is of the utmost importance, so use email campaigns to advertise offers and deals designed to entice them back for another stay. Testimonials from past guests are an effective way of doing this as customers tend to trust other customer recommendations more than any form of brand marketing.
Include a Call-to-Action
Your email should include a call-to-action to encourage guests to take the next step with your hotel, whether that’s booking a stay, learning more about services provided, or leaving reviews. A click-through button is often the easiest way of adding one; alternatively you could use text.
Your subject line is often the first thing your recipients see and can make or break their decision to open your email. An engaging subject line that appeals to readers will increase opening rates significantly; particularly if it features their name or creates urgency. Keep in mind that subject lines often get cut off on mobile devices so keep it short and direct for best results.
Email marketing is also an effective way to promote events hosted by your hotel, local attractions that your guests will love and recommendations from satisfied guests. Emails like these help build long-term customer loyalty and ensure repeat business.
Hotels must approach email marketing strategically and set specific goals when it comes to growing their list. By segmenting it and sending relevant content out regularly, hotels can reap the benefits of reputation management, more direct bookings, increased customer loyalty and reduced marketing costs.
Are You Looking for Help with Email Marketing for Your Hotel? Reach Out Now. Our email experts will assist in developing an effective campaign that drives results, as well as showing how to measure its success and provide tips for improving it over time.
Include Visuals
Emails that include images are more likely to catch our eyes and be read than ones without. By creating engaging visual content for your emails, the right visual content can leave a lasting impression with subscribers – making them more likely to book a stay at your hotel in future!
When creating visuals for an email campaign, it’s essential that they complement the overall message and evoke an emotional response in recipients. This can be accomplished using high-quality, relevant images alongside text that highlights benefits of your property.
Add an interactive element to your email by including live charts or graphs in it. This will make your email stand out among its peers and will allow your subscribers to better grasp the information presented. However, be wary not to overload it with charts or graphs as this may obscure its main message.
GIFs are another fantastic way to add personality and spark the reader’s memory about your brand. Though their use should be restricted, GIFs can serve as an eye-catcher and help remind customers about specific products or services you offer, while helping subscribers recall your business name more quickly.
Last but not least, including alt text is always recommended when including images in emails. This provides context to your target audience should their email provider block or disable an image; additionally it ensures your emails remain accessible regardless of a person’s ability to see embedded visuals.
Make it Personal
Email marketing can be one of the most personal forms of promotion; take advantage of it by making it as tailored as possible. This is especially important in the “from” field, which has an impactful effect on whether an email will be opened or ignored; for instance, sending from someone like “Angie at OptinMonster” might prompt subscribers to open it more readily than emails without identifiable senders.
Utilise guest data to personalise emails further and craft more tailored messages. By segmenting your list according to demographics, travel needs or previous hotel stays you can deliver more tailored offers more likely to appeal to each recipient.
Utilising visuals in your emails is an excellent way to capture recipients’ attention and motivate them to take action. Use high-quality images that represent your brand while still fitting with the subject matter of the email; this will provide your subscribers with a more engaging experience and increase open rates.
Email marketing provides the ability to target specific audience segments such as couples or families with special offer emails tailored specifically for them. This can help increase occupancy during slow weekends or times of the year and automate these emails for optimal efficiency – for instance you could set one up that includes pre-arrival tips and upgrades or post-stay feedback request so they arrive exactly at their scheduled times – showing guests that you care about their experiences and increasing return visits.