Email marketing is an efficient and cost-effective way for hotels to connect with leads and guests and build long-term relationships. Email allows hotels to showcase their hospitality by creating tailored experiences that foster customer loyalty.
Encourage visitors to opt-in by including an intuitive subscription form on your website. Ask only essential details and offer incentives such as early check-in or room upgrades as incentives to spur signups.
1. Open Rate
Email marketing is one of the best digital tools available to hotels, enabling them to directly reach customers with tailored content. However, email open rates should only be seen as one step toward success: the next step must be converting those leads into bookings or conversions.
To increase your open rate, it’s crucial to provide your audience with valuable and pertinent information that is easy to consume – this means crafting captivating subject lines, optimizing emails for mobile devices and email providers, and using compelling images that grab their attention.
Furthermore, it is critical that your hotel develops an email strategy in line with its brand identity. You can do this by developing a standard operating procedure that guides all team members on how to carry out each campaign, as well as creating and implementing an editorial calendar.
At certain points throughout the year, it would be smart to prioritize guest experience through promotions tailored specifically for specific guest personas. For instance, business travelers might enjoy receiving emails promoting nearby leisure and entertainment activities while families might appreciate offers on room packages.
An integral component of email marketing for hotels is making sure guests feel included at each stage of their stay. One method for accomplishing this goal is through automated transactional emails triggered by certain guest actions like booking, check-in and checkout; these transactional emails could provide useful tips about making the most out of their stay or offer exclusive amenities that might otherwise go unused.
Hoteliers should consider sending post-stay follow-ups after each guest stay to provide recommendations or incentives for booking again, among other features. Volkshotel, an artsy Amsterdam hotel which was previously the headquarters of a newspaper, utilized post-stay surveys to encourage guests to share their experience on social media with others.
2. Click-Through Rate
Email may feel archaic, but it remains one of the most powerful marketing channels for hotels and travel services. Used effectively, email can transform one-time guests into long-term repeat guests – something other marketing channels simply cannot achieve.
Email marketing offers the highest ROI among digital marketing channels.
For maximum success in optimizing your hotel’s direct email program, you need to understand your audience and their journey. By customizing messages with tailored content and strategies to reach more open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, your emails could increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
As your first step in increasing email click-through rate, start collecting guest emails on both online and offline channels. Create various signup forms tailored for each location to capture specific subscriber groups. By targeting each group with relevant hotel content and offers, this will increase email click-through rate significantly.
After your guests’ stay, don’t forget to nurture their relationship with you. Post-stay email campaigns are an effective way to drive repeat business, promote customer loyalty, and drive revenue growth. Send information about local events or special offers on future stays, along with encouragement to join your loyalty program.
Hotel email campaigns that succeed are typically personalized. Utilizing guest data collected during booking and check-in to customize messages specifically to each guest is key to increasing click-through rates; using their name in the subject line, linking back to your booking engine, and tailoring messages specifically to individual needs all contribute to increased click-through rates. A family traveling with children might appreciate an email that highlights kid-friendly activities or offers; guests with special dietary requirements might benefit from receiving a message outlining property-provided specialty food and beverages options as examples of personalized emails tailored specifically towards them based on data collected during booking and check-in will allow hotels to increase overall email click-through rates while simultaneously increasing overall hotel overall email click-through rate significantly.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate in the hotel industry is an important performance indicator, revealing how many of those who visit your website end up making reservations. To accurately measure it, a reliable booking engine and an email marketing strategy aligned with your business goals are needed for measurement. Email marketing has the potential to increase hotel sales and revenue by engaging past guests, targeting cart abandoners with promotional emails exclusive for email recipients, offering exclusive offers just through emails, etc.
Hotels must engage their customers at every stage of the customer journey, and email is an ideal means of doing this. By sending pre-arrival emails, reservation confirmations, and promotional offers directly to their email lists they can increase the chance that a hotel booking occurs.
As it’s essential for visitors of hotel websites, making email signup easy is essential for success. Make the form easy to locate and display it prominently, offering incentives like early check-in, free room upgrades or discounted spa services as incentives to sign up.
Once you have amassed email addresses, start providing content tailored specifically to each individual recipient. This will help expand your hotel brand while increasing conversion chances; hotel customers who receive offers through emails tend to spend more money during their stay than those who don’t receive such emails.
Ecommerce Tracking can help your hotel increase its conversion rate by tracking purchases made by visitors of its website. This provides valuable insight into what is working and where improvement could be made, while also giving you real data for testing new approaches to email marketing campaigns.
4. Revenue Per Email
Email marketing can be an extremely effective tool for hotels to generate revenue and build loyalty among past guests, but to maximize its returns you need an efficient strategy in place – the easiest way is with MailerLite which offers free versions with all essential features for hotel email marketing as well as integration with other tools such as social media management systems and booking systems.
Email marketers must strive to deliver value with every communication sent from their hotel, whether the goal is increasing brand recognition during busy seasons, encouraging repeat business or introducing new amenities and facilities. Tailoring content specifically to your target audience by segmenting lists based on demographics or purchase intent will increase success rates of email campaigns at turning leads into customers. A/B testing can also be utilized as a powerful strategy.
Email types that can drive revenue effectively include transactional emails triggered by guest actions like check out or purchasing hotel services. Transactional emails have an average unique open rate of 47.1 percent and have proven very successful at increasing hotel revenue.
Promotional emails can help draw new guests in by offering attractive incentives to book their stay, such as offering a discount, joining your loyalty program and special offers just for returning guests. They may even contain calls-to-action encouraging guests to share their experience on social media – leading them on to generate referrals!
5. ROI
Email marketing can be one of the best ROI tools for hotels if implemented effectively, providing new guests and revenue from existing customers while nurturing leads consistently with valuable content. But to achieve maximum return, it is necessary to know your numbers and keep a close eye on performance to ensure gains surpass costs.
Step one to creating an effective hotel email campaign is getting people to subscribe to your mailing list. One approach would be to place an opt-in form on your hotel website and offer incentives like free wifi or welcome gifts as part of the incentive to subscribe.
Once someone has signed up with your brand, it’s essential to keeping them engaged through various means – including newsletters and special offers available exclusively to email subscribers. Furthermore, segmenting your list based on demographics or preferences allows you to send tailored offers and information directly.
At every point in their stay, your guests should be informed about local events and attractions to maximize their stay. Email is an ideal way to do this as it allows you to personalize their experience. Plus, transactional emails like confirmations and booking reminders that automatically trigger can strengthen guest relationships while encouraging repeat stays.
Before launching an email campaign, always test first. This can be achieved by sending one version to one group of subscribers and another to another; and measuring which version yielded better results. In addition, try various subject lines, layouts and images until your audience responds best.