With travel restrictions in place for many countries, email marketing and maintaining a customer database is currently a huge advantage, allowing hoteliers to segment past guests and other subscribed customers who live within their region and tailor their marketing towards them in an effective way.

If you haven’t got a database in place, or need to know some of the best ways to securely obtain your guests’ information, here a few top tips from us at eTourism.

Grow Your Mailing List

As a hotel manager looking to drive as many bookings as possible, you should always be aiming to build your mailing list, as email marketing is an invaluable way to target loyal guests and new customers with effective campaigns that can be as general or as tailored as you like.

Thankfully, there are many ways to collect your guests’ information and it doesn’t have to be as intrusive as it sounds.

In addition to having email and address as a requirement on all online and over the phone guest bookings, you can encourage new subscribers through compelling social media campaigns, website special offers, “VIP” content invites and other call to action methods that will require your audience to happily provide you their email.

As email, contact and address can change quite frequently, it’s vital to encourage customer data collection as the last thing you want is for your marketing campaigns to fall flat on outdated data.

Maintain Your Marketing Database

Correct formatting and regular maintenance are crucial to keeping a comprehensible guest database in spreadsheet form that’s ready to use when it’s time to send out your newest marketing campaign.

This includes clear and easily referable name, email, address and contact details in effectively formatted sections, additional subsections for past guests and their booking frequency, and visible indicators for possibly obsolete data as well as customers who have made the decision to unsubscribe (make it your challenge to get them back!).

Additionally, useful property management software for hotel, motel and resort owners, such as REI Master, are invaluable tools at your disposal when it comes to managing and exporting customer data, and provide a range of benefits that include cloud accessibility, hassle-free collaboration, safe online backups and increased data security for your guests.

Give Your Guests Value

With a solid database in place, you then have the ability to segment and target a select audience that best fits your marketing campaigns as well as your guests’ needs – whether it’s a brand new promo, a special offer for past guests or a large-scale campaign that you need a vast majority of your customers to know about.

As for email marketing itself, it’s of the utmost importance to keep your subscribers interested with valuable and compelling email content, making use of eye-catching subjects, personalised and tailored content, frequent updates and little behind the scenes insights that will overall strengthen CRM.

It’s also well worth having a friendly automated welcome email in place – one that’s direct and organic – and, if you’re eager to take your hotel business to the next level, a customised email marketing funnel that gradually informs and encourages your guests to make both first, and repeat, bookings.

Are you actively encouraging data collection to improve your marketing database? Let us know in the comments below!

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Here are 7 simple but powerfully effective methods to improve your hotel’s email CTR, so you can boost levels of engagement and drive more guests back to your hotel’s website to book.

1. Less is More

It’s simple: shortening your emails will increase the likelihood that guests actually find out about your offer before they get bored and hit delete. Another good way to overcome the short attention span we all have online is to frontload your most important copy so it gets seen first.

2. Don’t Forget Social Sharing Buttons

Emails which include social sharing options are shown to generate up to 30% more clicks than emails which don’t include any at all, according to research by Econsultancy.

Even if your guests decide your email’s offer isn’t for them, they might have a friend or family member who is interested. Add social sharing buttons to your hotel’s emails and boost your CTR while giving a wider network of travellers the chance to find out about your property.

3. Segment, Segment, Segment

If you’ve been following our blog for awhile, you’ll know we harp on about the importance of email segmentation a lot. But that’s because it’s crucial to CTR, and in fact the entire success of your hotel’s email campaigns.

By drawing on your knowledge of your guests and segmenting your contact list into distinct groups based on booking history, location, demographic information and more, you can get super targeted with your messaging and avoid sending out irritating and irrelevant content. The result? Email marketing campaigns that strike the right note with the right people at the right time and voila – a boosted CTR.

4.) Keep It Simple

When you’re emailing your guests to promote a special offer or drive any other particular call to action, don’t give them a chance to get distracted by links to your blog posts, other pages, or list multiple offers in the hope that one of them does the trick.

If the goal of your email is to encourage more of your contacts to connect with you on social media, then that’s what your email’s heading, copy, image and CTA should drive home. Remove any distractions that don’t relate to this CTA for a better chance of driving clicks.

5) Include a Prominent CTA

Speaking of CTAs, make yours large, prominent and unmistakable.

6) Generate A Sense Of Urgency

Making your offers available for a limited time only forces guests to act quickly, making it an almost sure-fire way to boost your click through rate. Don’t feel guilty – if your list is well segmented, you’re reaching out with an offer that perfectly suits their needs.

7) Go Mobile Or Go Home

It’s a no-brainer: if you're not optimizing your emails for mobile, you're completely alienating the majority of your guests, who, along with everybody else, are using their mobile devices to access their emails.

What do you think? How are you working to improve CTR on your hotel’s email campaigns? Let us know in the comments below!

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Despite these pretty massive upsides to growing your hotel’s email list, many properties are not making the most of all the tools at their disposal to do so. One of the most powerful and under-utilized of these tools is social media.

Here are 3 ways you can start using your hotel’s social media pages to boost your email lists today.

Run A Giveaway

Everyone loves a good contest. As a marketing tactic on social media they really work and can be used to drive results for a variety of CTAs.

Your contest could be as simple as asking your hotel’s followers to submit a post or video about their favourite holiday memory with a special discount or package as the prize for the best entry. Announce your contest on social media along with an eye-catching image, a catchy hashtag and a link to the contest landing page with a form for email address collection (email address required for participation).

Include A Facebook Sign-Up Button

If you haven’t done so already, add a CTA button to your hotel’s Facebook business page. You can set it to collect email sign-ups by using it to direct traffic to a page where guests input their contact information.

Invest In A Facebook Ad

Facebook Ads are a powerful way to target a specific demographic of people and achieve results you can see almost immediately when it comes to capturing leads.

Of course, running an effective Facebook advertising campaign requires a little thought – you’ll need to carefully optimise your copy and image if you want to maximise results.

Once you’ve set up your ad, start with a minimal budget initially and use tracking pixels to keep a close eye on the leads you’re capturing. By testing and tweaking your ads, you’ll soon find the lead generation formula that works best with your particular audience.

What do you think? Do you use social media to capture email contacts? Let us know in the comments below!

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Priority Number One: Segment Your Email List

The below email types and best practices are only effective if you understand your guests, their behaviours, and crucially, where they are in the booking cycle. To do this, you need to have completed the crucial first step of segmenting your contact list to ensure you reach out to the right people with the right email content, at the right time.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to get started. These are the basic email types you should master as part of your retention strategy.

The welcome email

Most guests expect to receive a welcome email after signing up to your mailing list for the first time. This brief introductory message sets the tone for your communication going forward. Don’t forget to:

• Include “Welcome”, “Hi” or “Hello from Hotel X” in the subject line
• Personalise the email with the guest’s name
• Include your property’s unique value propositions – what are the features that make your hotel stand out from the competition?
• Humanize your brand and demonstrate your commitment to customer service by highlighting customer support

The nurture email

The aim of this kind of email is not explicitly to sell rooms, but instead to build your relationship with your guests and keep your hotel front of mind when it comes to planning their next break. Nurture emails should:

• Inform your audience: keep guests up to date about latest features/renovation projects at your property, as well as letting them know about interesting local events, attractions and travel tips
• Show off the human side of your business: by sharing stories from staff and guests, behind the scenes videos and photos.

The sales/promotional email

Emails which alert guests to offers and promos are an integral component of any email strategy and a powerful way to drive bookings. This email type should:

• Include a strong CTA: Design the email content so that the CTA is dominant and stands out from the other text.
• Create urgency: drive guests to book quickly by emphasising that your offer is available for a limited time only.

The Abandoned Booking email

This type of email is specifically designed to prompt guests to complete unfinished bookings.

• Send an initial gentle reminder:Your first email should simply remind guests of the uncompleted booking. Send it shortly after the abandoned booking to re-engage guests who may have just become distracted during the booking process.
• Offer a discount:To entice those guests who still don’t finish their booking, send out a follow up email a few days later, offering a special promo or limited time discount.
• Highlight your hotel’s best features: make use of booking abandonment emails to reemphasise your property’s best facilities and key features – whether it’s your location, pool or special discount at local restaurants for guests. Don’t forget to remind them of any advantages you offer for booking direct.

How does your property use email to engage and retain guests? Let us know in the comments below!

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As we move into the second month of 2018, it’s a good time to think about the email tactics that will deliver results in the year ahead.

1. Genuinely engaging, ‘sticky’ content is a must

Today’s customers are bored of content that focuses purely on offers, promotions and brand information. They’re looking for helpful and engaging information that speaks to their needs and offers real value to them as consumers – whether it’s local ‘insider’ travel tips, news of up and coming events, relevant how-tos (or anything else interesting and relevant to your hotel’s niche).

This type of “sticky” content is particularly useful for travel marketers because significant portions of our audience likely don’t book super frequently (eg. every month). Sure, your guests want to hear about your latest offers and promotions, but they’re going to unsubscribe or simply passively opt-out if that’s all you come up with. Make an effort to inform and entertain with helpful content that’s relevant to your guests’ lifestyles and interests however, and subscribers will stay engaged with your brand and keep you front of mind for their next break.

2. The arrival of kinetic email

In 2018, expect email marketing to get a new, more interactive layer thanks to the growth of kinetic email. Major platforms like Gmail have been adopting functionalities such as hover buttons, image carousels and order carts to make emails look and feel more like a website page.

Not only do these emails look modern and exciting, they’re also perfect for encouraging subscriber engagement and conversions. Although marketers are still experimenting with the possibilities of added email interactivity, you can expect to see more kinetic emails landing in your inbox in the year ahead.

3. A landmark moment for mobile purchasing

Purchasing on mobile is rapidly catching up with spending on desktop as more and more of your guests across generations rely on their Smartphones to engage with brands online.

This trend towards mobile purchasing is nothing brand new, yet many hotels still lag behind when it comes to making email images, CTA buttons, and content appealing to those accessing it on a small screen.

It’s no longer enough to simply ensure your email marketing is responsive and put mobile on the backburner – your audience expect a seamless experience across channels and devices with a comprehensive mobile strategy. We’re reaching a landmark moment for digital marketing, and those businesses that stay ahead of the curve when it comes to optimising email for mobile will stand out.
 

For four decades now, email marketing has generated great results for businesses that are ready to change with the times and adapt their strategies accordingly. How will you ensure your property’s email marketing campaign stays current in 2018? Let us know in the comments below!

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If you want to maximise bookings this Christmas, you need to plan out a strategic email marketing strategy to ensure your emails get opened, read and drive guests back to your website to book direct. Here are 5 tips to help you get started.

First Things First; Implement Responsive Design

The majority of your guests are checking their inboxes from mobile devices. So, if your hotel’s email content does not display optimally across devices, you’re already losing your audience at the first hurdle. Do your business, and your customers a massive favour and make ensuring your property’s content is mobile friendly your number one priority this Christmas.

Segmentation Is Key

Segmentation allows you to send only the most relevant content to the right people at the right time, making it a crucial component of email marketing throughout the year. During the festive season, when your guests are more inundated with marketing messages than ever, it becomes even more crucial to reach out with only the most relevant content to cut through the noise.

At the very least, you should segment your guest contact list into broad key groups, including frequent guests, recent guests, lapsed guests and those that are yet to book, and target them according to their behaviour patterns.

Shorter Is Better

It’s the busiest time of year; don’t overwhelm your guests with a deluge of information they haven’t got the time or inclination to read. Keep your festive messages short and to the point. A few sentences outlining your enticing offer, a compelling call to action (with link) and an arresting image, that’s it.

Use Your Subject Line To Create A Sense Of Urgency

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the marketer’s handbook, but it works. Research shows that subject lines which inspire a sense of urgency in the audience can increase open rates by as much as 22% and compel customers to move through the sales cycle at a quicker pace because of the fear of missing out.

Inspiring a sense of urgency doesn’t mean your special deal or promotion has to expire within the next 12 hours, but if your promo’s deadline is too far in advance, your guests won’t be compelled to act quickly. Data from Sidekick shows that including the word “tomorrow” within your subject lines can boost open rates by around 10%, but as always, run A/B tests to uncover the formula that resonates best with your particular audience.

Personalisation Matters

With every other brand and business under the sun vying for your guests’ attention this time of year, one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is to give your emails a personal touch. One of the easiest, most effective but still sometimes overlooked ways to do this is simply to use the guest’s first name – if you know it – either in the subject line or the body of the email (or both). If you have any extra information about your guests’ likes and behaviours from your analytics data you can put to use, all the better.

How will you be driving direct bookings through email marketing this Christmas? Let us know in the comments below!

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All businesses want a bigger email contact database, but as any savvy marketer will tell you, it’s not just the quantity of the contacts that matter, it’s the quality. A smaller list of dedicated guests who have a genuine interest in your property is worth more than a list that’s thousands strong but full of generic contacts looking for freebies.

So how do you attract the right kind of sign-ups, and more of them? These tips are a great place to start.

Encourage People To Forward Your Content To Friends And Family

Motivating people to do your marketing legwork for you by forwarding your content to friends and family is an excellent tactic for reaching new subscribers. Simply including a “Share the savings” call to action within your emails can be all it takes. If you decide to try this strategy, ensure that guests can click to compose their message directly online, so you can track how many people have actually spread the word.

Minimize Clicks to Subscribe

It’s a no brainer. If you want people to subscribe make it as easy as possible. Place your email opt-in form in a dominant position on your sidebar so it’s clearly visible on every page of your site. Keep the form itself stripped down and simple. This isn’t the time to collect demographic information – all you need is a CTA, a few fields and a prominent “subscribe” button.

Let Your Guests Control What They Receive And When

If you’re noticing an increase in your unsubscribe rate – it may not necessarily be because people don’t find your content interesting. Perhaps you’re simply sending too much for them. All the major email platforms are giving their users more and more control to customise what ends up in their inbox, so it’s more vital than ever to find your way into your guests’ “Favourite Senders” or Priority Inbox.

If a contact tries to unsubscribe, give them the option to change the type or the frequency of the messages they receive. That way, they’ll be more likely to stay subscribed, more likely to actually read your content and more likely to see you as a trusted sender that only wants to send helpful, relevant content.

Drive Sign Ups On Social Media

How often are you reminding your hotel’s Facebook friends to subscribe? Don’t forget you can also post your newsletter directly to your hotel’s page– a great way to give social followers who are yet to subscribe a glimpse of what they’re missing.

What are you doing to ensure a constant stream of quality email list sign ups? Let us know in the comments below!

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Guests crave highly relevant offers and personalised content that takes their individual needs into consideration.

So, take a look at three common mistakes below which are sure to have your audience hitting “delete” in a hurry. If you’re still using these tired approaches, it’s time to rethink your hotel’s email marketing strategies.

Email Marketing Mistake 1: Shameless Self Promotion

Vanity is always pretty off-putting, and especially to your guests.

Self-congratulatory email content that boasts about your hotel’s awards, reviews and accolades is ok in moderation, but it doesn’t really cut to the heart of travellers’ needs and problems.

The most effective marketing emails evoke emotion and inspire action. The best way to inspire action is to show how your property addresses your guests’ needs – whether it’s through the free babysitting service you offer for those travelling with young children, your discounted services for corporate guests, your links with local tour companies or something else.

Tip: Choose one benefit per email and use it to explain why your hotel perfectly meets your guests’ needs. Don’t forget to use email segmentation to target the right content to the right guest groups.

Email Marketing Mistake 2: Rambling

Your guests are busy people with hundreds of other brands and businesses vying for their attention. You have just a few crucial seconds to catch their attention with your content, so every single words needs to count. Bloated, unfocused messages which don’t get straight to the point will be banished to the trashcan in seconds.

Tip: Keep your email communication with your guests concise. However tempting it is to cram tonnes of information into each email, stick to no more than 5-6 sentences and a high quality eye catching image so your guests can understand the value you offer in an instant. Cluttered content bores and confuses your audience.

Email Marketing Mistake 3: Weak Call To Action

The ultimate aim of your marketing emails – or any other form of marketing for that matter – is to get your guests to take action.

Bearing this in mind, the biggest email marketing mistake you can make is to leave your guests unsure what they should do next.

Whatever else you talk about in your email, be crystal clear what action you want your audience to take next and the benefits they can expect if they do so.

Tip: Find a compelling way to urge guests to check out your website, social media, or make a booking, and place it in a prominent spot within the body of your email, each and every time you contact your audience.

Have you made any of these mistakes in your hotel’s email marketing campaigns? What are you doing to transform the way you communicate with your guests? Let us know in the comments below!

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The explosion of Smartphone use has helped keep email relevant for a younger audience, boosting the use of the platform as a marketing tactic by 83% in the last two years. Meanwhile, advances in technology mean it’s easier than ever for brands to track and personalise their campaigns to maximise results.

With this soar in the channel’s popularity, competition for attention in your guests’ inboxes has become fiercer than ever. If you want to get noticed and generate all-important clicks, you’ve got to make every character count.

Today, we’ll look at some tips for crafting subject lines and preview texts that will get your email content in front of as many eyes as possible.

Short and Irresistible Subject Lines = More Clicks

Subject line real estate has always been sparse, but now that the majority of your audience are consuming your email content on mobile devices, you’ve really got to make every character count.

On most devices you’ve effectively got as little as 33 characters to play with – that’s just a quarter the size of a tweet! Not every subject line you write has to be this short of course, but since longer lines will be truncated, it’s vital to put the most important and enticing information right at the front.

Which of the following would you be most likely to click on?

• Happy Valentine’s Day! Enjoy our range…
• We miss you! It’s time for you to come and…
• 50% off today only…

I’m guessing the last one. It skips the pleasantries and foregrounds the most crucial information. Your guests know exactly what they’re going to find when they open your emails, which means they’re going to be far more likely to click.

Create Compelling, Personalised Preview Text To Give Your Guests A Reason To Read

How much consideration do you give to your emails’ preview text? A lot of brands make the mistake of wasting this valuable snippet of text on standard “admin” stuff.

For instance:

“How do you feel about city breaks? View plain text version of this message. Check out our YouTube channel now”

This is important stuff. But it’s not going to do much to entice mobile readers to read your content.

This is far better.

“John, is it time for a city break? These half price deals are too good to miss.”

You only have around 90 characters of preview text to drive clicks, so make your first couple of sentences personalised, eye catching and hard to resist. If yours’ features a set of links back to your hotel website or boring text such as “click here to view message as PDF”, you’re missing a huge opportunity for engagement.

No matter how long you’ve been sending emails out to your guests; it’s time to refresh your approach to drive more engagement from Smartphone users. Ensure your subject lines are concise and super-relevant, make your preview text count, and you’ll inspire opens, click-throughs and bookings.

Do you have anything to add? Let us know in the comments below!

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Thanks to analytics data and your own knowledge of your guests, you have a huge wealth of data at your fingertips to help personalise your email messaging, drive bookings and increase guest loyalty with only the most relevant, targeted offers.

Want to get started? Here are 3 ways you can use the data you already have to personalise your email marketing campaigns and maximize your results.

1. Segment Travellers By Demographic Data

Unless you literally only opened the doors of your hotel to guests yesterday, you already have access to tonnes of information you can put to good use in your email marketing efforts. These include:

• Sex and age
• Marital status
• Lifestyle
• The countries and regions they come from

You can also enable Google Analytics to collect demographics data, or collect this information yourself using surveys and questionnaires. However you collect the information, don’t let it go to waste. Even segmenting by something as broad as gender will help you reach out to your audience with more targeted offers. For example, your older female guests are probably more likely to appreciate and respond to discounts on your spa services then younger male guests.

2. Get To Grips With Transactional Data To Create More Relevant Offers

In addition to demographic and lifestyle data, you have access to transactional data revealing what your guests have booked and how. Did they book a room for full price or take advantage of a discount? Perhaps they booked a group of rooms through a business account? What about when they made the booking – was it during a school holiday?

Using this information in combination with your demographic data, you can begin to get even more targeted and personalised with your email segments. For example, you might discover that corporate guests are far more likely to pay full price for a room – perhaps because they are able to book using company funds. With this in mind you might choose to direct less discounts and offers at business clients, while enticing them with other perks such as free room upgrades, or gourmet in-room coffee and business journals.

3. Take Advantage of Behavioural Data To Understand and Help Your Guests

This type of data gives you valuable insights into your guests’ travel booking behaviour and preferences. Did they arrive on your hotel’s website after following a link from social media? If so, you can make sure your email messaging ties in with your social content. Do they open your emails? If not, it’s time to start experimenting with more eye-catching and targeted subject lines. Did they abandon a booking before completion? Then contact them with personalised messaging to do all you can to finalise the transaction.

Final Thoughts…

In any kind of email marketing you send out to your guests, focus on how you can help them and enhance their stay. Whether you include menus of local recommended restaurants, photos of a local winery or your latest video tour, when you put the up-sell aside for a moment and focus on providing content that is genuinely helpful, interesting and relevant to the intended audience you’ll start seeing results.

How do you use data to personalise your hotel’s email campaigns? Let us know in the comments below!

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