by Marianne Cellucci
Email marketing is an excellent tool for hoteliers to stay in touch with their guests and prospects. Travel related email campaigns retain a loyal audience and create direct revenue opportunities with past, present, and future customers. This article consolidates a series of posts that originally appeared on our blog to address common marketing challenges hoteliers face and explore how email is the most effective solution to meet these challenges.
Whether you are new to email marketing or looking to refine your email campaigns, learn how you can use email to drive action and increase profits.
Challenge: Wanting to improve hotel sales through direct room bookings Solution: Use email marketing as a sales and relationship nurturing tool Benefit: Attracts more guests and increases profits
Email marketing in hospitality makes sense because it is a top sales performer and an excellent relationship building tool. Staying in touch with your past guests and your prospects can be one of the most effective ways to deliver revenue growth to your hotel. Hotel marketers can use email marketing campaigns to:
Communicating via email is simple, fast and cost-effective. If used properly, it can generate significant ROI for hoteliers because it helps you create a dialogue and build relationships. The key is to make your emails stand out by delivering messages that are timely, relevant and personalized. It is not a broadcast medium where you can just “batch and blast” out messages, but one when carefully crafted and segmented can deliver highly compelling and contextually-rich messages that drive people to act time after time.
Challenge: Low customer retention rates Solution: Use email as an automated awareness and retention tool Benefit: Effective tool for creating top-of-mind awareness and increasing repeat business
Out of sight, out of mind! The best way to increase customer retention is by automating your guest retention program to keep in front of your customers even after their checkout. Automated emails keep your inn or hotel in the forefront of your customer’s minds, and once they are setup they are deployed without any effort from your staff.
Here are 5 tips to improve customer retention:
By engaging guests and gathering feedback, you’ll gain a better understanding of their needs and motivations, allowing you to strengthen your brand by presenting them with relevant, timely and personalized email communications. Done the right way, email marketing can help hoteliers build brand awareness and create direct revenue opportunities with past, present and future guests.
Challenge: Not being able to send personalized emails because of lack of consolidated customer data Solution: Integrate data systems to personalize your automated email communications Benefit: Ability to send highly targeted offers in real time
Seamless integration between your email marketing system and your internal databases eliminates the need to manually upload Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data and email tracking data. By synchronizing your email marketing data with your external database, you’ll be improving guest communication and marketing efficiency. Hoteliers should consider integrating their data systems to:
By integrating email with your CRM data, you can identify your most influential and profitable customers and create, manage and send out highly targeted promotions to extremely specific customer lists. Trigger-based campaigns can be set up to capture additional revenue by automatically delivering up-sell and cross-sell offers to guests before they arrive. In short, you drive increased revenue into your hotel or inn by getting the right messages to the right audience at the right time!
Challenge: Missing key opportunities to build revenue Solution: Transform service-based messages into revenue opportunities Benefit: Potential to upsell and cross-sell current clients
Hotels and inns can use transactional messaging to fulfill an important role in maintaining prospects’ and guests’ opinions of your brand, reinforcing your value proposition, and boosting revenue. According to Forrester, confirmation emails are 17% more likely to be opened than newsletter or promotional emails, and customers are 20% more likely to click through on them. Confirmation emails are often read multiple times and are usually last to be deleted. Transactional emails are automated service-based emails that are sent based on pre-defined triggers or specific actions your prospects or customers have taken. Transactional emails usually come in a series and the primary purpose is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. For example, a hotel or inn could generate automated:
Both the pre- and post-stay emails can automatically trigger other communications based on your pre-determined business rules. For example, if an email doesn't get opened, it could trigger another email with a more compelling subject line and message. Additionally, you can follow-up with promotional emails letting guests that just stayed with you know about upcoming availability and special discounts.
Since transactional communications receive a high level of audience engagement because they contain essential information and are anticipated and welcomed by recipients, they provide a wonderful opportunity to boost revenue. Treat them as valuable customer touch points and ensure that you keep to the 80/20 rule: this is where 80% of the message is transactional or service-based in nature, and 20% is promotional in nature.
Challenge: Poor inbox delivery Solution: Regular maintenance and good email list hygiene Benefit: Maximizes deliverability and enhances performance Over time an unmaintained mailing list can result in complaints from recipients resulting in an Internet Service Provider (ISP) blocking your email from your recipients’ inboxes. Good list hygiene practices will help you avoid spam traps and keep your bounce rates low—both of which are key drivers of your sender reputation. To maximize email deliverability and performance, follow the best practices for list maintenance and hygiene below:
The most effective way to increase deliverability rates and increase your ROI is to practice good email list hygiene and regular data maintenance. The better your email deliverability, the more trusted your email sender reputation becomes, resulting in more opened emails, click throughs and conversions...all of which impact your bottom line.
With takeaways from this article hoteliers will better understand how email marketing is an effective tool for building customer relationships, growing brand loyalty, retaining customers, and increasing bottom line profits. For more information on email marketing solutions provided by Net Atlantic call our experienced Account Executives at 877-263-8285.
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