Email Marketing is still a fundamental technique that has to be part of your hotel’s online strategy. But, what are the best practices for sending the right email to the contacts you’ve made on your hotel’s website? What does an effective email marketing strategy look like?
Determine your audience.
One of the most important steps in your online strategy is to thoroughly identify who you are targeting. Your hotel must offer vacation experiences to a very specific and defined sector. Why? Because nowadays every online strategy should focus on satisfying the needs of our potential customers through valuable content. And if you don’t know your buyer personas (potential guests) it is impossible to create content that satisfies them.
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The same is true for email marketing. This also feeds on content and therefore you must know well to whom you will send your email. Using tools such as Google Analytics you will be able to better understand the interests, needs and desires of your hotel’s web users. And through interviews and surveys with your current customers, you will also get relevant information to create your buyer personas. Keep in mind that the more data you get, the more accurate the profiles will be.
Segment your contact database.
Sending specifically targeted content can increase email open and click-through rates. Emails sent to segmented lists receive 62% more clicks than those sent without segmentation. Therefore, it is important to divide the contacts you get into groups or segments based on similarities and trends, in order to create more attractive and relevant content for them.
Obviously, to know how to segment your audience, in addition to thinking about your buyer personas, you have to think about what stage they are at in the buying cycle or traveler’s journey : dreaming, planning, booking and experiencing. Otherwise, inappropriate emails would be sent at the wrong time.
If you use a CMS that allows you to track the behavior of your leads (sales opportunities) on your hotel’s website, you could evaluate the degree of interest they have and what interests them, that is, in what part of the traveler’s journey are your buyer persona. For example, to identify how they convert (if they download your content), if they open emails and visit your web pages. And if you use a CRM you could have a record of all the activities that your contacts perform, as well as all the actions that you perform for example segmentation, email marketing and workflows.
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3. Send a valuable email at the right time.
Lead Nurturing is the process by which the following are built relationships with your sales opportunities throughout the entire traveler’s journey. The goal is to do business with them when they are ready.Therefore, the golden rule of lead nurturing in email marketing is that emails should add value and not ask for value.
Sending an email that adds value means keeping track of your potential customers and how they consume your content. That is, you must make sure that your email marketing actions combine with your content marketing actions (e.g. your blogs) and even social media marketing, in order to send the right email.
In the dreaming stage, which coincides with the Attraction stage of the Inbound Methodology, present content that is easy to consume: videos, blog posts, publications on social networks… This content is great for capturing interest and educating visitors. This way these users advance in the traveler’s journey, so you get their contact information to initiate your email marketing actions among others.
In the planning stage, which coincides with the Conversion stage, you have to anticipate the questions your prospects will ask. The contents that can be sent by email are: publications of interest based on their consumption preferences; checklistspractical guides to activities in the area, restaurants or festivals; maps with places of interest… All of this not to mention your hotelbecause he thinks that at this stage your potential customer, your buyer personahas not yet decided where he is going to stay, although he already knows where and when he is going to spend his vacation. Talking about your products and services at this point is very invasive, but on the other hand, you can make it clear who you are with your brand. In addition, your content offering must be able to further pique their interest in the area. Remember that travelers want to enjoy new experiences.
In the booking stage, which coincides with the Closing stage, you can send discount coupons for the hotel, concert tickets, vouchers for restaurants in the area, offer a room or board upgrade, and others. promotions, offers and content related to the content they have consumed the most on your website or previous emails. If they have reached this state by consuming your content, it is because they are really interested. The content at this stage is what usually makes the difference.
In the experiencing stage, which coincides with the stage to delight customers, email marketing is useful to remember and thank them for their stay in your hotel and to promote other of your products or services (up-selling). Think that a satisfied customer is your best promoter, who can best recommend you. This is why email marketing is as important in this stage as in the rest. The content you create does not end when the reservation is closed. There is so much more you can offer that can satisfy your guest’s needs. Perhaps remember the leisure activities, excursions and guided tours they might enjoy, depending obviously on the type of buyer they are.
4. Design an email that satisfies the user experience.
Email campaigns are mostly measured by email open rates. For this reason, it is essential to include a striking, highly attractive subject line that, after reading it, will lead our user to click on the “open” button automatically. That’s why we want to offer you five keys to help you get your emails opened. These are not infallible keys, but if you follow them all, you will undoubtedly have a much better chance of success.
- Creative, original and direct. The subject line should be striking, imaginative, innovative and engaging. Avoid overly flashy or cheesy phrases. The ideal is a direct phrase that describes our objective and calls to action (open the email). If you send newsletters avoid at all costs that they always have the same issue. If you want to highlight a continuity, get it by another way… but never repeat business.
- Incorporates numbers. One of the keys to successful subject lines that few people know is that they must include numbers. Why? Very simple. According to relevant studies, numbers help to fix the eyesight. The scanning that our eyes do, when reading and finding a number, stops, the speed slows down and we pay more attention.
- Personalized. We all like to feel unique. It is clear that if we use the first or last name, depending on our interest, we will receive more openings. Although we should also consider the possibility of customization through localization. If we put the name of the city, the segmentation is greater. Try to avoid the mass media and focus your targeting on total segmentation.
- Brief and concrete. As far as length is concerned, there are several theories. Some experts determine that a subject line should be between 20 and 50 characters maximum. On the other hand, a Yesware study stresses that the length of the subject line is not important for your email to be opened. We believe that less is more. The shorter and more concrete the message, the better. In addition, we must take into account that nowadays almost half of all emails are opened from mobile devices, and these show only four to seven words.
- Avoid forbidden words. There are certain words such as offers, discounts o sex that can cause our emails to be categorized as spam, something we must avoid at all costs. For this reason, we must be extremely cautious and take this factor into account. In this website you will find other conditions why an email marketing becomes spam. It is also not advisable to use sentences that do not have a correct structure, symbols, extra punctuation or capital letters, since in written language this is interpreted as shouting.
And to add value, in addition to pensar in specific content for each moment of the traveler’s journey you have to keep in mind that most users will look at their emails through their mobile devices. mobile devices. For this reason you have to optimize your emails with the user experience in mind:
Responsive design to ensure that your emails look good on different mobile devices.
The size, so text, images and call-to-action buttons must be optimized.
Clear and concise messages. The good thing if brief is twice as good, and in emails even more so.
Allow your recipients to share the email content on their social networks.
5. Analyze.
Analysis is fundamental to any online strategy. In email marketing, emails can be analyzed based on:
The delivery rate to know if the emails reach the contacts. Also look at: error bounces to find out if emails are spoofed or out of order; and soft bounces to find out if emails are hitting spam trays.
And mainly, the click-through rate to know if your sales opportunities are interested in what you offer them. What’s important is what’s on the other side of thecall-to-action clicks they make, the kind of content they actually consume to recognize trends.
