Getting more hotel guest sign-ups is becoming more challenging, and many of the best practices hotel marketing directors used in the past are becoming obsolete. Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in a hotel marketer’s toolbox, so it is important to focus on implementing the tips we’ve outlined in this blog right away to improve your hotel bookings. In this blog article, we’ll go over 5 Ways you can personalize drip campaigns to earn more hotel guest signups.
Email subscribers take action because the content is interesting, relevant, and useful to them. It could be a mix of colorful creatives, calls-to-action, and witty subject lines that drive them to visit your website or to read further.
Why Is Email Marketing So Valuable for Hotels?
Email marketing drives hotel bookings. In fact, many studies show that for every $1 a company spends, email marketing provides a $40 ROI. This is in stark contrast to many legacy forms of advertising such as catalogs which only return an average of $7.00 for each dollar spent. Using email drip campaigns as part of your hospitality digital marketing strategy can provide one of the most beneficial boosts to your bottom line that you’ll find. Hotel marketing services should remember that in order to achieve the above return, they should implement the best practices listed in the blog below and reach out to us at FrescoData to discuss how they can optimize their hotel’s email marketing drip campaigns.
In fact, “Email marketing is one of the best ways to improve your hotel marketing strategy. It can not only boost customer retention but also helps you to acquire new customers and increase their spending.” (Mailer Lite)
Before we begin to delve too deeply into hotel email marketing, keep in mind all guest-facing hotel email marketing drip campaigns must contain at least the following:
- Pre-arrival emails
- Reminder emails
- Requests for feedback
- Post-Stay emails
How Can I Use Guest Data to Personalize Hotel Email Marketing?
Hotel guest data is extremely powerful and useful in helping you understand both how your hotel guests consume and access information but more importantly what information interests and delights them. There are four types of data that will be most useful to you as a hotel marketing director:
- Informed data – your past guest’s demographics (age, sex, and location)
- Transactional data – past hotel guest booking days, rooms or amenities purchased, and any upgrades they chose to purchase
- Behavioral data – your past guest’s tours, daily routines, and expectations
Each of the above data types can be used to help you better segment and create effective hotel email marketing campaigns. In addition to segmentation, crafting your emails so that they are as personalized and individual as possible.
5 Ways To Personalize Your Hotel Email Marketing Drip Campaigns To Improve Guest Signups
Hotel email marketing campaigns provide a way for you to get your message to prospective guests at just the right time. Making your email message as personalized, or as an individual, as possible gives your subscribers build a connection and makes your marketing touchpoints more powerful.
What makes a good guest email drip campaign?
- On Brand – every brand has a voice and a tone. Your emails need to reflect your specific brand’s style and verbiage. A style guide will help solve issues in this area.
- Clear & Concise – all of your emails are clear, concise, and error-free
- Relatable – your hospitality digital marketing campaign is highly relatable to your hotel guests’ needs
- Timely – your email reaches your hotel guests at the right time
Try these 5 ways to personalize your hotel email marketing drip campaigns to improve guest signups:
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Use Your Guest’s First Name To Improve Hospitality Digital Marketing Email Opens
Use your customer’s first name to make your emails more relatable and much more personalized. Personalization is extremely useful in grabbing the attention of your subscriber and keeping them interested in your content. Using a subscriber’s first name in email subject lines can help build up your open rates. In addition to using personalization, also think about catchy subject lines and tools that focus on your subscribers’ interests. Most hospitality digital marketing drip campaigns fail to use this extremely useful tactic.
You can use your hotel guest’s first name’s within:
- Subject lines
- Salutations
- Within your email content
According to Neil Patel’s blog, “a study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that by simply adding the name to the subject line of an email, it has the ability to:
- Increase the probability of an open by 20%
- Boost sales leads by 31%
- Reduce unsubscription rates by 17%”
Remember, if you are doing anything related to hospitality digital marketing that you take the time to think about who your ideal guests are (along with using data to help you make decisions).
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Segment Your Hotel Email Marketing List
FrescoData uses a powerful tool known as semantic segmentation. Hotel digital marketing services definitely don’t go into this depth of detail to segment guests. Semantic Audiences refers to an intent-based segmentation technique that is capable of ingesting hundreds or thousands of “triggers” across all websites. It is done by selecting 5-7 essential keywords suitable for our client in order to attain a weighted keyword cloud. This can help you really target your buyer’s interest. Semantic Audiences is present in the majority of international countries.
Our multilayered omnichannel approach combines developing innovative creatives with carefully targeted email and social media campaigns to guarantee you the best rates of attendance in the industry.
According to Revinate, the following are best practices your brand should follow:
- “Segment, Segment, Segment – not every email is appropriate for every customer. Make sure you’ve segmented your audience (especially new and loyal guests).
- A/B test all of your emails – test your “from” name, send time, your CTA, subject line, and email copy.
- Pay special attention to your subject line as it can make or break your hotel email campaign.
- Make sure your email copy is compelling
- Always provide value. Think to yourself, “would I read through this email if I received it?”
Segmenting is very important, as is sending emails at the right time of the day and week. If not, you could get an email notifying you of quite a few users who have unsubscribed from your hotel email marketing list.
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Send Just The Right Amount of Emails
The right amount of emails can drastically increase the potential for your guests to sign up for a room. Depending on the size of your hotel and its reputation, you may need to adjust the number of emails you send, but it’s important not to overdo it. Take the time to look at your data from the past year or even past campaigns. This way you can draw relevant data-driven conclusions and make decisions based on your subscriber’s open rates. If they would rather you have five emails in a sequence sent two times a week, then try that. If one sequence fails to bring you the results you are looking for, attempt to test out another using A/B testing. Rinse and repeat this method until you find a sequence that your subscribers respond to and that fits your hospitality email marketing campaign’s goals.
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Use Omnichannel Marketing Alongside Hotel Email Marketing
Hotel email marketing should be combined with various other forms of hospitality digital marketing services such as omnichannel marketing which helps you reach your guests where, and when, they browse.
Omnichannel marketing could be a combination of:
- Display advertising
- Geofenced advertising content
- Referral traffic
- Targeted social media marketing
- Mobile advertising
We provide best-in-class service and campaign excellence from concept to execution. Fortune 100 clients depend on our years of experience, analytical insights, and unparalleled access to global data sources ensuring sustained business growth throughout its lifecycle.
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Focus on Your Engaged Guests
Be sure to write drip campaigns and content that is targeted towards your past guests that were engaged with your content and/or hotel. You can use guest data (such as the informed data we discussed above or the transactional data) to help you understand which guests are most engaged (and you could also use a Net Promoter Score question in a survey to further target your most engaged customers, who answer that they are most or highly likely to refer your hotel brand to their friends and colleagues). This small segmentation and email targeting tweaks should help you improve your overall ROI and hotel occupancy rate over time. Remember, the more touchpoints that are relevant and easy to say yes to equal higher conversion rates and a more engaged hotel email marketing list.
Contact one of our Hotel Marketing Specialists to learn how FrescoData can help you attract and delight prospects in order to turn them into returning guests.
The FrescoData Difference: Hotel Marketing
We specialize in helping both mainstream and boutique high-end hotels by:
- Providing the right email strategies & database for the right audience
- Generating more leads while spending less time and money
- Improving the Sales Conversion rate
- Generating repeat guests
FrescoData’s industry-leading email marketing lists of hotel professionals facilitates marketers in retaining, growing and reactivating current and prospective clients. The hotel industry encompasses restaurants, hotels, inns, motels, lodging, event planners, cruise liners and more. With the growth in global tourism, the hotel industry has become one of the most organized sectors across the globe and is growing at a fast pace. This sector attracts huge investments and offers enormous growth prospects for enterprises. The hotel industry acts as a source of revenue for many countries and is an important contributor to a country’s development. Partnering with FrescoData’s targeted email lists results in highly targeted hotel marketing campaigns.
All the lists on FrescoData’s databases are opt-in and have been legally compiled according to each country’s marketing regulations.
FrescoData – Database synchronized for effective Marketing
The hotel industry is enormous and the marketing strategies vary from one type of service to another. The hotel industry has traditionally been dependent on word-of-mouth strategy for promotions. Now, with advancements in technology and the increasing use of the internet all over the world, email marketing has proven to be a potent tool for business promotions within this industry. FrescoData proves to be a one-stop facilitator for providing comprehensive email lists while assisting in enhancing and enriching existing internal databases.
FrescoData’s Hotel Email Executives List is Amicable for Your Business Growth
FrescoData’s Hotel Industry Email List is sourced using lists of trade shows attendees, hotel events, hotel magazines subscriptions, guest-based surveys, directories, etc. The Hotel Email and Marketing Lists are categorized on the basis of Job Roles and Countries for convenience. Given the enormity of the hotel sector, our quality team has put in their best efforts in keeping our hotel industry Email List and Marketing List accurate. FrescoData helps you reach the important decision-makers in the hotel industry.
All of FrescoData’s lists are verified by our data researchers and are updated twice a year.