One of the major advantages of running a hotel is your ability to create your own email list.
It is the kind of data that only a few businesses have, and it gives you a competitive advantage since it lets you build relationships and keep your customers engaged.
With the rise in hotels, your hotel email marketing strategy can play a vital role in scaling up your business.
The industry statistics indicate that the open rate benchmark is 21% with 2.56% of them actually clicking on the website.
A very crucial and intriguing factor in hotel marketing is that more than 55% of the emails are opened on mobile devices
This makes email mobile optimizations and responsiveness a crucial factor when it comes to determining if your emails will be successful.
With that being set, you don’t just have to settle for the benchmark, right? So here’s a complete hotel email marketing guide for you to follow for amazing results.
What is Hotel Email Marketing?
Hotel email marketing, is a very powerful marketing strategy whereby a hotelier use email campaigns to increase direct bookings and promote the services of a hotel to potential, existing and previous customers.
Your hotel email marketing strategy is a key part of your business. It will help you achieve a lot of things, including keeping in touch with your loyal customers and generating more sales.
Hotel email marketing can be as simple as sending a confirmation email to a customer who booked a room via on OTA like Expedia
The way you leverage your email marketing campaigns depends on what your goals are and what you want to achieve.
It also depends on your location audience and the kind of hotel you run, Is it a 5-Star hotel? Boutique Hotel? Or 3-star hotel?
The bottom line is that hotel email marketing is basically about nurturing and building a long-lasting relationship with customers, and it works wonders.
Your emails will influence how your customers feel about your hotels when they book a room, whether directly or via an OTA
Therefore, you have to keep your guests engaged and keep them on their toes with your email marketing campaigns.
Or else, with hundreds of emails bombarding their inbox every day, you might lose your customers to other hotels or even worse an Airbnb super host
What’s Involved in Hotel Email Marketing?
Hotel email marketing is slightly different to a normal email marketing strategy because you not only have the usual promotional emails, you also have your prearrival, arrival and post arrival emails.
Promotional emails are used to let subscribers know about offers, share your latest room offers lines, and generally keep in touch with them. No email is more important than the other.
Instead, they work together to create a solid system that builds strong relationship, nurtures meets the demands of the customers.
A solid hotel email marketing strategy takes both promotional, newsletter & transactional emails into account to create a stress-free experience for customers throughout the entire customer journey.
Why is Hotel Email Marketing Important?
Hotel email marketing gives hotels the ability to build credibility, establish a trustworthy and loyal relationship with the customer. It is also a perfect way to increase direct bookings, boosts sales and increase brand awareness,
Read: 7 Best Email Marketing Practices For eCommerce Brands in 2022
10 Hotel Email Campaigns You Can Send
Wondering what kind of emails can you send as a hotel? Here’s a list that will help you out:
- The Confirmation Email
- Upsell Email
- Pre-Arrival Reminder
- The Arrival or Welcome Email
- The Post Arrival Email
- The Thank-you Email
- The Request for Feedback Email
- The Promotional Email
- Re-engagement Email
- Newsletter Email
Confirmation Email
According to Sendpulse, a confirmation email is a kind of transactional email sent to a customer after a certain action is taken.
A hotel confirmation email can be sent to confirm that a customer has reserved a room, subscribed to a newsletter or made a payment.
For hotels, your booking confirmation email should contain all the necessary information, this information can be:
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Your hotel’s check-in and check-out times
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The date of arrival
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Number of nights booked
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Room type reserved
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Price of the stay, including taxes and/or resort fees
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Directions to the hotel
- Number of Individuals
Examples of Confirmation Email
Upsell Email
An upsell email encourages a customer to buy a more expensive version of your product or upgrade their account, while a cross-selling suggests related products or services to complement what the customer has.
A hotel upsell email will encourage a customer who booked a room that those not have a personal swimming pool to upgrade to a room that has it.
A hotel cross-sell email will encourage a customer to add access to spa or free parking to their cart.
Pre-Arrival Reminder Email
A pre-arrival reminder email is an email sent to a guest prior to their arrival. These emails are usually sent 3 days or sometimes a week before the date of their expected arrival at the hotel.
With the use of hotel email marketing software like Revinate hotels can automate this process so that the email can be sent at specific time.
For instance, you can configure an automated email to be sent out to 3 to 7 days before the guest’s arrival date to welcome him/her to your hotel.
Pre-arrival emails also give you an opportunity to remind the guest about the hotel reservation and upsell or cross-sell other products or services you offers.
The Arrival or Welcome Email
Hotel arrival or welcome emails gives the hotelier the opportunity to provide guests with importance details that will give them a slick experience throughout their stay in your hotels.
Some necessary information like Customer support mobile, Spa or Gym locations should be included in the arrival/welcome email.
The Post Arrival Email
Post arrival also referred to as post stay email are sent after the guest has left or checked out from your hotel.
Sending a post-stay e-mail campaign after guests has left your property can improve customer loyalty which in turn encourage them to return to your hotel.
If the guest booked via an OTA like Booking.com, include a direct win back offer.
The goal of the direct win back offer is to encourage them to book directly via your website for their next stay.
The Thank-you Email
Hotel thank-you emails are emails sent to customers thanking them for using lodging in your hotel. Thank you emails have a lot of advantages.
When thank you emails are used the right way, they have the ability to turn strangers into lifetime customers.
When should you send a thank-you email? A thank-you email should be sent to the guest 3-5 days after they left your property.
The Request for Feedback Email
Request for feedback emails are emails sent to hotel guests to gather reviews or opinions after using or lodging in your hotel.
A request for feedback email can help you know where you’re lacking, it can also help you get more reviews, which will in turn attract more customers to your hotel.
The best time to send a request for feedback email is 1-3 days after a customer left your property.
The Promotional Email
Promotional email marketing email sent to your potential, existing or previous customer written to your audience regarding a promotion your hotel is running.
Another reason why promotional emails are effective, is according to report by Convince & Convert
- 68% of millennials say promotional emails have influenced their buying decisions.
- 76% of email subscribers have bought something promoted through an email marketing message.
Another reason why promotional emails are important is because they can:
- Increase direct room bookings.
- Get dormant customers to buy
- Increase sales
- Improve customer engagement
- Reduce Churn
Re-Engagement Email
Hotel re-engagement emails are emails sent out to inactive email subscribers.
The goal of a re-engagement email is to get email subscribers who have stopped interacting with your emails to start interacting with them again.
The first step to sending out a pre-engagement email is to first of all segment or separate email subscribers who have been interacting with your emails from those who have been non-active.
The re-engagement email campaigns will be sent to the inactive subscribers.
When should you consider a subscriber inactive? A subscriber can be said to be inactive if they’ve not interacted with your emails for more than 40 days.
That is, they’ve not opened or clicked on any of your email for 4o days on a row.
Newsletter Email
According to Hubspot, newsletter email is a recurring email sent to email subscribers. These emails contain information that are relevant to the email subscribers.
The goal is to of a newsletter email is to provide ongoing value while surfacing important industry- or niche-related topics.
Summary
Hotel Email marketing has enormous potential for hotel. You can use these hotel email marketing best practices to attract new customers, generate direct bookings, retain existing clients, and drive more sales.
There are plenty of email marketing services & agencies that can make this process easier & worthwhile, and Revinate is one of the options available on the market.
Give it a try and see the tangible results in almost no time. Need help with hotel email marketing? Book a call with our team here!