It is hard to market yourself as a resort in today's age of digital marketing. Especially as the landscape quickly evolves. But one channel that has stood firm amidst all of this is hotel email marketing.
But, while many resorts have been able to gather a long hotel email list of guests over the past few years. Many hoteliers find it challenging to execute effective marketing campaigns.
In this article, we'll share five tips to help you increase your conversion rates in your email marketing activities.
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1. Use Hotel Market Segments to Create Hyper-Specific Marketing Campaigns
Emails are a great hotel digital marketing tool. But if your emails are not being segmented properly, then the potential power of email can also turn into its downfall.
Your guests have their inboxes flooded with emails and offers from many companies. So how do you ensure your email stands out? The answer is by segmenting your guests and tailoring email messages to their needs.
Let's face it. You store a lot of data about your guests in your hotel database. Such as their gender, nationality, frequency of stay, duration, and revenue.
We know that guests stay in our resort for different reasons. Perhaps they come to your resort for business or leisure purposes, traveling with their children or with their friends. But we often neglect these typical segments of hospitality industry when it comes to email marketing for hotels.
The first tip is to separate your guests into distinctive groups. Use customer data stored in your Property Management System (PMS) to create segmentation.
Creating hyper-specific marketing campaigns is more effective than generic ones. It has been shown that segmentation drives a 73% higher revenue per recipient than non-segmented campaigns.
How to Create Guest Segmentation in Resorts
So now that we understand the value in creating guest segmentation. You need to understand the next step - extracting the guest data to build segmentation. How can you do that?
We touched based on the creation of hotel market segments in our big hotel digital online guide earlier.
But to sum it up. One challenge is that your guest data is in your resort's PMS, which often comes without email marketing functionalities.
Hence, you need to find a solution that stores your resorts' data into one place - and that comes from a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). A solution like our CRM system for hotels can centralize all guest data, build a rich customer profile, and help you leverage your guest data - powered by your PMS data.
Let's take a quick look at how we help our clients build segmentation.
We built an advanced guest segmentation engine that enables clients to slice and dice their database in multiple ways. They create segmentation from demographics, stay behavior, interests, and other personal info.
Instead of sending one big bulk email, they can send smart, targeted messages for each specific guest segment!
2. Optimize Your Emails for Mobile Devices
Your guests are accustomed to using their mobile devices in almost every aspect of their life as technology has quickly evolved. They plan their trips, book travel, and do research online with their mobile phone at a previously unseen speed.
It comes naturally that you need to adopt a mobile-first mindset, especially when you create your email campaigns. Make sure your emails are optimized for the best user experience.
Ideas on how to improve resort marketing campaigns for mobile phones:
Create shorter subject line lengths. Mobile devices will only show up to 25-30 characters.
Use pre-header texts as people see it when they quickly browse on their mobile device.
Ensure your emails are using a responsive design.
Place your captivating call to action on the top of your email to make it stand out more.
Always test your e-mails on multiple devices before you send them out.
3. Don’t Neglect the Power of Staycation
The Covid pandemic gave us all sorts of buzzwords, from "pivot" to "new normal". As the world saw travel restrictions, resorts had to shift their strategies by trying to capitalize on staycations instead.
Now as the travel restrictions are gone, it can be easy to forget your local neighbors.
But the good part is that according to recent research, the staycation trend is here to stay.
So whatever you do, don't forget the power of staycation. Continue building on the relationship you gained through the pandemic with your local community.
Hospitality Research shows staycation experiences are underpinned by the consolidation of experiences. These guests value multisensory, memorable experiences and are highly emotional. Try to focus on the experiences your resort can offer and combine them with captivating discounts during low-peak seasons to fill the property.
4. Improve Your Conversions Rates Through Hotel Email Automation
Many resorts face budget limitations and staff shortages. In fact, the problem is so widespread that we covered a whole topic about how to effectively resolve labor shortages in the hospitality industry.
Perhaps you are running a much smaller marketing team these days, or given the task to one of your other departments. Regardless of what the situation is, email automation can come in handy.
Email automation is the process of sending pre-scheduled emails to your subscribers or customers.
Here's how it works. It starts by you arranging a set of conditions and the email being triggered from those conditions.
Let's say you want to schedule a drip campaign. These automated email sequences are behavioral-based, so you can define how many sequences you want to have in your campaign, and define the follow-up action based on the guests' behavior.
You can then pre-schedule these e-mails to a specific date and let it all run automatically, without having to do any work.
5. Analyze the Results of a Hotel Email Marketing Campaign
Our last tip is to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns to understand what works, and what doesn't.
This way you can improve and continuously optimize your future marketing campaigns in your resort.
The most important email marketing metrics that should be tracked in a hotel include:
Open rate - The number of people who opened your e-mail. The metric will show you the general indicator of subject line effectiveness.
Bounce rate - The number of emails that were not delivered to the inboxes. Higher bouncer rates hurt your reputation and should not be neglected.
Clickthrough rate - The percentage of email recipients who clicked on the links in your e-mails. A higher rate means that your campaign resonates with your audience and that the reader takes action.
Conversion rate - The percentage of people who clicked on the link in your email and completed your desired action. For example, booking a room using your coupon code. One of the key metrics that you should keep an eye on!
Are you still confused? Have a peek at this video explaining the marketing benchmarks in greater details!
Apart from the aforementioned metrics, one absolute favorite metric for hoteliers is to measure the Return On Investment (ROI). This metric is calculated by dividing the total revenue gained/total spend.
Conclusion: Hotel Email Marketing: 5 Tips to Marketing Resort
Hoteliers can improve their hotel marketing campaigns by implementing the following five tips:
The tips for marketing initiatives included:
Create hyper-personalized hotel email marketing campaigns by dividing your guests into different segmentations.
Optimize your emails for mobile devices.
Keep in touch with your neighbors to generate business in low-peak seasons.
Use email automation to work more efficiently with your marketing campaigns.
Continuously analyze and evaluate the outcomes of your resort's email marketing initiative.
At the end of the day, email marketing for hotels boils down to building and maintaining relationships with your customers. Through every stage of the guest journey.
At Metasphere, we developed an email marketing solution for hotels. The solution help hotels deeply connect with their customers during the whole guest journey.
If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your resort improve your conversation rates. Click on the button below to schedule a free demo session today!