The 5 essential email marketing campaigns for your hotel

Do you know the potential of email marketing? This strategy, when well-executed, is an online marketing favourite for the hotel sector for one reason: the return on investment. The fact is, email marketing allows you to conduct different campaigns associated with different goals which helps recover the investment of your resources.

Attracting customers, generating leads, selling your products and services, getting repeat customers and even improving your reputation are goals that can be associated with different email marketing campaigns conducted by your hotel. These campaigns must obviously be well-planned as far as timing, aimed at a certain segment and associated with effective emails.

Which campaigns should your hotel be conducting?

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is a metric that takes into account how many users recognise a brand and how they do so. In other words, this concept measures the popularity and how long your brand is imprinted in travel consumers’ minds.

Remember that not all guests at your hotel will end up remembering the chain where they stayed the year before and especially if they are not loyal customers. Their holiday experience in and outside of the hotel, the employees who were so pleasant… are often the most memorable moments. But, they won’t necessarily remember your brand.

So, how can you improve your hotel’s brand awareness?

With an adequate email marketing campaign, you can send emails pre-stay, post-stay, 6 months-after, etc. Through images and copy, these emails show your values and you can remind them everything your brand can do for them.

For example, a pre-stay email can include information on the destination and offer them up-selling services. A post-stay email can include a brief letter of thanks and perhaps a satisfaction survey. And after 6 months, you can tell them you “miss them”.

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is a practice that can become a part of your hotel’s content strategy. If you’re already generating content of interest on our pages or even on your blog, then you can take advantage of most of the material to offer content of interest to your potential customers.

Let’s say you’ve made a new contact through your web form or blog or that a consumer who had been a guest some time ago has come back to visit your pages. With this valuable information stored in your CRM, you can create segmented lists to “nurture” the interest for these contacts or leads.

How exactly does lead nurturing work with potential customers?

The idea with this practice is to think of which stage in the buying cycle these contacts are in. Obviously, if these leads have granted their consent to receive your notifications, you may implement this strategy.

So, you may send emails with different content of value depending on the stage in the buying cycle they are in as consumers and the material they have consumed. In other words, if a new lead has signed up because they’re interested in a particular destination. The purpose of lead nurturing is to feed their interest in this destination.

Considering the type of pages they’ve consumed, you have to decide which stage in the cycle they’re in and send another mailing with the appropriate content for each phase. In other words, you shouldn’t send information on your hotels to contacts who are still evaluating their destination options and are in the initial planning phase.

Newsletters

If you’re working on the content of a blog, you must send newsletters with your latest publications to the users who wish to receive this type of information. In any case, you must always remember to consider the new GDPR regulation.

Who should you send newsletters to and what should they include?

If you’ve worked on an SEO content strategy to attract potential customers organically, the users who consume this information will be interested in your content because they either like travelling or discovering new destinations or they are planning an important trip and need to know what to do.

It is very likely these consumers want to receive more information and subscribe to your newsletter or download content offered such as a travel guide you offer in exchange for their data. This is the target or list used to send your newsletters.

This type of email must mainly feed off the valuable information you generate on your blog. Information on destinations or experiences. Although this does not mean that you cannot sometimes talk about new experiences and services your hotel offers, but it has to be related to prior content that may interest the reader.

Special promotions

Are you interested in boosting direct bookings? In this case, promotional email marketing campaigns may be your best bet. Depending on the interests of the contacts in your database, you may make segmented lists and prepare mailings with special promotions for online bookings.

What types of promotional emails can be sent?

To encourage your potential customers to book online, there are several promotions that may work:

• Discounts for early booking: these promotional emails may coincide with seasonal campaigns and may work to promote bookings during the low season.
• Special destination discounts: in this case, the promotion will be related to the destination. Let’s say you’re interested in taking advantage of the popularity of a festival, local event or certain activities may be done during a certain season which may be of interest to your potential customers.
• Discounts for specific dates: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Black Friday are all habitual dates for emailing special promotions. Remember you must segment so you don’t send these emails to contacts who won’t share these interests. For example, families that never travel separately or couples without children. Each consumer has different interests.

Loyalty

Email marketing is a great strategy for building a long-term relationship with your habitual customers. Having a loyalty programme that allows you to get the most out of your guests’ LTV or lifetime value. But, how can you promote this?

New guests many times are in a hurry at check-in or check-out and don’t pay enough attention for you to explain your loyalty programme. In these cases, email marketing is one of the tools that will help your brand to promote it and maintain your loyal customers’ satisfaction.