Does your hotel know how to do email marketing without becoming boring?

Direct email marketing is an essential tool for your hotel. If well-executed, it’s a strategy that can help you keep interest alive among your contacts, generate brand awareness and, what’s more important, help you make your customers loyal to increase direct bookings.

Let’s face it, the result of your email marketing campaigns may not be what you expected. And we’re not only talking about how the rate of opening may not have been good, but rather how the ROI was not very good. Because even if they opened your email, your contacts have lost interest. The truth is, this strategy can have a return on investment of up to 4,300 %.

So, you might want to know how to do email marketing without becoming boring, right? The answer is by sending the right emails to specific contact lists at the right time. Emails that engage your customers. Effective emails.

And what exactly is a good strategy for effective email?

1. Knowing the aim of your email.

From now on, never send an email without a goal. Remember this like a mantra because it’s rule number one when sending effective email. Sending emails to all your contacts does not generate engagement. It does not get any results as far as benefits for your hotel. You must have a clear goal if you want high performance. Ask yourself:

• Who do you want to receive your email? You can’t send the same email to your entire contact database. To send the right email, you need CRM to help you segment your contact lists. These lists must be based on the interests shown by your customers as far as the content and consumption preferences. Remember that content that may be attractive to some may not be to others. And that’s why you need a high-quality database.
• What do you do after that? Would you like them to download a travel guide, subscribe to your newsletter, agree to the terms of a promotion or participate in your loyalty program? The next step must always be some type of conversion an action that allows them to get closer to the decision of booking. A booking you’d like to be direct. That’s why it’s important to know what their buying cycle is like and as much information as possible through CRM to create the right content that can attract them.

2. Optimizing emails so they are opened.

One of the elements that will determine the success of your hotel’s emails once the goal is clear, is the subject line. This single phrase can create attraction or rejection and have a major impact on the conversion rate of your emails. After all, it’s impossible for your contacts to take the action you set as a goal if they don’t open your emails.

And one of the factors that improve the opening rate for your emails is personalizing the subject line. Again, in order to personalize, you must know who you’re addressing well and what their preferences as per your database. As you can see, compiling relevant information on your customers is essential to increasing the open rate for your emails. Information you must manage with the right software.

3. Convince your contact to act.

There are several factors that can make the difference when deciding on one action or another. There’s only one click between opening your email and the goal you set for your contact, so pay attention:

• Prioritize the device. Nowadays, most digital designs are responsive and those that aren’t suffer the consequences. Because what happens if your contacts open their email with a mobile device and the visualization is not correct? It’s simple.  They leave, they’re not interested and you lose out on the opportunity to convert them. For this reason, it’s important to prepare a responsive design for your emails.
• Create clear content. You already know the saying “the shorter, the better”, right? You can apply it to this case. Your contacts must see what they can get out of it and how they can benefit from the conversion. You must offer value and do so in just a few words. They’ll thank you for it.
• Grab their attention. To do so, you can use personalization again, consider including their name, location, interests… so they can feel connected and become engaged. Also use visual content such as images or videos. And don’t forget to create buttons so they take the next action and know where they must click.

As you can see, the keys to effective email are basic yet few hotels follow these guidelines when executing their email marketing campaigns. Campaigns are sent to many contacts who aren’t always interested in what they offer. And this can bore your potential customers.

So, in order for your emails to be effective, you must use the information you get from your customers and contacts: quality data. And the proper tool that enables email marketing workflows to segmented contacts in your CRM can make the difference in your hotel sending the right email to a specific audience at the right time.