Guide 4: Maximise your return with Email Marketing

Emails are a key communication tool that every hospitality business should be utilising on a regular basis to drive traffic to your website and highlight events, promotions and news for your hotel.

As covered by Guide 1, your hotel website is a sales conversion hub that you drive traffic to from various sources. Some of that traffic comes from search engines, such as Google, or from other websites via links and is primarily people who are actively looking for what you provide.

Alternatively, additional traffic can be driven to your website by putting a message in front of your customers even if they’re not currently, actively, looking for what you provide.

Marketers have been using direct marketing techniques for decades, but email holds the additional benefits of allowing the recipient to immediately make a booking with just a couple of clicks of a mouse and is accurately measurable.

First Build an Email List

Marketing emails are considerably more effective if they are sent to people who are generally interested in what you provide, or who are already aware of your hotel. For this reason it is important to build your own email list.

Email lists can be developed in various ways including:

• Exported from your PMS, reservations software or website booking engine
• Guest feedback cards
• Running competitions or prize draws
• Implementing vouchers and flyers with offers only redeemable with email address included
• Encouraging people to subscribe to email promotions lists via your website

Always ensure your restaurant or spa reservation process asks for an email address. Although you might not get it every time, many people will provide it.

When using these collection techniques it’s essential that, where appropriate, you provide a tick box allowing people to opt in or out of promotional emails.

Email Structure

Once you have a good email list you can send them engaging, suitable and well-designed emails.

A promotional email consists of a number of key components:

• Subject Line
• Primary Message Headline
• Primary Image
• Secondary/Tertiary Messages and Images
• Calls to Action

Your subject line is key in determining the percentage of people who open the email, called the Open Rate.

A very good open rate in the hotel sector is around 25%, with the average about 15%. If you’re offering an attractive promotion make sure it is clear in the subject line, something like “2-4-1 Spa Days” works best, even if the promotion is only for Monday-Tuesday. You can explain that once people have opened the email.

The content of a good marketing email should have:

• A headline offer or promotion that immediately captures the attention of your audience.
• A powerful image helps to draw the eye and the headline text should boldly state the primary promotion on offer.
• Secondary and even tertiary messages in smaller sections can then appear further down the email for people who are drawn in by the primary offer.

Call to Action

The other critically important design element for effective hotel emails is the call to action.

With hotels this should be a ‘book online’ button or something similar. Each key message requires its own call to action. You want to encourage people to continue using the same media to convert to a sale, in this case online.

So the email should sell the promotion and encourage click-throughs to the website. The website must then convert this click-through to a sale using an online booking system.

This process means that within 2 or 3 clicks of a mouse, and in less than 30 seconds, somebody receiving an email can make a booking that helps to generate a high return on your marketing investment.

Text or Images?

Many people will have their email software set not to load images unless they activate the images on an email.

For this reason it is important for your results that:

• Your subject line is engaging
• There is a clear line of text at the top of the email and it should have images that summarise the key message
• All images on an email include text tags

You can also use plain text alongside images in your email, which appears regardless of image settings.

Reporting

Good email marketing software will provide you with a wide range of statistics and information to assess the ROI and effectiveness of the campaign.

Interesting statistics that you should monitor include:

Good software can also provide you with lists of people who have opened the email or clicked on links, ranking recipients by the number of links they’ve clicked. This creates a ‘hot list’ of people who are particularly interested in what you do, which you can then use to target more precisely.

This technique is particularly effective for business-to-business communications as you can test the water with an email then follow up the ‘hot list’ with a phone call to those people who are clearly interested. We find this works well with targeting the business meetings market.

Don't Spam

Finally a word of warning – don’t be a spammer, everybody hates them! Limit your emails to one per month at the most and always ensure you’re offering something of interest and value to your customers.

If you don’t use it already we strongly recommend that you incorporate email communications into your marketing mix.

Send people messages or offers that will encourage them to act immediately and you will be rewarded with one of the best returns on any marketing communication technique.

Ignite's 8-Step Email Marketing Process

If you’re attempting to run email marketing for your hotel, follow these steps to achieve the best results:

Build your own email list

Develop a good promotion

Create a good subject line

Design your email with a powerful headline and image

Ensure clear calls to action that link to your website conversion tool

Make sure your email is still effective with the images turned off

Monitor your results

Don’t spam!

Follow the suggestions here and you’ll easily drive significant additional customers to your website for more bookings!

Our goal is to help hoteliers succeed online. The Online Distribution Channel is the only growth channel in 2010 and is the cheapest. Smart hoteliers should dedicate increasing proportions of their marketing budgets to internet marketing.

If you would like to work with us to dramatically increase the number of visitors to your website and subsequent online bookings call 020 7275 8682 or email us.