To avoid making these embarrassing and potentially detrimental email marketing mistakes, it’s important to develop an email marketing strategy that will help you get the right information to the right customers. The clear answer is email segmentation. Follow the tips below to develop a strategy that works for your business and start email marketing like a pro.

What is Email Segmentation?

Email segmentation helps you target your email marketing campaigns so that your message reaches the right customers. When you develop an email segmentation strategy, you’ll start by separating your subscriber lists into small sections. These sections can be determined by:

• Where they live: Use geographic information, such as state, distance to a specific location or zip code to sort your customer list.
• Buying behaviors: Base the marketing information you send to your customers on past purchases or interactions with your business.
• Psychographics: This process can be more complicated but if you have information about your customers such as their values, lifestyles, or opinions, you can sort your email list based on these characteristics.
• Demographics: This includes details about your customers such as age, income, and household membership.

By using these categories to segment your email marketing campaigns, you can get your message delivered to the masses without creating an annoyance for customers and subscribers that the information isn’t relevant to. And unlike email personalization, segmentation doesn’t require the added work that goes into creating unique recommendations for each of your customers.

The Benefits of Using an Email Segmentation Strategy

It goes without saying that putting together an email segmentation strategy requires more effort than simply sending marketing emails to your entire subscriber list. However, the benefits of targeting these emails carefully are plentiful. They include:

• Enhanced customer relationships: Consumers know when they’re receiving mass marketing emails — strengthen your relationships with the people you serve by sending emails that speak to their interests and lifestyles.
• Increased engagement: Engagement is one of those metrics that are crucial to your business performance. Email marketing campaigns that generate clicks ensure you don’t lose engagement from disinterested subscribers.
• Simpler market research: Understanding which target audiences respond to which advertising campaigns is an easy way to understand who your customer base is and how to further tailor your offerings to their wants and needs.

7 Tips and Tricks For an Effective Email Segmentation Strategy

Before you sit down and try to sort out your email list, review the tips below to ensure the process is hassle-free.

1. Work with an agency
Work with a reliable digital marketing agency that has proven experience and success in email segmentation. Rely on their expertise to help you determine how to segment your list and to execute the strategy effectively.

2. Use page-level targeting and lead magnets
When website visitors opt-in to your email marketing campaigns, it’s easiest if you have the information you need from them right away. Using page-level targeting helps you understand where they fit based on the webpage they subscribe from, while lead magnets are questions on your subscription forms that enable your subscribers to give you the information you need from the get-go.

3. Give your new subscribers a warm welcome
When someone new subscribes to your email list, set up your system to automatically send them a welcome message reminding them of why they’re there. Include some of the benefits of being part of your email list, give them the opportunity to engage and shop online, and remind them that their private information is stored safely.

4. Give your subscribers the opportunity to choose
Some of the best email subscription lists make sure their subscribers aren’t overwhelmed by letting them determine the type of emails they’d like to receive and how often they’d like to receive them. Make it easy for your customers to provide you with their preferences and if they do want to unsubscribe, don’t make it hard for them.

5. Use metrics to determine message frequency
If you’re sending marketing emails to a particular subscriber and they’re never engaging, that might be a sign that it’s best to dial back their email frequency or give them the opportunity to provide you with their preferences. On the other hand, customers who engage frequently are the best ones to reach out to when you have special events, coupons, or invitations to test new products or website features. Make sure to measure and track the performance of each campaign so you have access to this important information.

6. Follow-up on abandoned forms and carts
One way to segment your email list is by creating a special list just for those who started the process of subscribing or shopping on your website but didn’t follow through. Use the information they’ve provided to follow up on forgotten shopping carts or incomplete forms.

7. Analyze purchasing behaviors
Using purchase history in your marketing campaigns is a great way to keep your subscribers coming back. Remind them when sales are coming up on their favorite products, offer add-ons that might interest them, and remind them if they’re likely running low on products they buy often.

Target the Right Audience With Email Segmentation

Taking the extra time to determine which subscribers will be most likely to engage with your marketing campaigns is the best way to ensure higher levels of engagement and more importantly, higher conversion rates. Use an email segmentation strategy to target your email marketing to the right consumers.

The post Email Segmentation: Tips and Ideas for Email Marketing Like a Pro appeared first on Upward Commerce.

Sending personalized, relevant and customer-oriented emails focused on the audience persona provides better ROI as compared to mass broadcasted emails. 

Here are some great tips to generate more revenue from your email campaigns:

1- Ensure that Your Email Defines Your Brand Voice

Right from the logo of your brand to the message you are planning to deliver, all must strategically define your brand voice.

You need to add your brand logo beneath every message so that a unique identity gets created and your brand can be easily identified on different platforms.

You can also create a brand voice chart to convert your brand voice into an action as shown in the below table:

2- Organically Grow Your Email Marketing List

Growing your email marketing list will deliver the best ROI compared to other marketing channels.  These subscribers have shown an interest in your hotel already. An organic email list also helps you to stay white-listed and ensure your emails are on a right path concerning the anti-spam laws like CASL.

Here are some great ways to increase your email subscriber base:

–   Create audience-specific content and promote it on your company blog. Allow people to sign up from your website in order to receive similar content.

–   Leverage the power of social media to encourage people to sign up for your email list.

–   Create an online community which your target audiences can join and share their thoughts. Have an email signup form on every page of the community to encourage email sign ups.

–   Add visible email signup buttons throughout your website.

–   Offer exclusive discounts only to email subscribers.

–   Host an event and ask people to RSVP with their email address.

–   Provide business cards to every customer and add an offer on the back of the card to encourage people to sign up for your emails.

–   Make use of daily deal sites to share special offers in return for an email address.

3- Build a Relationship with Your Customer Through a Chain of Emails

Do not send promotional email messages right from the first email that you send to your customer. Instead, try and build a relationship in the starting few emails and then you can try and pitch the customer.

1st email:

In the first email, introduce yourself and your hotel. Thereafter, share some travel tips or some local content showcasing cool local attractions. Your first email should deliver value to your customer so they understand there’s value to being a subscriber to your list.

Emails 2, 3 and 4:

In emails 2, 3 and 4 you should share more travel tips and more stories matching the customer persona. If the customer wants more information related to jungle safari send them the best options available and compliment them with some special offers. Similarly, a person interested in visiting beaches should not be sent an email containing palaces. Hope you get the idea!

Moreover, ensure that the content you write is of the 3rd grade reading level in order to receive the maximum responses.

4- Take Advantage of Peak Season

Usually guests are more likely to book hotels in peak seasons. Use this time to remind your new and existing customers to choose you as a first preference by offering them special discounts and attractive offers with holiday-themed emails.

You can also make use of marketing automation tools in order to send triggered emails that instantly drives the engagement rates. Automation tools are of great help because they allow you to send emails automatically to subscribers whenever a holiday or special event approaches, thereby avoiding the need to send emails manually.

5- Leverage the Power of Scarcity by Creating One Time Offers

Create offers in your email that are limited and time bound. The fear of the customer losing this offer will ultimately make him book your services. Scarcity is an emotional trigger that thrives where there is less supply and more demand.

You can send emails to the customer based on their browsing history and capitalize on the power of scarcity. Some messages that have proven to drive action are shared below (all of these messages are used by Booking.com to drive more sales):

–   “Lock in this great price while you still can” – persuading the customer to make a purchase right now!

–   “26 people are looking right now” – informs the customer about the competition.

–   “You missed it!” – tells the customer they missed booking this hotel so that they don’t miss the chance for booking the next available hotel or suite.

–   “See our last available rooms” – the word “last” urges the customer to hurry as rooms are limited.

–   “Booked 61 times in the last 24 hours” – specifies that it is a popular choice and should be booked before it’s gone.

6- Test Your Emails and Constantly Try to Improve the Conversion Rates

Testing is an essential element of the overall email marketing process. Here are some great tools to get started:

Putsmail – It lets you test your HTML emails before you send them. Any design flaws automatically gets noticed so that you can fix it before sending it to your subscribers.

Mail Tester – You don’t want your emails to rest in the spam folder of your subscribers. Do you? Hence, it is recommended to test your emails with the help of this tool. It allows you to send your emails to a specific email address and then it provides a spam score based on the contents of your email.

Litmus – This tool lets you check your email compatibility across 70+ apps. It takes highly optimized and fast screenshots of your email, delivering the highest quality images that represent exactly what your recipients see.

EmailonAcid – Another great tool that lets you test your emails across the most popular clients so that you can fix any problem before you hit send. You can create a new test for every HTML you make. Moreover, you can easily build HTML emails and test edits in real time.

Email marketing still has the power to generate the maximum return on investment. It all depends on maintaining a high standard of content and following a segmented marketing strategy. Tips shared above will surely help to get the most out of your email marketing strategy.

What can Upward Commerce do for your business? Contact us to find out.

The post Email Marketing For Hotels – 6 Tips to Generate Better ROI appeared first on Upward Commerce.