Email Marketing is one of the best ways for hotels to encourage brand awareness and direct bookings.

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.