Email marketing remains a powerful tool in the world of hospitality, allowing for ongoing, personalized communication with past, current and potential guests. With the right strategies in place, email marketing can help build and strengthen relationships over time and keep your brand at the top of guests’ minds.
Despite its importance, your hospitality business may struggle to stay at the forefront of email marketing trends and strategies. That’s why the experts at Creatives On Call are here to help build successful email marketing campaigns that are designed to reach your target consumers. As a marketing and creative consultancy, we can assist you at every step of the email marketing process, from audience research to expert copywriting.
Why Email Marketing Is Important in Hospitality
Email marketing presents hospitality brands with targeted opportunities to boost awareness, raise demand during slow periods, encourage customer loyalty and drive last-minute bookings. For an industry facing challenges like seasonal demand fluctuations, reliance on customer discovery and difficultydifferentiating brand identity, the benefits of email are numerous:
- Deliver personalized brand messaging: Email allows hotels to directly educate customers on their unique branding, offerings and value proposition in order to stand out.
- Drive promotional offers: Segmented email campaigns with special rates or packages incentivize bookings during annual demand drop-offs around holidays or low leisure travel periods.
- Target last-minute vacancies: Fill empty rooms through tailored email messaging that promotes limited-time flash sale rates on last-minute rooms.
- Build loyalty campaigns: Consistent email nurturing helps hotels foster trust and improve retention with leisure travelers who tend to book sporadically long-term.
- Track campaign performance: Monitor metrics like open, click-through and conversion rates to refine email targeting and content for optimal results.
As an affordable channel, email marketing can help consistently generate leads by keeping brands top of mind. Curating messaging to overcome specific hospitality growth barriers makes email a current and future go-to marketing pillar. With a team of expert hospitality copywriters, graphic designers and more, Creatives On Call can connect you to creative professionals with vast industry experience to drive your email marketing efforts.
Best Practices in Hospitality Email Marketing
There are several key trends and best practices that hospitality marketers should keep in mind to get the most out of email marketing campaigns. Creatives On Call always follows best practices, and our hospitality marketing experts are experienced in keeping up-to-date with industry trends.
Here are some best practices in hotel email marketing that Creatives On Call recommends:
- Personalization: Using merge tags, transactional data and behavioral data to customize emails to each subscriber’s interests improves open and click rates.
- Interactive content: Calls-to-action (CTAs), surveys, quizzes, calculators and other interactive content encourages engagement.
- Mobile optimization: With much email reading happening on mobile, messages must be optimized for small screens to prevent frustration.
- Customer journey marketing: Sending a series of tailored emails aligned to different stages of the travel journey nurtures guests over time.
- Subject line optimization: Attention-grabbing, benefit-focused subject lines in under 50 characters can help boost open rates.
- Striking creative: Eye-catching designs, strong imagery and compelling copy help emails stand out in crowded inboxes.
- Video: Incorporating video into emails can significantly lift click-through rates while also telling a brand’s story.
- Automation: Workflows that trigger emails based on certain user actions improve relevancy and save time.
- Testing and optimization: A/B testing different elements like subject lines, content and designs leads to improved results over time.
- List segmentation: Grouping subscribers based on demographics, interests and behaviors allows for super-targeted messaging.
By leveraging these tips and trends, hospitality marketers can cut through the noise to deliver emails that engage, convert and delight subscribers on their travel journeys.
Some key mistakes to avoid include:
- Sending too many emails that provide no value to subscribers. Avoid spamming.
- Focusing solely on promotional messaging without educational, lifestyle content. Mix it up.
- Not optimizing for mobile. This leads to frustration and unsubscribing.
- Using generic impersonal subject lines and copy. Personalize as much as possible.
- Making emails hard to act on. Include clear, clickable CTAs.
- Not segmenting lists based on user attributes and behaviors. One-size-fits-all is ineffective.
- Not testing elements like subject lines. Always be optimizing campaigns.
Setting Up a Successful Hospitality Email Marketing Strategy
When you partner with the Creatives On Call team for email marketing, we can help you create a strategy that allows you to directly connect with guests and share information about special offers, upcoming events and more. The key is crafting emails that provide value, engage your audience and drive conversions.
This process may include:
- Outlining clear goals for your campaign, such as generating bookings, promoting an event or driving restaurant revenue. Having specific, measurable goals will help shape your messaging and content.
- Building a segmented contact list so you can send targeted, relevant emails. It may help to group contacts by factors like past bookings, geographic location, interests and demographic data.
- Focusing emails around offering subscribers valuable, personalized information. For example, you could send special room deals to past guests planning future stays or invite locals to an upcoming wine dinner.
- Apart from promotions and events, it helps to use email to deliver confirmations, pre-arrival tips and post-stay surveys. This provides helpful information and builds brand engagement.
- Testing different subject lines to determine what drives open rates. Leverage emotional triggers like exclusivity and urgency as well as targeted language based on your segments.
- Finally, Creatives On Call’s expert hospitality copywriters can keep copy concise and scannable with short paragraphs, bullet points, headings and bold font to highlight key info. We can also help you use images and video to add visual interest.
Crafting a Cohesive Email Journey
The most effective hotel email programs guide subscribers through a cohesive journey before, during and after the guest stay.
Here are some best practices we can help you implement for nurturing guests through each stage:
Pre-Arrival Communication
Early outreach is key to getting on potential guests’ radar. Send intro emails highlighting your property’s unique perks and value proposition. When they do book, send confirmation emails recapping details.
Follow up with anticipation-building emails to get them excited about the upcoming stay. Share local attractions, dining options, property photos and experiences.
In-House Engagement
With permission, engage with guests during their stay via email. Welcome them and invite them to hotel events or exclusive experiences. Surprise and delight with random upgrades, credits or gifts.
Post-Stay Loyalty Building
After guests check out, stay top of mind with follow-up emails. Send quick surveys to monitor satisfaction. Surprise them with a thank you email, including photos from their stay.
Share exclusive loyalty member rates and personalized promotions to incentivize repeat visits. Ongoing nurturing keeps your property memorable.
Nurturing Relationships Through Email Marketing
In addition to offering promotions and engaging with guests during their stay, email marketing can also help nurture relationships with repeat guests. By crafting engaging content and sending relevant, timely messages, you can foster loyalty and encourage return visits.
Here are some tips for using email to build lasting connections with guests:
Crafting Engaging Content for Repeat Guests
Avoid blatant sales pitches in your emails to repeat guests. Focus on providing value through helpful information, insider tips or entertaining content. For example, you could share details on upcoming events, local attractions or special experiences unique to your property. Include vivid photos and videos to bring your location to life.
Personalization goes a long way. Use merge tags to include the guest’s name and information about past stays, like favorite rooms or amenities. Provide customized recommendations based on interests they’ve shared with you. This makes subscribers feel recognized as individuals.
Survey guests during their stay about topics or info they’d like to receive via email. Then tailor your content around their preferences. This ensures you’re sending information they actually want to read. Creatives On Call copywriters can help you craft engaging content based on guest data.
Creating Special Offers and Discounts
Loyalty rewards are hugely appealing to repeat guests. Create VIP discounts, free upgrades or exclusive deals just for your email subscriber list. Time these around milestone stays, birthdays or other occasions meaningful to subscribers.
Segment your list based on past booking behaviors and demographics. Then target specific offers at customer groups most likely to respond. For example, recent weekend travelers may appreciate a Sunday night discount, while families often book longer summer vacations.
A tiered loyalty program can incentivize return visits. As subscribers book more nights with you over time, they unlock better perks and discounts. But be sure rewards seem attainable and provide value at every level.
Sending Holiday or Seasonal Emails
Mark major holidays like Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day and the Fourth of July with festive emails. Include greetings, images or special packages themed to the occasion. Time these to serve as reminders to book getaways during popular travel seasons.
Themed emails also work for seasonal locales. A ski resort could highlight winter sports and après-ski perks in December then focus on warm weather activities like golf or water sports in the summer. Because the Creatives On Call team can work on single projects, we can jump in before your peak season to get email campaigns off the ground and into the inboxes of prospective visitors.
How Email Marketing Connects With Other Creative Services
Email marketing is far more powerful when incorporated into a multi-channel strategy encompassing several creative services. Our team specializes in making connections across disciplines to develop fully integrated campaigns that multiply results.
SEO & Content Creation
In-depth blogging and keyword research lays the foundation for email and all other marketing. Our content team produces articles on hospitality topics, which helps you rank in travel searches. Then, we can promote this content through email.
Social Media Management
Combining email promotions with organic and paid social media activity expands exposure. Our experts manage posts that highlight offers and initiatives shared in email newsletters to followers.
Video Production
Promotional video clips do wonders for email engagement. Our video team produces compelling brand films ideal for embedding or links driving traffic to proper video hosting pages.
Creative Design
Our top-notch graphic design team conceptualizes aesthetically stunning emails, landing pages, e-books, quizzes and more to feature in campaigns promoting offers sent out in newsletters.
Partnering With Creatives On Call
If you want to harness hospitality email marketing tools to set yourself apart in the industry, look to Creatives On Call. Through our team of creative experts, we can partner you with seasoned email marketing experts and copywriters who can help take your brand to the next level.
In addition to our email marketing services, Creatives On Call has extensive reach all over the creative space, from community management strategy to mobile app design and so much more. While we are happy to tackle single projects, we also believe in the power of an integrated marketing approach that lets us continuously invest in your brand to drive results.
Wherever you are in your marketing journey, we’re here to meet you. We can build a team of hospitality marketing experts to take your business to the next level. Contact us today to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should you include videos in promotional emails?
Including videos in promotional emails can be an effective strategy but should be done selectively. Videos can bring your email content to life in an engaging way, especially helpful for demonstrating services or telling a brand story. However, videos significantly increase email size, and not all email clients support embedding videos seamlessly. In some cases, consider linking to videos that live on your website or YouTube instead of embedding directly. This allows the subscriber to optionally view the video if interested without impacting deliverability.
Why is email marketing important in hospitality?
Email marketing is a critical component of an effective marketing strategy for hospitality businesses. Email allows hospitality brands to directly reach customers and build lasting relationships. It provides a means to deliver personalized and relevant communications that promote time-sensitive deals and offers. For example, an email campaign highlighting an available last-minute rate at a hotel can compel customers to make a booking or visit your business.
How should a marketing email be structured?
A well-structured marketing email typically contains a compelling subject line, a personalized greeting, an attention-grabbing opening, one or two key messages with supporting details, visual elements to break up the text, CTAs and an ending that leads the reader to your desired outcome. The goal is to engage readers early on, highlight value for them specifically, provide just enough information to support key points, make clear what you want them to do, and end to inspire action.
