If you are looking to write outreach emails for your hospitality business, we present some useful tips here.
The hospitality industry is a huge industry and email marketing is crucial to the success of any hospitality business.
In this post, we present some of the useful email marketing tips specific to the hospitality industry.
Email marketing is an indispensable part of the marketing strategy and various hospitality digital marketing tools make the task easier for the hoteliers. In order to increase hotel direct bookings, email marketing can prove to be a winner along with a quality mobile website.
In order to create a perfect email marketing strategy, here are some of the useful tips. It all begins with writing a perfect outreach email.
Let’s begin with the tips.
1. Focus on the content- Content is the King
Now, this is not only limited to the hospitality industry. With content all over the webspace, creating high quality and relevant content is the key for sure.
Gone are the days when you could simply copy and paste a template and then shoot emails to the list. A good email marketing strategy needs a well-curated content strategy at the front.
The hospitality industry has the maximum variety of choices for the readers leading to a requirement of more engaging content.
Use the below ideas and more to create engaging content.
- Keep the content simple and easy to read.
- Use one image or small infographic within the content.
- Keep the action tab in the email content (not more than 1-2).
- Create a catchy email subject.
- Use less number of links.
- Give free gifts or coupons if relevant.
Email marketing is crucial to success and hospitality businesses must not ignore it. Here’s an infographic by Optinmonster and Wordstream that speaks volumes about the importance of email marketing.
As you can see in the infographic above, the average return on investment for email marketing is huge.
Hospitality businesses should make the best use of it.
Moving on to the next tips now.
2. Maintain and update email list(s)
It is crucial to maintain an updated email list as a part of your email marketing strategy.
To ensure a clutter-free and updated email list, please take care of the following:
- Keep the unsubscribe option.
- Make it easy to unsubscribe and resubscribe.
- Allow customers to manage the frequency of emails.
- Allow email preferences.
- Eliminate not interested subscribers on a regular basis.
- Keep checking the bounce rates to remove wrong or expired emails.
- Personalise lists by segmenting them for a lesser bounce rate.
It is one of the most important email marketing tips for the hospitality industry.
The bounce rate for the hospitality industry email lists can be high due to the diversity of customers and prospective customers (both internal and external).
It is thus extremely important to keep the email lists fresh and segmented for better results.
3. Personalise your emails
One of the biggest email marketing mistakes is to focus more on the product than the customers.
It is extremely important to focus on the recipients and thus personalising emails become crucial.
E-mail personalisation tips by Neil Patel (an ace blogger and marketer) gives the below strategies to ensure you serve personalised emails for best results.
- Asking the right questions
- Creating customer personas
- Using location and time properly
- Setting up automatic behavioural trigger emails
- Personalising your business
- Correct landing pages
The above useful tips can help all industries to create personalised emails for maximum success. For the hospitality industry, the tip on location and time along with asking the right questions are crucial.
The below infographic provides a lot of email marketing tips with a key focus on personalising the emails.
4. Automate follow-ups
This is one of the most important email marketing tips for the hospitality industry. This industry is still a bit of technology averse.
It is important to keep a track of all leads and with the ever-increasing email lists, it can be a nightmare to follow up properly.
Technology comes as a saviour and in order to gain a competitive advantage, we must embrace the positives of technology. And, automating your follow up emails in one of them.
There are a lot of hospitality management software that would make it a cakewalk for businesses to automate email follow-ups.
5. Tracking and analysis of results of email marketing is a must
There are a lot of things that are important to track to ensure that email marketing provides better results with time.
Key metrics to measure and analyse in email campaigns are:
- Bounce rate
- Subscriptions and unsubscriptions
- Conversion rate
- Open rate and clickthrough rate
- References
- Complaints
and various other similar metrics.
There are a lot of free and paid software to help businesses track and analyse these results.
Most of the paid email marketing software would have most of these unbuild to help businesses analyse and improve their email campaigns.
6. Design your emails with a focus on mobile users
Customising your email campaign for mobile users one of the key hospitality industry email marketing tips.
This is very much in line with the top digital marketing trends in hospitality.
Most of the users in the current time are mobile and prefer the mobile versions of websites and emails.
A lot of professionals use mobile to check emails and reply to them. Thus keep your emails mobile-friendly.
Here are some tips to ensure your promotional emails are mobile-friendly.
- Try using short subject lines.
- Largest font size with more spacing is mobile friendly.
- smaller images perform better on mobiles.
- Call to action tab must be distinct and clear.
7. Get influencers on board
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective forms of modern hospitality marketing out there, and it can be a great way to get your product, service or business out there in front of a new audience that will take an interest in what you have to offer.
Influences add credibility to the promotion of your campaign.
If you can have occasional mention or emails from influencers for your product like recommendations or review, it is like an icing on the cake.
So, make every effort to find occasional email mentions by influencers of the hospitality niche that can be used in email marketing for the hospitality businesses.
Conclusion
Email marketing is more crucial than ever with ever-increasing internet reach.
Through a properly strategised email marketing, hospitality businesses can manage a bigger customer base directly.
In this article, we have summed up a lot of email marketing tips in 7 broad categories to help hospitality businesses create perfect email strategies and amazing email campaigns.
Hope these tips would help you increase the pie of your customer base and add to the brand visibility and brand value of your hospitality business(es).
