What Is Email Marketing For Hotels?

In a world saturated with marketing channels, email marketing remains a stalwart for hoteliers. It offers a direct line of communication with your guests, allowing you to provide personalized experiences and stay top-of-mind. Let’s go through the world of email marketing for hotels and inspect how you can harness its potential to boost your hospitality business.

What is email marketing for hotels?

Email marketing for hotels is a digital marketing strategy that involves sending targeted email campaigns to potential and existing customers to promote a hotel’s services, attract bookings, and build customer loyalty. This form of marketing leverages email communication to engage with guests, share relevant content, and encourage them to take action, such as booking a room, dining at a hotel restaurant, or participating in special promotions.

How to build an email marketing strategy for hotels

Create an email marketing account

You can choose to go with a free email service provider like Google or Outlook. These providers offer free accounts that you can use to send emails. The email address that you use with your hotel’s email marketing platform should match the name of the account that you created.

Select a landing page

Landing pages are web pages that appear at the end of an email message. Some of these pages allow you to capture contact information and lead a guest through the process of booking a room, dining, or signing up for a special promotion. Others provide a thank you for booking or a confirmation that they received the email. You can customize these pages with images, headlines, and text.

Choose your email frequency

There are three common methods of sending hotel email campaigns: daily, weekly, and monthly. Each method has pros and cons.

Daily Emails: This allows you to send out a small amount of messages to your customers in a day, which is useful if you are trying to create a sense of urgency and make it easy for your guests to book. On the downside, you may overwhelm your guests with too much content and cause them to unsubscribe from your email list.

Weekly Emails: Are more likely to convert guests into new customers than daily emails. They are also useful for reminding guests of special offers and providing guests with additional content and information. On the downside, you may receive less engagement from your guests if you send too many emails in a week.

Monthly Emails: These are usually sent out on the 1st, 15th, 30th, 60th, and 90th days of a month. They are designed to allow you to send guests a recap of your events for the past months and to let them know about the upcoming events. You can also add additional content for guests to enjoy and keep them engaged.

Add custom HTML code.

In addition to adding text, you can also include HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags and graphics to further personalize your emails. Some of the things that you can do include:

Adding links to your social media pages to increase the chance of your guests sharing your message.
Insert a coupon into your guest’s inbox.
Provide a unique URL so guests can click on it and book a room.

Optimize for search engines

If your website isn’t optimized for search engines, then you won’t be able to track conversions through your email campaigns. Your hotel should have a website with a unique URL and the proper meta description, keyword tags, and image alt tags.

These are the little details that search engines look for to decide whether a webpage is relevant. You can use tools such as Google Analytics and Hotels.com to learn more about your guests and how to get the most out of your email campaigns.

Include tracking codes

You should include a unique tracking code that will allow your guests to opt in to receive your emails. When you send an email to your guests, you will need to include a tracking code so that you can see how many people opened and clicked on your email and how many people converted to bookings.

Test your campaigns

You can use a tool such as MailChimp or Constant Contact to test the success of your email campaigns. You can then fine-tune your messaging and optimize your campaigns to get the most conversions.

3 Email marketing campaign ideas for the hospitality industry

1. Loyalty programs

You should start a loyalty program that rewards your guests for booking with you. Some of the benefits that you can offer are free upgrades, free parking, and free Wi-Fi. This is a great way to keep your guests happy and make sure that they will return to your hotel. You should also offer discounts to guests who book via email. Offering discounts can be a good way to attract new customers.

2. Local newsletters

People are usually very interested in what’s going on around town. If you have local events or activities going on, you should put them in a newsletter. You can even create a newsletter that goes out to a select group of guests, giving them exclusive information about things going on in your city.

3. Guest reviews

It is always a good idea to reward your best guests. This way, you can make your guests feel valued. You can offer them free accommodations, discounts, and even VIP treatments. You can also offer them prizes, like gift cards when they review your hotel online.

Conclusion

In conclusion, email marketing for hotels is a potent tool to boost bookings, enhance guest engagement, and drive revenue. By building an email marketing strategy, crafting compelling content, and personalizing your campaigns, you can create memorable experiences for your guests and keep them coming back for more.