Hotel email marketing is a form of online marketing that allows hotels to regularly engage with past, potential, and future guests. Marketing emails typically share news and information about hotel services, special offers, and local attractions. In this article, you will learn about the different types of marketing emails, understand common email marketing strategies, and access top tips to generate more bookings.
Table of Contents:
What is Hotel Email Marketing?
Hotel email marketing describes email marketing campaigns by businesses operating in the hotel industry, allowing them to reach a broad audience and target specific demographics with promotional content and other useful information. These campaigns will typically target past guests, customers who have recently made a booking, and others who have expressed an interest in receiving updates or an email newsletter.
Email marketing can take many forms, from overtly promotional emails, to emails highlighting important news stories about the hotel or the travel destination. Email marketing can send exclusive discounts to specific customers, generate repeat business, or communicate important pre-arrival information.
In many cases, hotel email marketing campaigns are automated outside of the actual creation of email content. Emails may be sent when customers perform specific actions, when special offers go live, or when news develops. Ultimately, most email marketing campaigns are intended to generate bookings or increase hotel revenue.
Why is Hotel Email Marketing So Valuable?
Hotel email marketing is extremely valuable to hoteliers, because it allows them to regularly engage with past and future guests in an extremely cost-effective way. Email marketing also provides scope for personalization, and email content can be sent to a large audience simultaneously.
In particular, email marketing is beneficial for upselling and cross-selling to people who have recently booked a hotel room, or targeting past customers with promotional content. Emails can include discount codes, special offers information, and links to the hotel’s booking engine. As a result, hotels can generate more bookings and can target their marketing efforts towards an audience that has already engaged with the brand.
It should also be noted that the potential reach of hotel email marketing campaigns can be vast, because almost every customer or potential customer has an active email address they regularly check.
3 Main Types of Hotel Email Marketing
In general, hotel email marketing can be divided into three main email types, which have different purposes:
1. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails directly reference transactions between your business and hotel guests and often serve to reassure customers that a transaction has been processed. A good example of this is a booking confirmation email.
Many transactional emails are sent automatically, in response to a particular customer action. They also serve as a valuable form of hotel email marketing because they allow you to communicate with confirmed hotel guests, upsell, cross-sell, reference additional hotel services, and provide other valuable information.
2. Guest Lifecycle Emails
Guest lifecycle emails are a form of hotel marketing based on different customer journey stages. They typically provide guests with information that is relevant to the part of the customer journey they are at.
For instance, a pre-arrival email can be sent a few days before arrival, explaining the check-in process, while attempting to sell upgrades or extra services. As another example, a request for feedback could be sent after the guest checks out. In the build-up to the anniversary of a stay, a hotel could send an email to try to entice a repeat visit.
3. Promotional Emails
As the name suggests, promotional emails are a more overtly promotional type of hotel email marketing, where your hotel attempts to promote the hotel and related products or services. This could include promoting hotel facilities, special offers, upgrade options, a customer loyalty program, your hotel app, or on-site meals.
Promotional emails aim to increase awareness of products or services and increase revenue by encouraging transactions. They are often targeted carefully towards the most relevant audience.
8 Hotel Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing for hotels is most likely to be successful when hotels adopt clear strategies. In the sections below, you can learn about tried-and-tested strategies that can help to maximize hotel marketing success:
1. Create Confirmation and Sign-Up Emails
An important first step for hotel email marketing is to create templates for confirmation and sign-up emails. A confirmation email is sent when users perform a specific action, like booking or upgrading their room. A sign-up email is sent when a user registers to receive a newsletter, or indicates a desire to receive regular email updates.
In both situations, you must craft compelling emails that can be automatically sent out. Confirmation emails should include the most essential information, such as details about the booking, but can also include promotional content to try to upsell. Sign-up emails should have a welcoming tone and be compelling enough to encourage recipients to open up the next email they receive from your hotel, so think carefully about how to add engaging or interesting content.
2. Adopt an Email Segmentation Strategy
Not all of your hotel email marketing will be relevant to your entire mailing list, so it can be a good idea to segment your mailing list into different groups, based on interests and shared qualities. This then allows you to send targeted emails to the people they will be most relevant to.
Segmentation of email campaigns can increase email revenue by up to 760%, so make sure you collect valuable customer data and segment your mailing list intelligently, based on shared characteristics.
3. Personalize Your Emails to the Individual
Speaking of email personalization, it is also important to treat every recipient as an individual, rather than treating your mailing list as one homogenous group of people. In addition to segmenting your mailing list and targeting emails to the right demographics, you can also take other steps to personalize hotel email marketing campaigns.
You should set up your emails so they automatically include the recipient’s name, allowing them to feel like you are addressing them personally. Re-marketing emails can be sent to past customers, and you can adopt a more familiar tone for these emails. You might even consider sending emails to mark specific occasions, like a customer’s birthday.
4. Target Different Stages of the Guest Journey
In addition to aiming emails at specific demographics, it can be a good idea to break down your hotel email marketing campaign into emails that target people at different stages of the guest journey. This helps to make emails more effective, because people receive information that resonates with where they are in the journey.
So, for example, you could create emails that are geared towards people who have expressed an interest in your hotel but have not made a booking. You can create separate emails for people who have made a booking, but have not yet visited. A third category can be tailored towards people who have visited in the past.
5. Focus On the Quality of Your Email Content
Your marketing department will have specific goals connected to your hotel email marketing campaigns, but your efforts must be based on the needs of the reader. What would make your emails worth reading? How can you make your emails stand out from the dozens of other promotional emails people receive daily?
The best answer is to focus on high-quality content. While it is fine to include promotional content or even an overt hotel advertisement, you should also add information useful to readers, or content that can help them in some way. You also need to ensure your emails are engaging, have a friendly tone, and include a great call to action.
6. Make Sure All Emails Are Mobile-Optimized
More than 60% of all internet traffic now originates from mobile devices, and a large number of people will regularly check emails on their smartphones. For this reason, it is absolutely essential to optimize your mobile emails.
This means ensuring all text is easy to read on smaller mobile devices and all links are easy to understand and follow using a touchscreen. You should choose fonts carefully, and images need to be appropriately sized. Another key element of mobile optimization is ensuring emails load quickly, as recipients often close emails that take too long to load.
7. Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing
Your hotel email marketing strategy is just one part of your wider hotel marketing efforts, and it can be beneficial to integrate marketing strategies. In particular, email marketing and social media marketing often go hand-in-hand, and you can combine the two with minimal effort, to deliver potentially great results.
For instance, your marketing emails should include links to your social media accounts, and you can also link directly to social media content. Similarly, you can use your social media accounts to promote your mailing list and highlight some potential benefits associated with subscribing, such as discounts and special offers.
What Content To Create? | 101 HOTEL Marketing Ideas For Social Media + Email | Five Star Content
8. Monitor and Measure Campaign Performance
Finally, you need to understand which hotel email marketing campaigns are successful and which are not, so you need to track and measure performance. In particular, it is necessary to monitor email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates and the number of unsubscribing users.
Of course, tracking performance is only part of the story. You need to continually track your key metrics and look for trends. If campaigns are underperforming, you need to make adjustments and then monitor your key performance metrics to see if the changes made a difference. This allows you to improve email marketing constantly.
6 Hotel Email Marketing Ideas to Generate More Bookings
Ultimately, email marketing for hotels is intended to increase the number of bookings you attract. In the following sections, you can read some helpful ideas that can assist you in achieving this objective.
4 Proven Email Marketing Templates
1. Welcome New Subscribers With a Series of Introductory Emails
One of the biggest email marketing-related hotel trends is the use of an introductory series of emails, sent out when someone first signs up for a newsletter or checks a box requesting further communications. These introductory emails help you introduce your brand and set the tone for future emails.
Most people who opt into receiving communications will be staying with you, so these emails can provide a great chance to highlight your hotel’s facilities, share tips for enjoying the area around your hotel, and promote options for upgrades or extras. Ensure the information is useful and engaging, so readers open the next email.
2. Run Promotional Campaigns and Send Out Exclusive Offers
Ideally, you want to ensure hotel email marketing recipients are getting something tangible out of their subscription. A mutually beneficial way to achieve this is to send out exclusive special offers or discounts. This can improve demand for hotel rooms, while giving readers a clear incentive to stay subscribed and read your emails.
You can take this to the next level by directly targeting sales prospects with specific offers that match their needs. Alternatively, you can run a more generalized promotional campaign, where you offer extra services with a booking, or allow customers to extend their stay at a discount and send this information via email.
3. Send a Follow-Up Email After Guests Check Out of Your Hotel
Once guests check out of your hotel, you can follow up with them via email and gain useful information. First of all, thank them for choosing your hotel. Then try to gain some feedback from them. For instance, you might ask them to leave a review on your preferred platform, or send them a customer feedback survey.
This has many potential benefits for your hotel, such as assisting you with reputation management and providing valuable feedback that can inform future business decisions. If you deliver excellent service and receive positive reviews, these can then influence other people to book with your hotel, too.
4. Entice Past Guests Back With Customer Loyalty Email Marketing
A secondary form of follow-up hotel email marketing involves targeting past customers with customer loyalty emails. The basic intention is to try to entice some of these people to stay at your hotel again.
In many cases, the best way to do this is to offer an incentive. You could ask them to sign up for a customer loyalty program, or offer an exclusive discount. Some hotels target customers in the build-up to the anniversary of their last stay, as this can evoke happy memories and encourage the customer to return.
5. Utilize Hotel Email Marketing During the Pre-Arrival Phase
Some hotels make the mistake of assuming they no longer need to target people who have booked with hotel email marketing. Yet, this is a crucial demographic to target. Make sure you send pre-arrival emails, which not only explain check-in processes or provide useful information, but also try to generate more revenue.
Many of these confirmed customers may be willing to upgrade to a better room, or add meals to their booking. They may also be interested in your leisure facilities, your corporate offerings, faster Wi-Fi, or learning about your hotel restaurant. Use this pre-arrival phase to maximize earnings from your ancillary revenue streams.
6. Invite People to Attend Conferences or Other Events At Your Hotel
Suppose you decide to host events at your hotel, such as conferences, exhibitions, trade shows or festivals. In that case, using your hotel email marketing campaigns and contact lists to boost attendance can be a good idea. This allows you to maximize revenue earned from the event, but it can also have other important benefits.
For example, if you have email contacts who have relevant business interests, inviting them to a trade show event at your hotel is a great way to allow them to see the hotel for themselves. This may encourage them to book a room with your hotel in the future, host an event there, or recommend your hotel to friends.
The Pros and Cons of Email Marketing for Hotels
Any hotel marketing company will tell you that email marketing campaigns have both pros and cons. Below, you can get a snapshot of some of the most significant advantages and disadvantages of this marketing approach.
Advantages of Email Marketing for Hotels
- Generate bookings: A percentage of recipients will likely make or upgrade an existing booking.
- Cost-effective: Hotel email marketing is extremely cheap and often delivers some of the best ROI for marketers.
- Connect with guests: Email marketing for hotels provides an opportunity to engage directly with customers.
- Feedback from customers: Email marketing allows you to request reviews and opinions from past guests.
Disadvantages of Hotel Email Marketing
- Can overwhelm people: Some customers receive a huge number of marketing emails and may not open yours.
- Privacy and data concerns: While personalization is highly effective and generally desirable, a percentage of recipients may be concerned about the amount of data you hold about them.
- Takes time to build: Hotel email marketing sign-ups take time and effort to generate.
- Requires audience attention: Emails need to be actively read and cannot be engaged with while doing other things, unlike other marketing content, such as video content or hotel marketing podcasts.
The Most Effective Hotel Marketing Strategies
Hotel email marketing is just one of the strategies used by hotels to generate revenue and increase awareness of services. Any good hotel owner or marketing manager knows it needs to be combined with other marketing strategies, like social media marketing, search engine optimization and getting your hotel listed on OTAs.
In the “15 Essential Hotel Marketing Strategies” article, you can learn about the most important and effective marketing strategies for businesses operating in the hotel industry to use.
Accessing High-Quality Hotel Marketing Courses
You need foundational knowledge to get the most from your hotel email marketing campaigns and other strategies. An excellent way to develop your understanding of marketing techniques and strategies is to take a hotel marketing course, focusing on approaches that are tried and tested in the hotel industry.
In the “Hotel Marketing Courses: What Will You Learn? + List of Educators” article, you can access a list of hotel marketing course providers and gain an overview of why these courses are valuable and what they teach you.
Hotel Email Marketing FAQs
Hotel email marketing can be a cost-effective means of reaching out to existing and future customers and generating more revenue. Using some of the strategies highlighted, you can encourage more bookings and upgrades, and gain valuable feedback from guests who have stayed at your hotel.
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Revfine.com is a knowledge platform for the hospitality & travel industry. Professionals use our insights, strategies and actionable tips to get inspired, optimise revenue, innovate processes and improve customer experience. You can find all hotel & hospitality tips in the categories Revenue Management, Marketing & Distribution, Hotel Operations, Staffing & Career, Technology and Software.
This article is written by:
Hi, I am Martijn Barten, founder of Revfine.com. I am specialized in optimizing revenue by combining revenue management with marketing strategies. I have over 15 years of experience developing, implementing, and managing revenue management and marketing strategies and processes for individual properties and multi-properties.
