Email Marketing Tips For The Hospitality Industry

Did you know that email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of 3,800 percent? This really isn’t surprising, since 99% of consumers check their email every day!

These statistics make it clear that email marketing is still one of the most popular ways of reaching your target audience – and keeping them engaged with your brand.

Within the hospitality industry, marketing emails can help you achieve three important goals; increase the number of direct bookings, build customer loyalty and boost engagement.

To do so, you need to plan your campaigns well. For example, automate all your emails (welcome mails, weekly newsletters, special offers), incorporate personalisation, optimise for mobile, etc.

Here are our best tips on how to make the most out of this cost effective strategy to up your conversion rates.

5 Email Marketing Tips For The Hospitality Industry 

1. Permission Based Campaigns

Imagine yourself starting a conversation with the subscriber when you send an email; in short, try to engage your subscribers with meaningful content.  

This means two things:

• First, never send a marketing email to someone who has not given you explicit permission. To lend extra legitimacy to your email, you can also include double opt ins
• Second, space out your offers. For example, avoid sending five or six emails in a day as this could be seen as spam

The idea is to grow your list of subscribers organically through branded login portals, optimised landing pages or even a short form with welcome cards that your guests can fill in.

Think about it this way: when you run permission based campaigns, you’re only targeting people who are actually interested in your offer (since they have subscribed to your marketing emails). 

This also helps you drive up your open and click through rates – thereby increasing engagement and sales.

2. Keep Mobiles In Mind 

As per recent statistics, 47% of people use mobiles to check their email on average. This clearly shows that optimising your emails for mobile is no longer optional – it’s a necessity.

There are multiple ways you can do so. For example, it’s a good idea to avoid large size images – or too many images – as they might take longer to load on mobiles with iffy WiFi connections. 

Similarly, use a responsive template as these are designed to automatically fit any screen on which the email is being opened.

Other ideas include making your subject line short and precise since phones do not display all the characters when held vertically, and adding call-to-action buttons instead of links.

3. Email Automation 

As a hospitality business, part of your lead nurturing process will be to send a lot of emails to your subscribers such as newsletters, special offers, pre and post-stay emails etc. 

But doing this manually can be tedious. The solution? Email automation.

This is the best way to drive conversions and keep your subscribers engaged at scale – without taking up too much time. In other words, email automation allows businesses to create personalised experiences based on how consumers interact with the brand. 

In practical terms, you can automate your welcome emails, weekly newsletters or set up trigger based emails for when a user takes a specific action on site. 

Remember, businesses that use automation to nurture their leads or keep existing customers engaged observe 45% more purchases. 

4. Personalised Content 

Since 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from businesses that cater to their preferences, it’s crucial that you focus on personalising your emails to increase reservations, revenue and customer loyalty.

Effective personalisation can be as simple as sending a welcome email to the guest or as complex as adding a picture of the room that your guest last stayed in. 

To start with, you can add the following touches to your emails:

• Mention the recipient’s first name
• Use geolocation to make relatable content
• Use stories to elicit emotions (e.g.: taking a break from work and stress for a holiday)

5. Analytics & Reporting 

Marketers primarily rely on two metrics for email campaigns; open and click-through rates. 

While it is important to track which headlines are getting the highest open rates and which CTA are bringing in maximum clicks, email analytics go deeper than these two factors. 

For example, in-depth tracking can yield specific insights about your customers’ preferences and behaviour that you can use to set up certain KPIs.

You can add more layers to email analytics through the following metrics:

• Conversion rate
• Unique clicks and unique open rates
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
• Unsubscribe rate 
• Bounce rate
• Opens by device
• Spam score, etc.

And that’s it – these are the top five tips that businesses in the hospitality industry should use in their email marketing campaigns to increase their conversions and ROI.

With Stampede, it doesn’t matter if you’re a non-digital business. We help you successfully target your customers across multiple touch points through our cloud-based WiFi solution. 

Regardless of whether you’re a small café, a five star restaurant, casino, hotel, amusement park or tour operator, we can have your branded WiFi portal up and running so you can start capturing valuable customer contact and information.

The best part is that we are fully GDPR compliant so you don’t have to worry about managing personally identifiable data or incurring fines.

Want to learn more about Stampede and our services? Contact us today!