Campaigns Your Hotel Email Marketing Needs

Campaigns Your Hotel Email Marketing Needs

With the large bulk of bookings at your hotel coming from the world wide web, implementing a strategy around your hotel email marketing is critical.  Gone are the days of agents making inbound phone reservations. With phone reservations, it allows the agent to build a relationship using voice interaction and personality. Generating less phone reservations in 2020, automated and personalized communication is the key via email blasts. 

You do not want your reservation agents and marketing team to send low-quality, unsegmented emails. Your hotel needs a marketing email strategy that targets the right audience, at the right time in the form of a drip campaign. But what is a drip campaign you may ask? A drip campaign is a series of emails that are automated based on the activity of the guest on either the website, over the phone, or in person. 

Being able to track the footsteps of the traveler through your CRM during their entire life cycle will allow you to create drip email campaigns catered to their preferences, needs, and wants. If you are utilizing a Hotel CRM such as the one offered by Track Hospitality Software, your hotel marketing team will have access to an email marketing suite that is easy to use. With a CRM combined with your hotel email marketing, it allows you to keep segmented lists with no manual entry and ensures you can personalize your guest communications. With these features, you can create drip email campaigns revolving around booking confirmation, upsell, lost lead emails, pre-stay emails, booking anniversary and more. Keep reading to learn about the most effective campaigns in the hotel email marketing world. 

Website Subscriber

There are quite a few ways you can capture the traveler’s email through your hotel website. A traveler can enter the site and a conversion optimization pop up can appear, you can have a hello bar across the top offering additional content, you can set up an exit-intent form to appear when the traveler is deciding to leave your website, or you can have forms implemented on demonstration pages or gated PDF pages where the travelers enter the page with the intent to input their contact data. Your digital marketing team or a hospitality digital marketing agency such as TravelNet Solutions should take advantage of all these routes to grow your database for your hotel email marketing. 

It is proven, utilizing conversion optimization you can increase your subscribers from 4 to 8 times more than the average website. Once you have captured the visitor’s email, you can nurture them with campaigns that align with your company’s goals and objectives. 

Reservation Confirmation

As soon as the looker becomes a booker your hotel CRM has access to traveler information that can be used in email marketing. Think of this as an example, it is the cold, winter months in Minnesota during January and a family just booked their spring break for March in Florida. The first email can send the reservation confirmation email, the next email 14 days later can send a promotion for the all-inclusive pool pass promotion going on, then 14 days later you can send them a gentle reminder of the promotion they have available on their account. With this example, your hotel has personalized the email communication to base it on a pain point of the customer, the cold winter they live in, and enjoying their trip a little more with the promotion. 

Post Stay Survey Automation

Did you know it will cost your hotel less to retain a current guest than to market to a new one? What better way than an email drip campaign to follow up with the guest after they leave a five-star raving review. You already know this guest was happy with their stay, so now focus on keeping your brand top of mind by reminding them of the great stay they had. Did they mention in their survey that they absolutely loved the sauna in the pool area? Send them an email with brand awareness of additional amenities such as the spa, then the next email can be a coupon towards the spa, followed with a friendly reminder! This is allowing your brand to stay in front of the guest even after they have checked out.

Special Dates

Adding a personal touch to your guest’s experience might be the reason they choose to book again. Automated emails can be set up in a campaign to fire off an email on important dates such as their booking anniversary, wedding anniversary, or birthday. 

If you want to add a second layer to entice them to return to your property, add on a promotional code to the email. 

Cart Abandonment – The Story of the Lost Lead

Do you have cart abandonment on your website currently? Cart abandonment is when the traveler is close to booking, they put in the dates of their stay, pick the room they want, add it to their cart, go to checkout and then decide to hold off. The thoughts that might go through their head could range from the prices will go down, they might not be certain of the trip, or they might choose to look at other options. Regardless of why the traveler leaves an unbooked room in their cart, it is now your time to swoop in and stay top of their mind before they book elsewhere. With cart abandonment, you are able to capture that guest’s data and implement an email campaign and retarget them with the hopes they decide to secure the booking in the near future.

If you are looking to learn more about hotel email marketing, please email us at learnmore@tnsinc.com