The finest digital marketing tool for promoting hotels, fostering future customers, up-selling and cross-selling rooms, and maintaining contact with past visitors long after their stay is email.
We’ll teach you how to harness the power of email to boost hotel growth and income in our guide on hotel email marketing.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is an electronic form of direct communication between businesses and their customers. This type of marketing uses email as a way to communicate information about products or services offered by the company.
You can use email marketing to send messages to your customers with offers, promotions, and updates.
The most common types of emails used today include transactional emails (which inform users of order confirmations, shipping details, refunds, etc.), relationship emails (which promote special events, new product announcements, sales, etc.), and promotional emails (which encourage people to take action).
Benefits of Email Marketing
One of email marketing’s most evident benefits is that it is less expensive than other types of marketing. It is one of the few channels that customers specifically request. The vast majority of businesses that use the platform solely communicate with subscribers. Due to the fact that a business is only focusing on customers who are already interested in their brand, conversion rates can be significantly greater as a result.
Using email marketing, you can profit from people’s buying impulses.
There aren’t many other marketing channels that let people buy something after seeing an offer for two clicks of a button. Email newsletters can increase sales more than any other channel by including an enticing call to action and a link directly to the checkout.
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Step 1: Know Your Goals
Setting goals is the first step in every successful marketing campaign, and email marketing is no exception. Consider your goals before launching an email marketing campaign to ensure success.
A typical email marketing campaign has the following objectives:
- Greeting new subscribers and informing them of your company’s mission and core values so that a relationship may be established.
- Increasing interaction with your content and your company, whether you’re attempting to sell something for the first time or are advertising a webinar.
- Maintaining current customers by giving them something they’ll value.
- Reacquainting inactive subscribers with your brand.
- Dividing up your subscriber base into groups so you can send more specialized email marketing messages.
In accordance with your conversion goals, you can also create your own email marketing objectives.
Step 2: Understand Email Types
It’s crucial to comprehend the many email formats available to you. Here are the three main email types, though people organize them in various ways.
- Promotional Emails – emails that promote themselves and talk about deals and sales.
- Relational Emails – provides your subscribers with the content you promised, such as a weekly newsletter, a free gift, useful information, etc.
- Transactional Emails – relates to an action a subscriber has done on your website and are prompted by that action. For example, confirmations of subscriptions, welcome messages, confirmations of purchases or orders, changes to subscriber information are acknowledged, etc.
Step 3: Know Your Audience
You’ll probably be familiar with your audience if you’ve been using email marketing for some time. To focus your content if you’re just starting out, you’ll need to make some educated assumptions. Don’t panic; you’ll begin gathering subscriber information as soon as you send your first campaign, giving you actual data to work with the following time.
Gather information from your social media profiles and Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
You may get a general idea of who your consumers are and what interests them from both sources, which both contain information on demographics, location, and interests in addition to a wide range of other indicators. That’s an excellent place to start when developing effective email marketing campaigns.
Step 4: Personalize by segmenting subscribers
The majority of marketing professionals would gladly pay to guarantee that their advertising dollars were solely directed to customers who were interested in their brand. However, email marketers can take it a step further by limiting the recipients of their communications to those who satisfy specific requirements.
Brands that learn more about their subscribers benefit greatly from email list segmentation. According to studies, marketers who employ this strategy frequently brag about higher engagement rates as a result.
Sending the same email to every subscriber or customer is no longer a successful strategy and businesses that see the best results from their email marketing segment their data and campaigns to make sure they are communicating with each subscriber or customer with the most pertinent message possible.
Step 5: Create an email campaign
Email Marketing Copy
Writing your email marketing copy is the next step. You should start your essay with a hook that will entice readers to continue reading.
Keep email marketing copy concise and avoid pushing your offer too soon for optimum results. First, you want individuals to feel at ease.
Start by identifying your subscribers by name. Emails with personalization are more effective. Additionally, Buffer advises tailoring your emails to specific user expectations by providing messages that adhere to their needs. They become more focused as a result, increasing their chances of success. According to some research, segmenting and educating your audience will increase email clickthrough rates by up to 50%.
Consider the following additional details for your email copy:
A narrative of your own. Being human never does a business any harm and frequently promotes emotional connections. This strategy is used in some of the most effective emails we’ve come across.
Anything of value for your audience. The resource you’re promoting could be a piece of content, some useful information, or both. Explain how this will benefit them. The possible benefit is highlighted in the first line of the email in the SEMrush example that follows.
A survey, poll, animated gif, or video are all effective ways to keep readers interested.
Naturally, you don’t need to include every one of those in every email. Your emails should ideally be brief and contain just a few key points.
Email Marketing Design
Make your email scannable if you desire to continue.
The call to action appears as the final sentence of your email marketing text (CTA). The action that you want individuals to take after reading your email is reflected in your CTA.
Typically, CTAs are repeated throughout your email marketing message. There will probably be a CTA towards the beginning, in the middle, and near the end, even if you don’t want to pitch readers too soon.
Short and direct calls to action work best. If your material is strong, subscribers should have no reason not to click your link.
Most effective emails contain more text than graphics. There is no doubting that photos enhance the appeal of your email, but be aware that many recipients deactivate images. That implies that even if recipients cannot see them, your email must still function.
Step 6: Send the right email at the right time
Take a moment to consider the ideal time to send your email before pressing the “send” button. Depending on the sector you work in, different times will be best, however, MailChimp has some wonderful information.
If you’re emailing companies, you can get greater results if you send it on the weekday morning. Check out the rise in email opens on Wednesday and Thursday:
If you’re marketing to customers, you might get a stronger response in the late afternoon or evening when they are checking their email after leaving work.
Whatever the data suggests, experiment with various times to determine which generates the most opens and clicks for your business.
Step 7. Track your campaigns
A crucial part of how to operate email marketing is tracking, monitoring, and analyzing your campaign performance. Utilizing an email management solution makes it simple to monitor your progress.
The majority of email automation services will give you details like:
- Open rate
- Links clicked
- Unsubscribe rate
- Bounce rate
- Subscriber interactions
- Email deliverability
- And more
This data is all valuable, and you can use it to understand your users and campaign performance. Besides your email management tool, you can also use Google Analytics.
This tool, which is free and a must-have for any business, will allow you to see the traffic driven to your website via email and that traffic’s behavior on your site. With this data, you can provide answers to any questions about your email campaigns’ performance.