Personalising Email Marketing for the Hospitality Industry: Best Practices for Success
If you’re struggling to find cost-effective ways to communicate with your customers then understanding the best practices for email marketing becomes essential. Efficient email campaigns are more than just personalising the name, but look at your customer journey as a whole. Leverage automation, analyse data and create a hospitable omnichannel experience for your guests. In this article, we dive into the best practices for your email campaigns.
Introduction
If you’re struggling to fill hotel rooms or find loyal customers, especially after recovering from the pandemic, then email marketing might be a solid solution for your business. As a proven method for reaching potential guests, retaining existing ones and increasing revenue, it becomes an essential marketing tool when used correctly.
But how do you create an effective marketing campaign when your audience is already bombarded with plenty of emails? And how do you resonate with your audience and drive conversions? That’s what we’re answering in this article by going through the best practices of email marketing.
Tashi Hati is a growth marketing agency based in Asia specialising in integrated multichannel marketing strategies tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities of the hospitality and real estate, insurance and retail industry. Our data-driven approach allowed us to experiment with different campaigns and analyse the best practices. Whether you’re a startup or an established hotel property, our expertise and experience will help guide you every step of the way.
Personalisation: More than just the name.
Personalisation involves tailoring your email content to the specific interests and preferences of your audience, rather than a generic email. This is crucial for successful email marketing campaigns and involves a lot more than only personalising just the name.
In the hospitality industry, personalisation can take many forms. For example, this could be based on your customer’s past booking history, their preferred travel destinations or interests and hobbies that you have collected when servicing them. These emails help create a more engaging experience with the customer even when they are not eating at your restaurant or staying at your property.
Personalisation has many benefits such as increased open rates, click-through rates and conversions. By sending targeted messages that your audience is actually interested in, you can build a stronger relationship with them thus increasing loyalty and revenue. Besides this, it can also lead to higher satisfaction rates.
At Tashi Hati, we take a data-driven approach to personalisation. We use advanced analytics tools to segment your audience based on criteria such as demographics, behaviours and interests. This will allow us to create a personalised email campaign that speaks to each segment in a more unique way. For example, if your restaurant is offering a special Mother’s Day menu, we will only send it out to visitors that have children.
Segmentation: Because one size does not fit all.
When you divide your email list into different groups based on shared characteristics or behaviours, it is known as segmentation. For example, mothers, short-term travellers or business travellers. Sending out a one-size fits all message will likely lead to people unsubscribing therefore it is key to resonate as much as possible with the right audience.
Generally, we can segment your customer based on the type of traveller (for example business or leisure), their age or gender, geographic location or past booking behaviour.
Automation: Let the technology do the tedious work.
Technology and marketing have come a long way and this should be leveraged especially as the volume of travellers will start to pick up in the next few years. Automation helps with this. It is the process of setting up an email campaign that is triggered by a specific action. This saves a ton of manual work and can include welcome emails and review requests.
A few great options for affordable email automation software include Brevo and Mailerlite in general and Constant Contact for event marketing.
Engagement: Short and sweet.
Engagement is the level of interaction that a person has with your email campaigns. This could include if they opened it, clicked on it, or replied. We find it the most important metric to see how well your campaign has been doing as it showcases your ability to build a relationship with your audience online. This engagement could be in the form of making a booking, leaving a review or referring friends or family.
It is best to keep the engagement short and sweet, for example, the customer only has to leave a star rating and a quick comment on the email to boost your chances of success. There could also be an incentive attached to it, especially when you’re enticing your audience to post user-generated content such as photos on social media to build on social proof.
Conversion: Improve, improve, improve.
At Tashi Hati, we look at each part of the email and determine where it needs to be improved. For example, if the open rate is low then perhaps a stronger subject line needs to be created. This is the conversion of the email, referring to the desired action that you want your audience to take after receiving your email campaign.
Improving the engagement automatically helps to increase the conversion rates, so that there are more people taking the action you ultimately want them to take. The sequence could be open-rate, click-through-rate, and completing a review.
Data Analysis: What gets measured, gets done.
At Tashi Hati, we’re all about data-driven approaches and this is no different from email marketing. It helps us measure the effectiveness of the campaigns and make well-informed decisions to improve results rather than making it a guessing game. By analysing the data, we can identify trends, understand customer behaviours and optimise our campaigns for maximum impact.
As an example for hotels, we analyse data from past bookings to identify popular room types or amenities and use this to create targeted emails that highlight these. This allows us then to track revenue trends over time and identify growth opportunities or areas of improvement. Softwares such as Mailchimp, Mailerlite and Constant Contact will have dashboard overviews making this process easier.
Customer Journey: More than just one touchpoint.
Mapping out the customer journey to identify the touch points a customer has with your brand is crucial for any industry and the hospitality industry is no different. While it may be slightly more complex, it usually starts with gaining awareness through reviews and social media, then your website to learn more and finally booking channels to complete the booking.
Customers at different stages of the buying journey may require to start your email campaign at a different part therefore a deep understanding of the sequence becomes crucial.
Brand Consistency: Consistency is key.
Brand consistency refers to the practice of maintaining a unified brand identity across all marketing channels, including emails. This is part of our Brand Alignment services are specially designed for this as it helps increase brand loyalty and trust. It ultimately helps improve your brand awareness and recognition as you’re using the same fonts, colours and messaging.
Making a template for your email marketing will allow your team to focus on what matters the most - the content. We highly recommend creating a template that anyone who needs to send emails has access to so that you can improve your brand recognition on autopilot.
Content Strategy: Content is the new king.
In email marketing, content as mentioned above, is king. It is not only about what the content is about but also how it is written. This makes all the difference in driving engagement, conversion and building customer loyalty. Having a solid content strategy, just like with blog posts, is the make-it-or-break-it for email marketing.
A content strategy starts with an outline of the type of content you will be creating, how often it will be sent (we don’t recommend more than once a week) and most importantly, how often you’ll measure its effectiveness. It involves understanding your target audience, mapping out their pain points and what type of content resonates with each segment the most.
For resorts, this could include a campaign showcasing the amenities, local attractions, and discounts. At Tashi Hati, we start with researching how your customer engages with your brand and where they spend their money. We determine what’s valuable to each segment and align those with your business goals. This strategy will help to not only drive engagement but also contribute to a positive customer experience.
Our integrated multichannel marketing strategies are designed to ensure that whatever email you sent out aligns with your overall brand messaging across all channels.
Omnichannel Experience: Seamless interactions, everywhere.
Today, customers expect and should be able to interact with your brand across multiple channels seamlessly. This is what is known as the omnichannel experience with touchpoints including emails, social media, website and on-property interactions.
Email marketing is a crucial, but still only one touchpoint in the whole customer journey of a hospitality experience. Customers want to research and book on websites, receive confirmation and personal details via email, receive updates on social media and enjoy a personalised stay. This makes the start of your guest's hospitality experience not the check-in moment, but the moment they see, interact and book the room.
In email marketing, the omnichannel experience should be taken into consideration and the journey should be, as mentioned, thoroughly mapped out. We must remember, the best practice for email marketing is to look at both the detail and how it fits into the whole customer experience.
The Wrap Up
The hospitality industry has been an incredibly competitive market in Asia, especially now as we start to recover from travel restrictions. Who gets the biggest piece of the pie depends on not only who delivers the best service, but also the most memorable one. Email marketing is one tool that hospitality providers such as restaurants and hotels can use to with their integrated multichannel marketing strategy to drive brand awareness and increase revenue.
To achieve maximum effectiveness, it’s important to focus on personalisation, segmentation, automation, engagement, conversion, data analysis, customer journey, brand consistency, content strategy, and the omnichannel experience.
We understand how difficult it is to create an email campaign that won’t just result in a high unsubscribe rate, land in a spam folder or with low conversion rates. We specialise in creating high-impact campaigns by constant experimentation using design thinking, lean startup and agile methodologies and measure the results using the OKR framework. For more information about our services, feel free to schedule a call or immediately get started with our service.