The Ultimate Email Marketing Guide for Hotels & Hospitality (2024)
By Jordan Hollander
Last updated November 28, 2023
11 min read
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach customers, according to research by Hubspot and a recent report from the New York Times. Their research shows that email campaigns generate $38 for every $1 spent: an ROI of 3,800% that makes email easily one of the best performing marketing tools at your disposal. In the competitive hotel industry, email is critical for building 1:1 relationships with guests that lead to repeat bookings and guest loyalty.
Hotel email marketing requires an analytical and creative mindset combined with great software tools. You'll need to be well versed in metrics like open rates, subscriber churn, click-through rates, deliverability, subject line A/B testing and more. Email marketing strategy also requires savvy digital marketing skills and social media like creativity (e.g. an eye for design and catchy headlines).
Email open rates and conversion rates depend on both the analytical side (i.e. are you segmenting a quality list?) and also the creative content (e.g. are you able to craft special offers that are attractive for that segment?). Great email marketers don't forget that hotel guests are not just numbers, they're people. The customer journey in today's hospitality industry is incredibly complex and email remains one of the best ways to reach prospects whether they're business travelers looking for high-quality meeting space or honeymooners ready for that special getaway.
There are many general email campaign tools on the market, with MailChimp being one of the more popular options. While these tools offer standard email marketing capabilities that can improve your hotel’s marketing ROI, a industry-focused hotel CRM and email marketing platform that is specialized for the hospitality industry delivers better results, guest insight, and increased revenue. Here’s why.
The Landscape of Email Marketing for Hotels
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to build relationships with your guests and is a key hotel marketing channel.
First and foremost, it’s one of the few channels that hotels own; by growing and maintaining your email list – and using this customer touchpoint thoughtfully – hotels reap the benefits of reputation management, more direct bookings, increased customer loyalty, and lower marketing costs. When email campaigns are backed by thoughtful, data-driven strategy, hotel owners can capture higher ROI by redirecting spend from platforms like Google and Facebook.
Great email marketing requires four ingredients:
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Segmentation: using detailed attributes beyond gender or age, such as loyalty, lifetime spend, frequency of stay, or recency of stay.
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Relevant messaging: send content that is relevant as measured by an increase in conversions or a decrease in unsubscribes.
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Timely automation: when the guest receives the email is everything. Data analysis from Revinate shows that 98% of all upsell revenue came from pre-arrival emails; create relevant campaigns and automatically send them at key moments in the guest journey (before check-in, for example).
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Benchmarking and guest insight: use a tool that can evaluate your campaigns’ performance based on geography, segment, and email type to constantly iterate and improve.
Setting up your email campaigns takes the right tools – specifically, the right customer relationship management software that blends marketing automation with other integrations and in-person, text, and online customer touchpoints. Hotels seeking a quick and straightforward marketing tool might consider MailChimp to achieve their marketing goals – yet they would be missing out on the better capabilities of an email marketing tool built to handle the needs of the hospitality industry.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Hotels
Email marketing has become a game-changer in the digital age, revolutionizing the way hotels communicate with their guests and drive business growth. With its ability to deliver targeted and personalized messages, email marketing has emerged as a powerful tool for hotels to achieve a range of benefits. In this section, we will explore the numerous advantages that email marketing brings to the hospitality industry, from increasing direct bookings to building customer loyalty and engagement. By understanding and harnessing these benefits, hotels can unlock the full potential of their marketing efforts and create a competitive edge in the market.
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Increased Direct Bookings: Email marketing enables hotels to communicate directly with potential guests, showcasing exclusive offers, discounts, and packages. By providing a seamless booking experience through personalized emails, hotels can significantly boost their direct bookings and reduce reliance on third-party booking platforms.
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Building Customer Loyalty and Engagement: Engaging guests beyond their stay is crucial for building long-term relationships. Email marketing allows hotels to stay connected with guests, share relevant content, and nurture loyalty. By delivering personalized offers, post-stay surveys, and updates on upcoming events, hotels can foster a sense of community and keep guests coming back.
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Targeted and Personalized Communication: One-size-fits-all approaches no longer suffice in the highly competitive hospitality industry. With email marketing, hotels can segment their subscribers based on preferences, demographics, and past behavior. This enables the delivery of tailored content and offers, ensuring that each email resonates with the recipient, thereby enhancing engagement and conversion rates.
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Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy: Compared to traditional advertising methods, email marketing provides an excellent return on investment. With minimal costs involved, hotels can reach a large audience and achieve measurable results. Additionally, email campaigns can be automated, saving time and effort while maintaining a consistent and impactful communication strategy.
Highly Effective Hotel Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing has become an indispensable tool for hotels seeking to boost bookings, engage guests, and drive revenue growth. However, with the increasing competition and evolving consumer expectations, it is crucial for hotels to implement highly effective email marketing strategies that cut through the noise and deliver outstanding results. In this section, we will explore a range of hotel-specific email marketing strategies that have proven to be highly effective in the hospitality industry. From segmentation and personalization to compelling subject lines and clear calls to action, these strategies will empower hotels to optimize their email campaigns and achieve remarkable success in reaching, engaging, and converting their target audience.
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Segmenting and Personalizing Emails: Utilize the power of segmentation to divide your email list into different groups based on demographics, past guest behavior, or preferences. Personalize your emails to deliver tailored content and offers that resonate with each segment, increasing engagement and conversions.
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Compelling Subject Lines: Craft attention-grabbing subject lines that entice recipients to open your emails. Use persuasive language, urgency, and relevancy to pique the curiosity of your hotel guests and improve your email open rates.
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Clear Call to Action (CTA): Include a clear and prominent call to action in your hotel email marketing campaigns. Encourage recipients to take a specific action, such as booking a room, signing up for a loyalty program, or exploring special offers. Make the CTA easy to find and click, leading to higher click-through rates and conversions.
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Pre-Arrival and Post-Stay Emails: Implement a comprehensive email strategy that includes both pre-arrival and post-stay emails. Pre-arrival emails can provide helpful information, local event suggestions, or room upgrade options, enhancing the anticipation and guest experience. Post-stay emails can express gratitude, encourage guest feedback, or offer incentives for future bookings, fostering guest loyalty and driving repeat business.
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A/B Testing and Metrics Analysis: Continuously optimize your hotel email marketing campaigns through A/B testing. Experiment with different subject lines, email content, and design elements to identify the most effective strategies. Analyze metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to gauge campaign performance and make data-driven improvements.
By implementing these highly effective hotel email marketing strategies, you can leverage the power of email to engage your target audience, drive bookings, and cultivate long-lasting relationships with your hotel guests.
Selecting the Best Hotel Email Marketing Tools
Selecting the best email marketing tools is critical for hotels because, without the right tools, it becomes nearly impossible to execute even the best hotel email marketing strategies effectively.
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Efficient Execution: Hotel email marketing involves managing various aspects, such as social media integration, open rates, subject lines, call to action, check-in, conversion rates, pre-arrival emails, click-through rates, post-stay communication, and more. The right email marketing tools provide templates, automation, and streamlined processes that enable hotels to execute their strategies efficiently and effectively.
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Personalization and Targeting: Effective hotel email marketing requires segmenting the audience, tailoring messages, and delivering personalized experiences. Quality email marketing tools offer advanced segmentation capabilities based on demographics, past guest behavior, and preferences. They also provide templates and customization options for creating highly targeted and relevant email campaigns, catering to the specific needs of different guest segments.
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Performance Tracking: Metrics and analytics play a crucial role in measuring the success of hotel email marketing campaigns. The right tools provide comprehensive reporting on metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more. These insights help hoteliers assess the effectiveness of their strategies, make data-driven decisions, and refine their email marketing efforts to improve results.
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Automation and Workflow Management: Email marketing tools with automation features streamline repetitive tasks, such as sending confirmation emails, upselling room upgrades, or delivering post-stay emails. Automation helps hotels save time, maintain consistency, and ensure timely communication throughout the customer journey. It also allows hoteliers to focus on creating high-quality guest experiences rather than getting caught up in manual email processes.
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Deliverability and Compliance: Reliable email marketing tools ensure high deliverability rates, minimizing the risk of emails being flagged as spam or not reaching the intended recipients. They also assist with compliance, such as adhering to GDPR regulations and providing clear options for subscribers to unsubscribe. Compliance with data protection regulations is vital to maintain trust with guests and protect the hotel's reputation.
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Best Practices for Email Marketing in the Hotel Industry
In an era where digital communication dominates, email marketing has emerged as a vital tool for hotels to connect with their guests, nurture relationships, and drive bookings. However, simply sending out mass emails is no longer enough. To truly maximize the potential of email marketing, hotels need to implement best practices specifically tailored to the unique needs of the hospitality industry. In this section, we will explore the essential best practices that hotels should follow to optimize their email marketing efforts. From building an email subscriber list to crafting compelling subject lines and leveraging automation, these practices will help hotels create impactful campaigns, engage their target audience, and achieve remarkable results.
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Building an Email Subscriber List:
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Opt-in forms on the hotel website: Strategically place opt-in forms on the website to capture visitor emails.
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Guest registration and check-out process: Offer guests the option to subscribe during the booking or check-out process.
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Social media integration: Leverage social media platforms to promote email subscriptions and attract a wider audience.
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Segmentation and Targeting:
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Segmenting subscribers based on preferences and behavior: Categorize subscribers into meaningful segments to deliver personalized content and offers.
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Tailoring content to different segments: Create relevant and engaging content that addresses the unique needs and preferences of each segment.
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Compelling Subject Lines and Email Content:
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Crafting attention-grabbing subject lines: Use concise, compelling subject lines that entice recipients to open the email.
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Providing valuable and engaging content: Deliver informative and engaging content that adds value to the recipient's experience, such as local attractions, upcoming events, or exclusive offers.
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Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Design:
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Optimizing emails for mobile devices: Ensure that emails are mobile-friendly and display properly on various devices and screen sizes.
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Testing and ensuring responsiveness across devices: Thoroughly test email designs across different platforms and devices to ensure a consistent and pleasant user experience.
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Automation and Personalization:
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Implementing automated email workflows: Set up automated emails triggered by specific guest actions or milestones, such as booking confirmation, pre-arrival instructions, or post-stay thank-you messages.
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Personalizing emails based on guest data: Utilize guest data to personalize emails, addressing recipients by name and tailoring offers based on their preferences and past behavior.
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A/B Testing and Analytics:
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Testing different email elements
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Hotel Email Marketing Examples
While understanding the best practices and strategies of hotel email marketing is essential, seeing real-world examples can provide valuable inspiration and insights. In this section, we will showcase a selection of hotel email marketing examples that demonstrate effective strategies and tactics employed by hotels in their email campaigns. These examples highlight creative approaches, personalization techniques, compelling subject lines, and successful call-to-action implementation. By examining these real-life examples, hotels can gain a deeper understanding of how to leverage email marketing effectively to engage guests, boost bookings, and achieve their marketing objectives.
Hotel Email Marketing Examples:
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Example 1: "Personalized Offer for Your Next Stay" This email campaign from a luxury hotel showcases the power of personalization. By addressing the recipient by name and tailoring the offer based on their previous booking history, the hotel creates a sense of exclusivity and personalized attention. The email includes stunning visuals of the property, highlights the hotel's amenities, and provides a limited-time offer with a clear call to action. The combination of personalization, compelling imagery, and a well-crafted offer leads to increased engagement and conversion rates.
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Example 2: "Countdown to Your Dream Vacation" This email campaign from a resort captures the excitement and anticipation of an upcoming trip. The email utilizes a countdown feature that dynamically updates the number of days left until the guest's check-in date. It includes enticing imagery of the resort's amenities, promotes local events and attractions during the guest's stay, and offers the option to customize their experience with add-ons and upgrades. This engaging and visually appealing email creates a sense of anticipation, encourages further exploration of the resort's offerings, and increases the likelihood of additional bookings.
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Example 3: "Share Your Travel Story and Win" This email campaign from a boutique hotel leverages user-generated content and guest engagement. The email encourages guests to share their travel stories and experiences at the hotel through social media. By featuring selected guest stories in future newsletters or social media posts, the hotel fosters a sense of community and encourages guests to become brand advocates. The campaign incentivizes participation by offering a chance to win a complimentary stay or special offers. This approach not only increases guest engagement but also amplifies the hotel's reach and attracts potential new customers.
By exploring these hotel email marketing examples, hotels can gain inspiration for their own campaigns, adapt successful tactics to their unique offerings, and deliver impactful and engaging emails that resonate with their target audience.
Why Your Hotel Should Act Right Now
It is critical for hotels to leverage email marketing and implement top-rated tools and techniques right now due to several reasons. First and foremost, social media alone cannot provide the same level of direct and personalized communication that hotel email marketing can achieve. By utilizing email marketing, hotels can directly reach their subscribers with tailored content, offers, and updates.
The subject line plays a crucial role in grabbing the attention of recipients and enticing them to open the email. A compelling subject line can significantly impact open rates and increase the chances of engagement with the email content.
Call to action (CTA) buttons within the emails prompt subscribers to take desired actions, such as booking a room, exploring special offers, or signing up for a loyalty program. Well-designed and strategically placed CTAs can drive click-through rates and boost conversions.
Automation is another key aspect of hotel email marketing. Automated emails, such as check-in or confirmation emails, enhance the guest experience by providing timely and relevant information. Pre-arrival emails can offer personalized recommendations for local events and attractions, enhancing guest satisfaction even before check-in. Post-stay emails can be used to collect feedback and encourage future bookings.
Using templates and email marketing software, hoteliers can streamline their email campaigns, saving time and ensuring a consistent and high-quality approach. Templates also make it easier to personalize emails based on guest preferences, past stays, or demographics, leading to more effective communication and higher conversion rates.
Email marketing serves as a valuable marketing channel for hotels to promote special offers, upselling opportunities, and loyalty program benefits. By targeting both past guests and potential new customers, hotels can nurture relationships, increase brand loyalty, and attract new bookings.
Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates provide valuable insights into the success of hotel email marketing campaigns. These metrics allow hoteliers to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, optimize their email content and subject lines, and make data-driven decisions to boost bookings.
Integrations between email marketing tools and the hotel's property management system (PMS) enable seamless synchronization of guest data, preferences, and booking information. This integration helps in personalizing emails and delivering relevant offers to enhance the guest experience and drive conversions.
Hotel email marketing encompasses various types of emails, including welcome emails, promotional emails, post-stay emails, and newsletters. Each type serves a specific purpose in the customer journey, ensuring timely and relevant communication with email subscribers.
To ensure compliance with regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), hotels need to have proper opt-in processes and provide easy options for subscribers to unsubscribe from their email lists. Respecting privacy and adhering to data protection regulations are crucial for maintaining trust and positive guest relationships.
A/B testing can be employed to experiment with different elements of email campaigns, such as subject lines, CTAs, or email content, to determine the most effective approaches for improving open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
In addition to the email itself, the landing page where recipients are directed plays a vital role in converting them into customers. A well-designed and optimized landing page can provide a seamless transition from the email to the booking process, maximizing the chances of completing a reservation.
Deliverability is an essential factor in hotel email marketing. Hotels should ensure that their emails reach the intended recipients' inboxes and avoid being marked as spam. Maintaining a high-quality email list, following best practices, and utilizing reputable email marketing providers can improve deliverability rates.
Personalized emails tailored to the target audience and their preferences contribute to a positive guest experience and help build the hotel's brand. By optimizing email content, subject lines, and visuals, hotels can create engaging and relevant communications that resonate with recipients.
By implementing effective hotel email marketing strategies and utilizing top-rated tools and techniques, hotels can enhance their digital marketing efforts, boost bookings, and