Hotel Email Marketing – Skyrocket Customer Retention

Luxury hotel email marketing informs and educates leads, connects with long-term customers, presents up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, humanizes your brand through newsletters, and converts customers. Improving your website, updating lead magnets, and crafting engaging, personalized emails will catapult your email marketing campaign to success. If required, consider hiring an email marketing agency for optimal management.

This guide will help hotels create an email marketing strategy with prerequisites, tool suggestions, and examples.

Prerequisites to Develop a Luxury Hotel Email Marketing Strategy

A fruitful email marketing campaign relies on the following foundations.

First Step: Define Your Niche and Audience

Your hotel must have a strong understanding of your audience, which can only come from a well-defined niche.

Travel has many niches, with hotels to match. For example, luxury hotels are standard in the world’s most premium travel destinations. Other hotel niches are ecotourism, wellness, and adventure.

Continuing to use luxury hotels as an example, you’ll have a specific audience segment who’s interested in and can afford luxury travel.

Second Step: Set Objectives

Your hotel will always use email marketing in some form or function, but campaigns are finite. What goals do you hope to accomplish with your latest campaign? Create a rough timeline.

Third Step: Create a Strategy to Achieve Your Goals

Having a timeline for goal completion will enable your hotel to build a strategy. Divide longer-term goals into smaller, shorter-term objectives.

For instance, if you want to increase customer retention by 80 percent for the year, start with a 20 percent increase for the next quarter.

Your strategy must incorporate email tone, types, and frequency.

Build Your Luxury Hotel Email Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps

Your luxury hotel email marketing strategy has begun to take shape. Build upon it with these tactics.

1. Improve Your Website

Your website plays a substantial role in the success of your email marketing campaign. Your site must be an attractive landing place when online users click your ads.

The site must also have opt-in forms and lead magnets to incentivize email list signups. 

2. Create an Offer for New Leads

Your offers must be high-value to your audience, which is why audience research is integral. Understanding their pain points allows you to position relevant offers they’ll want to take advantage of by subscribing to your emails.

3. Position Your Lead Magnets Strategically

A niche audience shouldn’t see the same lead magnet from one segment to another. Create several lead magnets to appeal to various audience groups. Start an email list for each group to ensure personalized communications.

4. Gain Leads and Populate Your Email Lists

Once the parts are in motion, start reviewing your leads. More should enter the funnel than before you began your hotel email marketing campaign. However, be patient, as this can take upwards of a month to happen, sometimes longer.

5. Start Your Luxury Hotel Email Marketing Campaign

With your email lists populated, you can begin sending out drip campaigns, newsletters, promotional messages, deals and sales alerts to your audience. You should have a receptive contact list that opens and clicks through your email content.

Marketing Automation for Luxury Hotel Email Campaigns

Has your hotel found itself short on time to run email marketing campaigns to the fullest? Marketing automation tools like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact allow you to automate parts or the entirety of your campaign.

Here are some ways to use email automation to drive your hotel goals.

Collect Leads and Provide Free Value

Generating leads within an email automation tool will free up your hotel staff to create cunning offers where you provide value for free. For instance, you might offer a discount or coupon.

Outstanding offers will garner more enthusiasm from your leads, as they’ll find it too tempting to pass up.

Send a Welcome Email Immediately

Time zones and schedule differences mean leads can subscribe to your emails anytime. Email automation will initialize a welcome email whether your leads sign up at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday or 3 p.m. on a Saturday.

Set Up a Logical Path for User Behavior

However, email automation does require your initial involvement to work its best. You can create workflows for the software to use, crafting a path that follows “if this, then that” logic.

This logic makes it easy to create simple and even complex workflows to accommodate any lead situation.

5 Luxury Hotel Email Marketing Examples

Do you need some inspiration to kickstart your luxury hotel email marketing campaign? Here are five examples that showcase sterling email tone, formatting, imagery, and branding.

Example 1: Welcome Email

A welcome email should be warm, thoughtful, and inviting. The Four Seasons welcomed this guest with a message from its President of Worldwide Hotel Operations to inspire goodwill.  The mention of an exclusive offer should also incentivize readers to keep their eyes peeled on their inboxes.

This message is simple but effective, as it carries a stately yet embracing tone.

Example 2: Seasonal Email

Image courtesy of Cendyn

Holidays are a prime time to travel, so capitalizing on the occasion by sending an email could motivate customers to book. Sweeten the deal by offering an exclusive discount code, as seen above.

Send the email announcing your deal in advance to win your customers’ business before they spend their budget on holiday shopping. Save some of your biggest discounts for this period.

Example 3: Follow-Up Email

Follow-up email requests should be simple. In the example above, the reader only has to click the button to confirm their VIP status.

That will incentivize the lead to engage with the message, as they don’t have to manually respond to the hotel. These small features make a difference when a customer considers who to book with next time. [1] [2] [3] 

Example 4. Thank-You Email

Image courtesy of SmartGuests.com

You can send thank-you emails as part of your hotel email marketing when a customer books or checks out after their stay (like the example above shows) or annually for being a great customer.

Thank-you emails keep your hotel top of mind. If you send a survey request as seen above, motivate users to take the time to fill it out by offering a discount code.

Example 5. Loyalty Email

Image courtesy of Dribbble

Long-term customers should be treated like VIPs to ensure their loyalty and retention. This email from The Manor invites VIPs to stay and “live like royalty.”  That’s a great use of branding and language to encourage customers to consider a stay.

The CTA button stands out and makes it easy for a VIP to take advantage of their membership perks.

Bonus Tips: 5 Best Practices for a Successful Luxury Hotel Email Marketing Campaign

These best practices will benefit your email marketing for luxury hotels.

1. Don’t Spam Offers

After an initial email announcing an offer, you can send a follow-up several days later reminding your audience about the offer. However, spamming it every day or several times per day will cause your audience to unsubscribe.

2. Respect Specific Times to Send Emails

According to Adobe, Tuesdays are a premier time for travel companies to send emails. Thursdays are another popular day but tend to produce the lowest open rates.

The best time for sending emails is 8 a.m. (With an open rate of 20.32 percent and a click-through rate of 7.79 percent), 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m., and then 5 p.m. for higher click-through rates.

3. Give Advice and Tips for Free

Free tips, recommendations, and advice indicate to your audience you offer high-value content. This could encourage leads to subscribe to your emails and even pay for content such as webinars or eBooks.

4. Track Email CTR and CVR

The success of an email campaign cannot be measured solely by how many people open the message. You must also track the click-through rate to determine who is engaging with your email content.

The conversion rate or CVR indicates how many of your leads convert into customers through email marketing.

5. Establish a Long-Term Content Strategy

Email is one part of your overall hotel marketing strategy. You must also regularly produce high-value content that you share in your emails and across social media. Create a content strategy with an editorial calendar so you don’t run out of content ideas.

Hire a Luxury Hotel Email Marketing Web Agency

Email marketing for hotels can grow your customer base and improve retention, but you must have a strong knowledge of what types of messages to send and when. A luxury hotel email marketing web agency like Mediaboom will work beside you to help you achieve your email goals. Improve your open and click-through rates with us.