With most people receiving around 81 emails a day, the average inbox is a pretty crowded place.
Sending out highly targeted, carefully crafted messages that offer real value to your guests is essential if you want to compete against this clutter and hold on to email subscribers. So if you’re guilty of any of these 3 unsubscribe-driving poor practices, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
1) You Haven’t Segmented Your Contact Database
It’s simple: email content that is highly relevant to recipients increases open rates, click-throughs, and bookings. Email content that is of little to no relevance does nothing but increase unsubscribe rates.
If you want to send guests back to your resort’s website to make a booking, you have to send emails designed to target the right people, at the right time.
This is where list segmentation comes in.
Best practices:
- Segment your contact list based on cold, hard facts you know about your audience. Analyse your audience’s history and create segments based on the site pages they’ve visited, the offers they’ve clicked on and which pieces of your content they’ve chosen to share. By creating smaller lists based on guests’ interests and behaviour, it will be easier to nurture and guide these leads through the booking cycle.
- Segment your database by focusing in on the different stages of the booking cycle. In most cases, someone who has recently signed up to your mailing list but never made a booking won’t be ready for the same kind of content you might send to a repeat guest, so adjust your strategy accordingly.
2) You’re Emailing Too Often…Or Not Enough
When it comes to email frequency, it’s all about striking the right balance. Bombarding your audience with emails at every opportunity won’t win you any fans, but leave it too long between messages and you risk getting completely forgotten in the torrent of content that lands in your guests’ inboxes everyday.
Making contact with your audience on a regular basis is a positive thing – as long as each piece of content you send is of real value to the people you’re sending it to.
Best practices:
- Keep a close eye on your resort’s email analytics. Examine the data for any patterns in open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and unsubscribes. This will help you identify if engagement rates start to drop off after a certain level of frequency.
- Send your guests a newsletter every week, two weeks or month to establish a regular correspondence that they will come to expect and even look forward to.
- Change the frequency of your emails based on how far along a guest is in the booking cycle. Fresh leads who have never booked with you before need a higher volume of emails to ensure you stay at the forefront of their minds, while repeat guests are more likely to respond favourably to less frequent, more personal emails.
3) You Haven’t Optimized for Mobile
Now that Smartphones are like an extra limb for most of us, it’s not surprising that email consumption via mobile devices has soared. Are you accommodating your guests’ transition to mobile? In 2014, you simply cannot afford not to.
Best Pracitices:
- Implement a responsive design to provide the best possible display for a variety of screen sizes and devices.
- Make all buttons included within your messages large and clickable – it should be easy for your guests to take the next step, no matter how big their thumbs. In general, keeping buttons spaced out from each other by at least 40 pixels will help reduce clicking mishaps.
- Mobile devices reveal a shorter snippet of the email subject line than appears on desktop. Try to keep this important text under 30 characters to avoid cut offs mid sentence.
Although you can’t expect every one of your emails to resonate powerfully with each person you send them to, focusing on your guests’ needs will help curb your unsubscribe rates so you see your audience grow and not shrink.
If you are seeing high levels of unsubscribes, it’s time to identify why people are losing interest in your messages, then work to craft new strategies to keep your current audience engaged and subscribed.
Do you have anything to add? Let us know in the comments below!
RELATED PAGES AND BLOG POSTS:
- How To Write Emails Your Guests Will Open
- 6 Things To Check Before You Send That Email
- How To Retain More Guests Through Post-Booking Email Engagement
