Whatever you may have heard, email is still an integral component of any businesses online marketing arsenal. Regularly emailing your guests great offers, exclusive packages and enticing local info is one of the best ways to keep your audience engaged and your property at the front of their minds between holidays. But with so many other brands and businesses fighting for attention in your guests’ inboxes, getting your guests to actually open and read your email content is not always easy.
A deep understanding of your guests’ wants, problems and habits is central to creating a powerful email marketing campaign that achieves high open rates and gets results. Before sending out any new email marketing campaign a key question to ask is: if I received this email, would I open it?
1. First Impressions Count
There are two things that your guests see before deciding whether to open an email: the subject line, and who’s sending it. The subject line should be considered your prime piece of real estate when it comes to persuading your audience to click open your email instead of simply moving on to the next one.
Crafting Effective Subject Lines
Your subject line is your one shot at making a great first impression in the email world. Use these best practices as a guide before launching your next email campaign:
- Don’t: Include too many generic ‘spam trigger’ words and phrases, such as reminder, one time, visit our website, act now!
- Do: Localise your content with a city name to boost open rates
- Don’t: Reuse the same subject lines over and over. Studies show using identical subject lines in each newsletter has a negative impact on open rates
- Do: Keep it concise: Unless you’re sending content to an ultra targeted audience, limiting your email subject line to less than 50 characters is best.
2. Timing Matters
As far as timing your email campaigns go, you’ll normally need to do a bit of experimentation before striking the right balance. As always, a little common sense goes a long way too: if you send your emails in the early hours of the morning they may get buried among all the other content that drops into your guests’ inboxes late at night or early in the morning.
However, depending on your audience demographic, it’s likely that people will have time to check their messages during their lunch break or after work, so try experimenting with sending your content around these key times of day. To really crack the question of when’s best to post, run A/B tests on different time frames to check open rates.
3. Break Free of Spam Filters
Designed to clean up your audience’s inboxes, spam filters analyse a wide array of criteria to filter out unwanted, spammy content. If your content’s ‘spam score’ is above a certain rating it will end up dumped, unseen in the dreaded Spam inbox. But dodging this fate is easy if you know what to avoid:
- Spammy, cliche phrases such as “satisfaction guaranteed” “Once in a lifetime opportunity!” and “limited time only”
- Overuse of !!!
- Overuse of capital letters
- Poor HTML
4. Lose the Dead Weight
Delve into your email reporting to find out which of your subscribers are consistently not opening your emails. One of the simplest and most effective ways to boost your open rate is to pull people from your contact list who never choose to engage with your content. Should you forget these people entirely? No. Do some research and identify where the subscriber originally came from so you can start to work on a highly targeted re-engagement campaign.
What does your resort do to keep your email open rates consistently high? Let us know in the comments below!
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- 7 Easy Ways To Boost Your Email List
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- 5 Simple Steps for Powerful Email Marketing
