Good marketing is all about creating an experience that makes your guests feel like your addressing their specific needs as individuals. When it comes to your email marketing campaign, the most effective way to do this is to personalise your message, and this involves more than simply including your recipients first name. Here are some tips to help you create more personalised emails that generate more opens, more click-throughs and less deletes.
Before You Email
1. Identify guest personas
Before you can begin to personalise your emails, you need to understand the characteristics of the different guest groups you’re targeting. It’s crucial to have a clear, well thought out vision of your ideal guests ‘personas’ and their specific needs because this will determine how you target your audience. You will probably find that you have several of these groups of ideal guests, and identifying them will help you to start segmenting your emails.
2. Ask the right questions
Now equipped with an understanding of your guest personas, you can use your landing page forms to ask questions that will help you collect the data you need to categorise your prospective guests into segments. What are the characteristics of each guest group? What information do you need to make your marketing strategy more effective to each group?
3. Collect data from other sources
As well as the information you collect from your landing page forms, it’s also important to gather extra data from other sources such as your CRM and social media. This can include prospects’ Twitter or LinkedIn username, as well as information about the emails you’ve sent them in the past and the kind of content they’ve downloaded on your website.
You can use this information to segment your contact list more effectively. For example, if you are launching a Twitter only promotion, you can choose to email only the contacts with a Twitter account to alert them about it.
4. Segmentation
Once you’ve collected all this information, it’s time to put it to good use! Categorise your contact database into smaller segments so you can create personalised emails that resonate better with your distinct guest groups.
In Your Email
5. Tailor your content
Of course, the content within the email itself is just as crucial as the actual segmentation process. It goes without saying, for example, that the kind of messages and offers you might want to send to business travellers and conference attendees are very different to the type of message you might want to send leisure travellers or families. Each time you email a certain segment, tailor your content to speak directly to the goals and needs of that particular group of guests and watch your conversion rates soar.
6. Use a reply-to email address
The whole purpose of your email marketing campaign is to engage with your guests and get them to respond to an offer, so why would you use a generic and anonymous sounding noreply@resort.com as your email address? Instead, use a real person’s name such as johnsmith@resort.com to make your messages appear more personal and increase your open rates.
7. Include the sender name
Following on from that point, you need to make sure that you include a sender name within the email. This makes the email sound as if it was written by a real person for a real person and helps the recipient put a ‘face’ to your brand, even if they have never met or spoken to anyone from your resort.
After Your Email
8. Keep track of opens and clicks
Keeping track of open and click rates is not just a good way of determining the success of your email campaign, it’s also a useful way to build an understanding of the type of content each recipient is most interested in, which allows you to personalise your content even more.
9. Consider when someone last received an email
Avoid over-emailing your contacts by keeping a record of when you last emailed each recipient. Create suppression lists to prevent recipients you’ve emailed recently receiving too many messages in a short space of time.
These simple techniques will help improve the open and click-through rates of your resort’s email marketing campaign. Do you have any more suggestions for improving email personalisation?
Other Related Posts
- How to Identify Your Guests' Needs and Take Email Sugmentation to the Next Level
- Why List Segmentation is Crucial To Your Resorts Email Marketing Campaign
- How To Personalise your Email Marketing Campaign
- Here you can learn how to use Newsletter Campaigns in the iLaunch Content Management System.
- Learn How To Track your Email Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics
- Six Steps For Successful Email Subject Lines
