Your guests might be stocking up on sweets for trick-or-treaters, but it’s time for you to think slightly further ahead and start strategising your resort’s Christmas email campaigns.
Email continues to be one of the most effective ways to reach your audience, but competition for their attention is getting fiercer every year, especially during the festive season. Start planning now to give yourself a head start when December rolls around in just 6 weeks.
Embrace the Christmas Spirit
Personalise your messages.
Your guests aren’t all the same, so don’t treat them the same – use email list segmentation to customise your campaigns and create a truly personalised experience. Not only will this help your audience feel like you understand their needs and preferences, it will also enhance their affinity with your brand, and make them more likely to become loyal, repeat guests.
Send discount offers with welcome emails.
Received new email list sign-ups? Give your new contacts a little gift with your first email to them. Welcome email campaigns that feature coupons or discounts are 2.5x more likely to convert than those without.
Send discounts to previous guests.
Your guests want to hear from you about your resort’s exclusive offers and other ways they can save money, particularly during the holiday season.
You don’t have to cut into your profit margins to offer your guests great deals – even emails offering small discounts of 10 or 15% have been shown to generate higher click-through rates than other promotional messages.
Engage your guests with useful, seasonal content.
Keep your brand in the forefront of your audience’s mind during the busiest time of year by serving up valuable relevant content, targeted to their needs. It only takes a little thought and creativity to incorporate Christmas related themes into your email content, and your guests will appreciate your effort.
Check Your Email Contact List, Twice
Your email messaging efforts will only pay off if your content is actually hitting inboxes, so how do you give your emails the best chance possible of getting in front of your guests?
Use Opt-In Contact Collection Methods
Paying for an email list can be tempting, especially as the pressure to get results gears up in the countdown to Christmas. Although buying a list can give you access to a huge database of email addresses, these contacts are typically of unreliable quality. For the best results for your seasonal campaigns, stick to names and email addresses you have collected only through permission-based, opt in methods.
Make sure contact list is up to date and valid.
A sudden surge in the volume of emails you’re sending out during the seasonal period can make your Internet Service Provider more likely to view you as a spammer, which may affect your ability to reach your guests’ inboxes. Take steps to combat this by confirming that the addresses on your list are up to date and valid before you launch a major Christmas campaign.
Eliminate hard bounces.
Although you should be mindful of your sender reputation throughout the year, a good ‘quick fix’ for the Christmas countdown is to remove any hard bounces. Eliminating these hard bounces before you start your seasonal campaigns will prevent them from having any negative impact on your sender reputation.
Don’t forget to check your data
Monitoring your marketing efforts is essential if you want to grow and improve – and it’s particularly crucial if you want to launch bigger and better holiday campaigns each year.
Tracking key metrics such as unique open rates and click-through rates, revenue per email and conversion rates will help give you important insights into what’s working, and what needs to be changed or improved for the following year.
How does your resort tweak your email campaign for the Christmas season? Let us know in the comments section below!
RELATED PAGES AND BLOG POSTS:
- How To Write Emails Your Guests Will Open
- Four Ways to Customise Your Facebook Campaign For Christmas
- How To Clean Up Your Contact List For Better Email Marketing Results
