Even in the rise of social networking sites, email remains a critical channel to embrace for B2B marketing success for any hotel, apartment or resort. However, it’s a channel that’s poorly treated due to our excitement at the extreme ROI potential of social media. Hotel marketers may need to get back to basics and implement smart, tested strategies in order to increase engagement, grow a targeted list and accomplish business objectives.
To ensure email marketing deliverability success and optimise this critical marketing tool, a hotel operator must remember a few things.
Compelling welcome messages win.
Don’t neglect your welcome message as it sets the tone for what readers can expect from the email, plus if placed at the beginning it ensures deliverability. Make sure your call to action is compelling enough for your reader to change their behavior. See to it that the message is relevant to them as it is critical to maintaining subscribers and growing your email marketing ROI..
You may want to put an attention grabbing subject line to make your readers OPEN your email. Include important information, articles or tips that you want your readers to know about with accompanying photos..
Time is of the essence.
As a rule of thumb you want to establish a frequency of sending your email or e-newsletters no less than once a month. Send out your newsletter too infrequently and people will forget about you. But, if you bombard your audience with irrelevant emails, twice a day, then they’re very likely to quickly unsubscribe.
Gauge your audience first, try sending it monthly then bi-weekly or weekly. Send them information that is interesting to them, relevant to their wants or needs, and is well written – the chances are they will read it and look forward to repeat emails.
Cleanliness is next to effectiveness.
Continual upkeep on a mailing list is vital in order to maintain quality and clear off bad addresses. These bad addresses hinder email deliverability and falls into three types: unknown users, inactive addresses and spam traps.
Eliminate these addresses from your current list and start quarantining new data so guests can provide updated information easily.
Learn to authenticate.
Authentication means is that you need your guests to confirm that their email addresses are valid. After signing up for your newsletters, send an email with a link to make sure they are the real users. The benefits of authentication are separating you as a legitimate business as opposed to someone involved in spamming or phishing scams.
Organise your infrastructure.
Work with your external marketing companies or website developers to help you make sure that there will be no glitches in your email blasts. This can be a real hard work but the pay-off is well worth it.
