Hotels and other businesses can benefit immensely from the effective use of email marketing campaigns because it’s fast, direct, cost-effective, and builds one-to-one relationships with your guests and customers.
Quality email marketing campaigns can also provide your brand with an excellent ROI– you can see an average return of $38 for every $1 spent running the campaign.
Harness the power of email marketing to exponentially increase your sales and profits and one of the most effective marketing communications and promotions vehicles in today’s internet marketplace.
Permission vs. Spamming
Permission-based email is a necessity in modern marketing. Customers today receive an average of 117 consumer emails per day, which means that inboxes can easily get overwhelmed when inundated with emails from brands they did not opt into. Failing to use an opt-in system to collect email addresses can result in your emails getting ignored, annoying the recipient, or even getting filtered by inbox spam filters and having negative marks against the company. Using an opt-in system helps to ensure that the customer has expressed at least some interest in receiving your emails and has in some way established a relationship with you by indicating an interest in your product or an offer, such as website opt-in.
Spamming is sending unsolicited commercial emails using broadcast methods to multiple recipients without first establishing a relationship with them (permission) and without regard to their categorical interests (untargeted). This can damage your reputation and hamper your ability to effectively send even legitimate emails.
6 Tips For Building a Permission-Based Email Database
- License an email platform that meets your needs and can scale as you grow.
- Use your email system’s capability to stop sending emails to hard bounce replies or soft bounce more than 4 times.
- Provide an option on your website to “opt-in” and reply if they would like to receive monthly specials, upcoming events, or newsletters about the hotel.
- At booking, transaction, or check-in, ask guests for an email address and keep importing email addresses into the database on a weekly basis so that you can contact them with their permission.
- Offer gated items on your website that will encourage people to exchange their email address for the content.
- Provide customers with a means to ‘opt-out’ of your email list and a subscriptions management page as well. While this might sound counter-intuitive, you do not want people uninterested in your brand on your list. They will damage your open and click-through rates, have a very low likelihood of making a purchase, and will likely either delete or move your emails into the spam folder.
Keeping people on the email list engaged by combining news, offers, and content.
As you build your email lists, you want the emails you send to effectively target the customer and encourage them to buy. Emails do an excellent job of keeping leads engaged with the brand, reminding them about the value you offer, and continuing to educate and show them how well your organization will help solve their pain point.
To create these types of emails effectively you should consider the following steps:
- Segment your email lists so you can group them based on important audience segments such as location, role in their organization (for B2B), or their place in the buyer’s journey.
- Have a plan for the emails you send out, delivering email based on the content most likely to appeal to the given segment.
- Remember to continue to engage customers even after a purchase. A hotel, for example, might send customers information about their locations, fun strategies for preserving memories after a trip, or ideas for returning to the exciting destination– and this particular hotel– as soon as possible.
- Carefully track your analytics so that you know how your different emails perform and which ones encourage the most clicks. Also, monitor how people respond after opening an email to see how well your messaging helps to encourage them to move along the buyer’s journey.
Email marketing strategies play an important role in attracting and nurturing the conversion of customers. Take advantage of the excellent ROI you can obtain by seeing how you can use email marketing to build your brand and keep your customers engaged and interested in your organization.
Learn more about email marketing as part of omnichannel marketing services.
Does your business need a winning digital marketing strategy using Milestone’s Idea Lab? Contact us at +1 408-200-2211 or mail us at [email protected]
