Build your direct business.
Getting more direct business is one of the top priorities for all hoteliers, and email is one of the key marketing tools that can help you achieve this goal. Most properties now have an email marketing programme in place, and this is vital as email represents the best opportunity to have a direct relationship with your customers.
Social media can be effective, but remember it’s a place where competitors and OTA’s can also reach your customers. Email enables you to communicate directly with your guests in a space that you control.
The key to a successful email programme is in relevance, and in the hotel industry where your customer base can vary from regular customers to sporadic visitors, engaging customers and talking to them at the right time is a common challenge. This is why email media is so important for the hotel industry.
Email media provides a new opportunity to turn a vital customer touchpoint – all those emails sent out by hotel employees - into a marketing opportunity, right at the time when your customers are engaging with you. What is email media?
Leaving aside, for the moment, the newsletters that you send, there are literally thousands of other emails sent out by your reservations department, front office staff, sales managers, meetings and events teams, revenue management, restaurant, spa, golf pros…. .
Email media works with your existing email and enables you to add targeted, centrally-controlled email signatures and marketing messages to each of these ordinary emails. This gives you a brand new way to reach your customers, and drive more traffic to your website. These links are also trackable, will help you grow your database, and most importantly will help you convert more business
Let’s explore three ways that hotels can benefit from email media:
RocketSeed Example
Drive More Traffic to your own website
With email media, every email your employees send contains inbound links to your website. Click through rates on email media campaigns in the hotel industry are generally around 9%. So if you have 50 employees sending 1000 emails per month, you could expect to get around 4,500 additional website visits every month.
Support Conversion and Upselling
Email media is effective because it enables hotels to market their services right at the time. When the customer is enquiring about room availability, email media gives you the chance to include an appealing visual, helping your property to stand out, and - critically the chance to highlight upselling options eg suites or dining packages increase meetings and events bookings
Meetings and events is the most high-touch in terms of interaction between your sales people and the customer, and this means that there is a significant opportunity to leverage the email correspondence and improve conversion. Email media can enable you to showcase your events facilities, and create impact right from the moment you respond to an initial RFP. And with email media, you can also get notified in real-time about what your client has viewed.
So for example if I have just emailed an event proposal to a customer, and they click on the media to view set-up options, I know that they are a hot prospect and can focus on converting them, rather than enquirers who may just be looking for price comparisons.
What’s are the key differences with email media
• Just like email marketing, you get tracking and analytics on your campaigns
• You can have multiple messages applied to different emails
Eg load a weekend offer, an Easter promotion and a wedding banner – a different one is applied each time you send an email
• You can segment the messaging so different departments have the right message for them eg add Dinner package for reception emails, add an Events campaign to your banquet team• Links are tracked, so you can let real-time alerts to support sales conversion
• You can help grow your main database organically