Effective email marketing for hotels, especially during the festive season, extends beyond mere sales promotion; it’s about forging a meaningful connection with your clients. Here’s a collection of strategies to elevate your email marketing campaigns, along with a concise guide to essential email marketing techniques tailored for hotels.

Going Beyond “Happy New Year”

While it’s customary for hotels and resorts to spread festive cheer during the holiday season with generic “Happy New Year” emails, this time presents a more profound opportunity for connection. The holiday season isn’t just about exchanging holiday greetings; it’s a golden opportunity to express heartfelt gratitude to past guests and cultivate anticipation for the vibrant summer season that lies ahead.
While a heartfelt “Happy New Year” message is a good gesture, seizing this opportunity to deepen your connection with guests can set your resort apart. Acknowledge their past visits and demonstrate their worth by sharing your enthusiasm for the upcoming summer season. Consider granting them preferential access to summer reservations and providing special perks as a token of appreciation. This approach not only strengthens the bond with your guests but also whets their appetite for revisiting your resort, transforming a customary greeting into a powerful engagement tool.

Audience Segmentation and Personalization: Reminders of Sunny Days

Personalization goes beyond addressing a guest by name. It involves creating offers and promotions that are tailored to their interests and past behaviors, making them feel truly valued and understood. Personalized campaigns have 5x the click-through rates, and 6x higher booking rates vs. other email campaigns.
Even during the off-season, personalization remains crucial. Use your guest data to recapture cherished memories of their past stays and excite them about future stays. Classify your email list into categories. Remember that your Loyalty members are an important segment to consider. Furthermore, you can segment families, couples, solo travelers, and first-time visitors or target them according to age or income and location/language.

Curate tailored offers that resonate with each group, such as family-centric holiday packages for families and intimate, romantic dining experiences for couples.
Send personalized emails reflecting on guests’ previous stays, mentioning specific activities or experiences they enjoyed. Bear in mind that your loyalty members are the ones with the greatest likelihood to book at your property.
Offer them early bird booking discounts or special packages for the upcoming season, making them feel valued and eager to return.

Finally, if you are managing a hotel chain then you could recommend destinations and properties in a location where your guests have not yet stayed.

Keeping the Summer Dream Alive in the Winter

For hoteliers, the holiday season presents a golden opportunity to deepen connections with guests through creative email marketing. As festive cheer permeates the air, it’s essential for hotels to design campaigns that reflect the season’s warmth and excitement. For summer properties, the holiday season falls during the off-season when the resorts are closed. However, this time can be used strategically to keep your resort top-of-mind and build anticipation for the upcoming season.

A compelling strategy is to craft captivating emails that evoke memories of past summers and pique curiosity for what’s on the horizon. Immerse guests in the warmth and vibrancy of past summer experiences using captivating images and evocative stories. Simultaneously, subtly hint at exciting enhancements and new attractions planned for the upcoming season, leaving guests eager to return and discover the resort’s refreshed offerings.

Interactive Elements: Engaging Future Holiday Planning

Enliven your off-season email campaigns with interactive elements that captivate guests and fuel their anticipation for the upcoming summer season.

Engagement is key in email marketing, and interactive elements can transform your emails from simple messages to engaging experiences. They can help in capturing the attention of your audience and encourage them to interact more with your content.
Implement features like clickable holiday-themed quizzes, virtual tours of your resort decorated for the season, or countdowns to special holiday events. These elements should be both fun and informative, encouraging guests to explore more about your resort.

Storytelling: Keeping the Summer Spirit Warm

Craft captivating tales that capture the essence of your resort’s unique charm and experiences, keeping the warmth of summer alive amidst the winter’s chill.

Compose a series of emails that narrate heartwarming stories from the previous summer, showcasing memorable guest experiences, extraordinary events, or even the exceptional contributions of your dedicated staff.

This storytelling approach not only maintains a strong connection with your guests but also cultivates a palpable anticipation for the upcoming summer season, ensuring that their memories of your resort remain vivid and enduring.

You can use Automation features of email platforms to streamline your storytelling efforts. Plan your email series in advance, set the desired dates and times for delivery, and let the platform handle the task of sending these captivating stories directly to your guests’ inbox.

Mobile Optimization: A Non-Negotiable Necessity

Ensure your email designs are responsive and mobile-friendly, maintaining a strong connection with your guests even during the off-season. In the era of smartphones, optimizing your emails for mobile devices is not just an option; it’s a necessity. Most of your guests are likely to first interact with your emails on a mobile device, making mobile optimization crucial for effective communication. Use responsive email design templates. Test your emails across different devices to ensure they are displayed correctly, with readable text and accessible call-to-action buttons.

Sustainability: Highlighting Year-Round Commitment

Sustainability is a year-round commitment. Use the off-season to communicate your eco-friendly initiatives and plans for the upcoming summer.
Share updates about sustainable practices being implemented or enhanced at your resort. This could include new eco-friendly accommodations, conservation efforts, or green initiatives that guests can look forward to.

Timing and Testing: Strategic Off-Season Engagement

The off-season is an ideal time to experiment with different types of email content and strategies to see what resonates most with your audience.

Data-driven decision-making is essential in today’s marketing landscape. By analyzing data from your email campaigns, you can gain insights into what resonates with your audience and continuously improve your strategies.

Track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Experiment with different subject lines, send times, and content formats to find the most effective combination.

BASIC TECHNIQUES TO ELEVATE YOUR EMAIL MARKETING

In the digital age, where inboxes are constantly flooded with an array of messages, standing out through effective email marketing is both an art and a science. The right techniques can not only capture the attention of your audience but also drive significant engagement and conversions, particularly in the hospitality industry.

Engaging Subject Lines

Your email’s subject line is the most important part of your email campaign. Before your subscribers can read your email, they first have to open it. If the subject line is boring and unappealing then most probably 10% – 20% of the sent emails will not be opened. An engaging subject line can make the difference between an opened email and one that’s overlooked. Craft subject lines that are intriguing and relevant. Use A/B testing to determine which types of subject lines (e.g., humorous, direct, offer-based) perform best with your audience.

Incorporating Animated elements

The inclusion of Gifs can significantly enhance the appeal of your emails. These elements can provide a more dynamic and engaging experience for your audience, showcasing your resort in a vibrant and enticing way. Ensure these videos are optimized for quick loading and are viewable across different devices. Not all email clients support animated GIFs, so it’s essential to check your database to ensure your subscribers have a seamless experience. For instance, if the majority of your subscribers utilize Gmail, Yahoo, or other GIF-compatible clients, you can safely incorporate them into your emails. However, if your audience extends beyond these popular platforms, a static fallback image is essential for those using non-supporting clients.

Content

Design your emails using a responsive template to ensure readability and mobile-friendliness. Most email service providers offer native, responsive layouts that automatically adjust to different screen sizes. Pay particular attention to font size, especially for customers aged 45 and older. A font that’s too small can discourage this demographic from engaging with your email.

Keep the email content concise with short paragraphs and headlines, spaced appropriately. Avoid large blocks of text, as they tend to be unattractive and can lead to recipients skipping over your email.

Use Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons and hyperlinked text judiciously. It’s important not to overwhelm your audience with requests for action in every part of the email. Focus on your main objectives and place the primary CTA in a prominent position, ideally ‘above the fold’ where it’s immediately visible without scrolling. The CTA buttons should align with your brand’s color scheme but also stand out within the email. Choose a color that is distinct from other elements in the email and offers a strong contrast to enhance visibility.

Single image email campaigns for Season Greetings

While single image emails can be visually impactful and simpler to create, they fall short in many crucial aspects of effective email marketing. Single image emails often face issues like being flagged by spam filters, image blocking by email clients, and longer load times due to large file sizes. They also lack the capabilities for detailed analytics and user engagement tracking, present accessibility challenges for visually impaired users, and offer limited personalization options. On the other hand, HTML emails boast superior deliverability, enhanced tracking and analytics, greater personalization potential, better accessibility, and interactive elements like buttons and links.

Despite requiring more time and HTML expertise to create, HTML emails are generally much more effective for email marketing due to their flexibility and wider compatibility with various email clients.

Landing page

It’s crucial to link your emails to a well-designed landing page that supports your key message. This approach is essential, especially when sending offers. Users should immediately see the offer upon entering the landing page. A common mistake many hoteliers make is directing users to their website’s homepage, expecting them to search for offers or make a booking. This strategy is often ineffective, as it doesn’t directly guide the user to the relevant offer or information. A targeted landing page should be focused, eliminating distractions, and leading the user seamlessly to the desired action, whether it’s booking a stay, learning more about a special package, or taking advantage of a promotion.
Research shows that targeted landing pages significantly improve conversion rates in email marketing campaigns. They create highly relevant and focused experiences for different audience segments, directly addressing the specific content or offers mentioned in the emails.

In summary, when crafting email marketing campaigns, especially for sending offers, ensure that the linked landing page is well-designed, focused on the offer, and provides a clear and direct path for the user to take the desired action. This approach is more likely to result in successful conversions and a better user experience.

The holiday season presents a unique opportunity to engage with your guests in a meaningful way. By implementing these strategies, you can create email campaigns that not only capture the essence of the season but also effectively engage and convert your audience. Remember, the goal is not just to increase bookings during the holidays but also to build a lasting relationship with your guests that extends beyond the festive season.
Craft an effective festive email marketing campaign that resonates with your audience and drives results. Connect with our team of experts today to unleash the power of email marketing and transform your holiday season into a season of success.