5 Tactics You Should Be Using To Grow Your Email Marketing List And Generate More Direct Bookings

E-mail marketing is a fond favourite amongst digital marketers – in fact, while email marketing may not grab the headlines as much as say social media or new technologies like augmented reality, industry research indicates that consistently, email marketing is the hardest working of all the digital marketing channels. As a hotelier, that means this channel has the potential to deliver a strong ROI and make a serious and sustained contribution to growing RevPar and increasing direct booking revenue.

Email marketing gives hospitality industry marketing professionals a way to target interested parties and measure their responses. However, this shouldn’t be taken for granted. Hubspot estimates that your e-mail marketing reach decays by around 22% a year as email addresses change and interest wanes, leading to dead ends and unopened messages- so growing your e-mail list should be foremost amongst the priorities of any savvy e-mail marketer.

However there are few enduring ‘quick-fix’ solutions and it’s important to have strategies in place to deal with this data loss. Here are five tactics you should be using in your email marketing strategy to grow your lists and combat the natural rate of attrition.

1. Create an Online Contest

Crafting an online contest for your hotel which requires e-mail sign-ups is a tried and tested way of cultivating new e-mail leads to target with some clever e-mail marketing further down the line. This contest could take the form of a draw to win a reduced or complimentary booking, or perhaps offer a free meal, excursion, room upgrade or some other enticement to sign up. Whatever you choose, the offer should be sufficiently valuable to ensure your potential guests are willing to hand over their e-mail address – without putting a dent in your profits.

2. Add a Sign-up Link to your E-mail Marketing Employee Signatures

Linking to a simple landing page asking for customer e-mails means you’ll never be accused of sending unwanted content.

3. Refresh Your Existing Contacts List

Sending an appealing opt-in message to existing e-mail contacts, encouraging them to respond if they want to remain on your database, might seem a counterintuitive method of growing your hotel’s email marketing list. Yet put in the context of why you would do such a thing – ensuring your e-mail marketing list is truly reflective of those who are open to contact with your e-mail marketing strategy rather than ‘ghosting’ valueless contacts – it makes perfect sense. The added benefit of this tactic is that guests will appreciate your efforts to avoid spamming them with unwanted content, meaning you can focus on truly meaningful e-mail marketing campaigns.

4. Add a CTA on your Facebook business page

Using this function to encourage sign-ups to your e-mail marketing list is quick, simple and effective.

5. Use Your Website Content