LOW OPEN RATE? AMP UP YOUR EMAILS WITH THESE 3 TIPS

Time and time again, research has found that email marketing delivers the best ROI of almost all channels available to you as a hotel marketer. It is also however the one that is most overlooked. Used cleverly, e-mail marketing can be the best friend of a hotel marketer, providing a great way to share and distribute information with prospects and former customers who have already willingly shared their contact details.

Your e-mail campaign’s open-rate is quite literally how many recipients of an e-mail marketing campaign have opened your e-mails. More broadly, it can help indicate how much your audience is interested in your output. How can you best ensure your e-mails are seen and read by the contacts on your list?

Get The Timing Right

Never underestimate the role of timing when sending out your e-mail marketing, because it is utterly crucial to the success or failure of a particular campaign. Through trial and error, you may be able to ascertain exactly what works for your hotel, but by applying this approach too rigidly, you also risk a lot of wasted e-mails while collecting data – so use common sense when deciding what times to test. You ideally want to hit the inbox at the time your future hotel guests are looking at it. According to a recent study by Experian, Saturday and Sunday yield the best results across most industries, whilst Tuesdays and Thursdays resulted in the lowest open-rates.

Create a Great Subject Line

All great e-mail marketing campaigns begin with a killer subject line. Not too long, not too short – with the promise of something amazing for those who open (without misleading prospects). Great e-mail marketing is conversational – but it also offers real value to the recipient. It has to; otherwise they have no reason to click. Remember that your target is bombarded, daily, with hundreds of marketing materials all aimed at grabbing their attention; you have a lot of competition to be cutting through before reaching them. Your e-mail marketing strategy must take account of the need for an unmistakably ‘human’ voice whilst also remaining on brand, so as not to confuse your audience.

To make sure you’re hitting the mark with the subject line, carry out an A/B test on a small portion of your subscriber list ahead of the main send. Platforms like MailChimp make this easy – just create a small subset of your mailing list and then set up an A/B test to test the subject line. The platform will serve half with option A and half with option B. You can then come back the next day, see which subject line delivered the best open rates and use that one for the main send to the bulk of your mailing list.

Personalise your Emails

Personalisation is a big deal within hotel marketing in general – so why not apply the same principles to your e-mail marketing? As a key component of digital marketing for hotels, the addition of a guests’ name in the subject line could make all the difference between their clicking through to read the message itself, or sending it straight to the trash bin.