Tips for Successful Email Campaigns in Hotels

Personalized email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools for hotel chains and tour operators. Through clever automation you can use relevant occasions for email campaigns to get in touch with your guests and provide them with relevant content at any time. In this way, you make use of the existing potential of your guests and contribute to an increase in your turnover.

In order to achieve the best possible results, you need to integrate your Hotel PMS (Property Management System) with your CRM or email marketing system. ProCampaign^® integrates directly with protel.I/O, for example, and thus offers you ideal conditions for successful email marketing.

But what content should you send as part of your email campaigns in hotels? To give you some guidance, we have put together a few tips.

Tip 1 - Before the journey - "We look forward to seeing you"

Thank your guests for their booking with a friendly confirmation email. This should be sent automatically directly after the booking. Include relevant information about your hotel and introduce possible additional services that can be booked in advance for the upcoming stay: e.g. a bottle of champagne to the room, a wellness treatment in the SPA area or the reservation of a table in the hotel restaurant. This is your chance to cross- and up-sell your hotel offers. From the clicking behavior you can find out what the individual guests are interested in thanks to link tagging. This is the basis for segmentation and other relevant content.

Take the opportunity to inform your guests about interesting local facts, such as sights, destinations, activities or local events. Highlight the local highlights that make the arrival and stay of your guests as pleasant as possible.

To enhance the excitement, send an automated email again a few days prior to arrival with arrival information or a weather forecast for the day of arrival.

Tip 2 - During the journey - "Nice to have you here"

After check-in, there is another opportunity to stay in touch with your guests digitally. For example, send an email with all relevant information for the stay, such as opening hours of the wellness area, the current menu of the hotel restaurant or the current wine recommendation of your sommelier.

If you have a bonus points program, it is recommended that you send an email with information on the current points balance and the possibilities for redeeming points on site.

Tip 3 - After the trip - "Thank you for your stay"

After departure, thank your guests for their visit and ask for an assessment of the stay, the hotel and the local services. Send this email as soon as possible after check-out so that the stay is as fresh in their minds as possible. It has been shown that the willingness to write a review is higher when consumers are explicitly asked for it.
A few weeks after departure, it is advisable to send an email with relevant offers for a repeat booking. This could, for example, be a comparable hotel from the same chain or a comparable trip. If possible, use the information from the hotel rating that was submitted.

If you use the ProCampaign^® Ratings & Reviews module, the ratings submitted are saved in the respective 360° customer profile. In this way you can specifically select those people who have given a particular rating, e.g. at least 4 out of 5 stars for your wellness hotel on the North Sea coast. For these persons a stay in your wellness hotel on the Baltic Sea coast could be interesting.

For example, send them a 5% loyalty bonus for their next booking and thus create an incentive for a new stay.

Tip 4 - Generally - "Stay in Touch"

Regardless of the booking behavior of your guests, other occasions for personalized email campaigns in hotels are often neglected.

A welcome campaign that new newsletter subscribers go through after the double-opt-in confirmation has proven to be very effective. Present your most important hotels or offers here and collect information about the interests and preferences of your recipients via link tagging. This is the basis for further automated email campaigns, which thus generate more relevance among newsletter recipients.

A personalized coupon in the first or second welcome email creates an additional incentive for a booking at your hotel.

Everyone is happy about a personalised birthday email. If this is then, for example, combined with a 10% voucher for your wellness offers, all the more so.

Guests who have not booked with you for a long time, but have given their consent to email marketing, should at best go through a reactivation process. Cleverly implemented, this encourages your guests to book again - and generates additional sales for you.

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