Email marketing is an essential tool for businesses of all sizes, and hotels are no exception. A well-crafted strategy can help hoteliers acquire new customers, drive more bookings, build a lasting relationship with their guests, and essentially increase their revenue.
This article will provide a definition of email marketing for hotels, along with examples, useful tips, and software recommendations to help you build a successful strategy.
What is email marketing for hotels?
Email marketing for hotels is a type of email marketing that is built around the peculiarities of the hospitality industry. It involves all sorts of campaigns, such as hotel newsletters, confirmation emails, special offers, welcome emails, etc. The focus of these campaigns is to highlight the destination, emphasize reviews and social proof, and use personalization to provide customized recommendations.
Customer journey stages in hotel email marketing
Just like any other type of email marketing, email marketing for hotels is aligned with customer journey stages to move leads through the marketing funnel. However, they look different from the classic stages (awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, advocacy). We can identify five main stages: research or pre-booking stage, booking stage, pre-arrival stage, stay stage, and post-stay stage.
Research or pre-booking stage
The research or pre-booking stage is equivalent to the awareness stage. In this stage, a potential guest is researching hotels and comparing prices and reviews. Hotel owners/marketers can use this opportunity to run informational email marketing campaigns. These can include recommendations on activities or attractions in selected destinations.
Another option is to motivate potential hotel guests to book your accommodation. This can be done by influencing their choice with social proof, testimonials, or reviews.
It’s also a good idea to send special offers and promotional emails. Pricing is a major factor when choosing a hotel, and leveraging this opportunity can certainly help drive more traffic.
Booking stage
Next comes the booking stage i.e., the guest has chosen your hotel for their stay. Here, hotel marketers should send confirmation emails to verify the booking and include necessary details, such as date, room type, check-in and check-out times, etc. Don’t forget to include information about your policies (such as cancellation, pet, and number of guests, for example).
To make this process easier, you can create workflows and send automated emails for confirmation. They will be triggered after the booking, requiring minimal effort from you.
The booking stage is also perfect for upselling emails. With those, you can offer room upgrades and promote additional amenities.
Pre-arrival/arrival stage
Pre-arrival/arrival stage begins before the guest’s planned stay. And since this stage can be stressful for the guest, you should try to ease it as much as possible with your hotel email marketing campaigns.
One way to do this is to implement an online check-in. You could craft a simple email and direct guests to the hotel website, specifically to the landing page where they can complete the check-in. This step will be a bit tricky if you don’t have a website, though. In that case, it’s better to skip online check-in altogether. Asking for sensitive information over emails is a bad practice, and could significantly damage your hotel’s brand.
In the pre-arrival/arrival stage, you can once again promote additional amenities through emails, such as airport transportation, restaurant reservations, all-inclusive deals, spa treatments – basically anything that could improve the quality of the guests’ stays.
Stay stage
The stay stage begins as soon as your guests arrive at your hotel and lasts until they leave. In this stage, you should focus on making their stay comfortable and enjoyable. Emails with personalized recommendations about local attractions and experiences should do the trick.
Post-stay stage
The post-stay stage is all about nurturing your relationship and turning your guests into loyal customers. At this point, the guest has checked out from your hotel, so the goal should be to keep them coming back. You can ask them for a review, offer a discount on their next stay, or ask them to join your loyalty programs, if any.
Hospitality email marketing examples
Now that you understand what hotel email marketing is, let’s dive into some of the samples of email marketing letters.
The Hoxton – Special Offer
Special offer emails are a great way to attract new customers and motivate existing ones to book your stay. These can be couples or children discounts, voucher codes, discounts on a specific location, or free accommodation upgrades. Such offers can increase your traffic on slow weekends and seasons. You could make them targeted to specific audience segments, such as bachelorettes, couples, business travelers, or school children.
Special offer email marketing campaigns help you stay on top of the competition and linger in potential guests’ minds the next time they plan a vacation or a weekend getaway.
Below you can see a great example of the special offer email from The Hoxton.
What we like:
- The copy is well-crafted and has a humorous tone, matching the industry and the vibe of the email.
- The illustrations are smart and eye-catching.
- The discount is generous.
- The email includes clear instructions on what the user should do to get a discount.
What could be improved:
- On the technical side of things, the language attribute isn’t clearly defined, which may hinder the transcription of the message if English isn’t the default language for the users’ screen reader.
- Table roles aren’t clearly defined.