3 tips from hospitality experts for making your email channel a revenue powerhouse
Here’s a situation that happens more than you think.
Your guest opens their email inbox to your latest campaign only to say, Another one? And why would I even want this?
Ouch. That’s a reaction you want to avoid as a hotelier, especially when you’re trying to recover an abandoned guest, nurture an existing guest relationship, or simply stay competitive against OTAs and other hoteliers. Flooding your guests’ inboxes with irrelevant, generic emails isn’t how you leverage one of your most powerful communication channels.
75% of consumers are highly dissatisfied with impersonal emails, and 34% of US internet users don’t even read or even delete brand emails half of the time. Sending more of these “trashed” emails will only drive guests further away from your brand.
Your email channel is vital for guest communication and a necessary building block for fostering guest relationships and a tool for acquiring and converting new guests.
As Renee Murrieta, Founder of Show.Tell, likes to say, Talk to guests like we know them, because we know them.
Applying that idea and infusing email messaging with guest data makes the content stand out in the eyes of your target audience. And personalized emails increase open rates by 26%.
Every email campaign is a chance to apply what you know about your guests. It’s also a chance to collect more data about your target segments to stand out among the competition, strengthen your guest relationships, and continue to add value to those who loyally visit your hotel. Because when campaigns resonate, guests notice — and are more likely to open their wallets for a hotel that “gets them” than one that doesn’t.
Your email channel can be a powerhouse if you know how to make it one. So we’ve gathered three tips from hospitality industry experts to help you get there.
What you will see here
- Use your email channel to be OTA competitive
- Retarget and recover abandoned guests with a value-add
- Tell a data story
Use your email channel to be OTA competitive
OTAs can be useful for helping you reach new guests, but after that, they should butt out of the relationship. Investing in your email channel to create repeat, loyal guests makes you less dependent on OTAs and reduces your cost of acquisition.
You may be casting a wider net with marketing dollars invested in OTAs, but you’re missing out on direct business by chasing volume. By targeting your most profitable segments with your email channel, you’ll not only save money, but you’ll be bring in direct, reliable business to your hotel.
Example: OTA win-back campaigns
An OTA win-back campaign has the goal in the name — win guests back from OTAs and bring them to your website, your booking engine. These campaigns help answer a key question that Ross McAlpine, Senior Director, CRM at EOS Hospitality, posed on the Hotel Moment podcast: How do we take ownership of that guest when it comes from an OTA booking?
For Ross, it’s all about using data you’ve collected across the guest journey: We have a big focus at EOS hospitality on maximizing the use of first-party data. So first-party data being data you have collected as a hotel, or as a hotel group, that you have specific, you know, permission to market to those guests. So, a big focus for my role as Director of CRM for EOS is to understand all of the points at which we are collecting data, and then how do we feed that into a central system.
When you’ve fed all your data into a central system (i.e., a Customer Data Platform) you can create a complete picture of your guests so that you know exactly who you are targeting with accurate segmentation. Best-in-class CDPs use technology called i dentity resolution to unscramble masked OTA email addresses and connect guest profiles from different data sources. That way, when you go to send your OTA win-back campaign, your email will reach the right guest, with the right message.
Here’s an idea from MARRAM. They enticed previous OTA bookers to book direct with discounted room offers and promotions — achieving a 65% open rate from this OTA win-back campaign.
Retarget and recover abandoned guests with a value-add
…[Make] sure that you are getting back in front of them. And then when you are doing that, what type of value are you ultimately putting in front of them? Because if they’re leaving your site, it’s to look for a better price, more than likely. So what can you be doing to communicate that more loudly up front?
That’s from Jason Pirock, Head of Marketing at Springboard Hospitality, on the Hotel Moment podcast, highlighting the importance of a value-add when it comes to re-targeting abandoned guests.
The reality is that not every guest will complete their reservation, and many will abandon your booking engine. How you get back in front of those guests is what matters, and one of the easiest ways to do that is with your email channel.
Technology like Revinate’s Shopping Cart Abandonment tool quickens the retargeting process by automatically triggering campaigns to target abandoned bookers. You can schedule emails to be delivered immediately after a guest exits your booking engine and a few days later with a timely follow-up. Just make sure your emails are packed with the value you bring to that guest — whether by including an incentive or highlighting your unique amenities.
Example: Cart abandonment campaigns
Following up with abandoned bookers with an email is the easy part. How you communicate the value your bring guests in an email is how you turn a prospect into a conversion.
Guests need to be reminded of what inspired them to book and why your hotel is the best fit for their dream stay. They don’t want to be told what to do — they want to know why something matters. In other words, your email channel is a tremendous opportunity to apply the power of personalization.
So, what could an abandonment email look like and read like? Take it from Meritage Resort and Spa with their warm lead nurture email. They targeted guests who showed interest in booking over the phone, but didn’t follow through. Because abandonment can happen on any channel. Target potential bookers with abandonment campaigns, whether they first got in touch via your voice channel or your website.
This triggered campaign ended up driving 72 room nights with an open rate of 62% as Meritage Resort and Spa reminded guests of the loyalty program they were missing out on by failing to book direct.
Tell a data story
Every channel tells a story, especially your email channel. Campaigns are data-rich and inform your guest communication and relationship strategy. That “data-story” reveals your guest’s inspiration to book and starts to lay out the chapters of their guest journey — from pre-arrival to post-stay.
For example, maybe you collected your guest’s email address from when they entered your booking engine, but they didn’t convert. But the triggered email encouraging them to complete their booking and take advantage of your ocean-side spa led them to open the email and complete their reservation. Then, when they reach your property, you sent an upsell email with a discounted spa offer, and you see they opened the email and claimed the offer. This guest is clearly motivated by spa and wellness content, so this type of messaging is likely to catch their attention in the future.
Renee Murrieta, Founder of Show.Tell, describes how campaigns tell a“data story” on the Hotel Moment podcast:
Do you have the right pieces of data pulling in front of you — be it from your agency or in your dashboard — that you’ve set up to tell a story? With email marketing, for example, what does your campaign performance data tell you? You can see the engagement. You see the open rate. You see the click rate. You can see the revenue and the room nights. That’s great. But what was booked? Of that 65K that was booked, what was booked? This is where I think the story gets a little deeper when you’re talking about email marketing for a channel.
A good data story is the key to understanding each guest, and that story grows deeper every time they interact with your brand.
Example: Leverage Rich Guest Profiles
By monitoring and keeping track of your campaign performance, you’re adding to your guest’s data story and their guest profile.
Storing campaign information in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) ensures a 360-degree view of each guest. Your email channel is an effective way to find out more about who’s staying at your hotel and why, but a CDP supports and furthers those guest relationships by revealing expectations and preferences in one place.
Every time you interact with a guest or a group of guests via email, you collect more data to add to their profiles so that you can segment your guests accurately.
Let’s go back to the spa-loving guest we mentioned earlier. Now that you’ve identified that this guest is more likely to take advantage of those campaign deals, you can begin to get more specific with your emails. Maybe that’s a discounted spa deal for the guest’s birthday. Or maybe if this guest hasn’t visited in a while, you send a “We Miss You” campaign that presents an exclusive spa package if that guest comes back to stay with you.
You can use what you learned from this interaction to find look-alike audiences within your guest database who might also be interested in your spa — creating a whole new segment to drive ancillary revenue.
Turn your email channel into a data engine
Your email channel will never reach its full revenue potential if you treat it as just a guest communication tool. Your email channel is a data engine, and it needs fuel. Campaigns aren’t just about what you can give to guests, but are also about what guests can give you — data-rich information. How you use that information determines if you’ll recover abandoned guests, attract guests away from OTAs, or foster loyal guest relationships.
About Revinate
Revinate is a direct booking platform that leads the hospitality industry in driving direct revenue and increased profitability.
Our products and our people combine to give hoteliers the superpowers they need to crush their goals. With Revinate, hoteliers shift share away from OTAs and drive tangible results across an individual property or a portfolio. Our industry-leading, AI-powered, customer data platform collects, unifies and, synthesizes data giving hoteliers a foundational advantage.
Hoteliers gain critical intelligence – guest lifetime spend, stay preferences, ancillary revenue, and more. With our Rich Guest Profiles database, hoteliers don't need to guess who their most profitable guests are, or how to drive conversions across email, voice, messaging, and digital channels.
Revinate's direct booking platform and omnichannel communication technology powers 900+ million Rich Guest Profiles across 12,500+ hotels to drive over $17 billion in direct revenue.
