Email is one of the only forms of direct communication a hotel has with its guests.
An email marketing strategy should be nurtured, well thought out, and cultivated to its fullest potential.
In this article, we will explore automated hotel email marketing examples that can help your hotel stand out from the crowd.
There are several strategies to help you maintain relevance in your guest’s ever-changing inboxes. We recommend incorporating the following automated email strategies—and checking out these hotel emails examples—into your campaigns:
Hotel Email Marketing Examples:
Triggered Email Sends
Typically, triggered emails are generated from an action such as a hotel booking or cancellation and are standard practice in the hotel industry.
Hotel emails examples and strategies of triggered emails include:
1. Welcome Emails
A welcome email is polite, but a welcome campaign is creative. Don’t be afraid to take a traditional welcome email to the next level. Be aggressive and beat out the competition by following up. Thank the consumer for subscribing and provide a clear path to navigate different areas of your website they may want to browse. Follow through with a special offer to those who haven’t booked.
The Belmond’s welcome email not only includes a “Thanks for signing up!” and a quick look at what’s in store for new subscribers. It also includes a directory of their website with links to some of their most popular content so the consumer’s only option isn’t the back button.
2. Event Reminders
Selling event/attraction tickets AND room nights? Double whammy. Set up an email campaign that not only gets guests excited about what you’re promoting but highlights hotel amenities they can enjoy during their stay.
The Betsy Hotel gets the word out about a featured event taking place at their hotel, as well as the option to RSVP so the hotel can track how successful the email send performs.
3. Check-in/Check-out
Arrival emails are a good way to showcase what the property has to offer and notify guests of on-site specials. You could build incremental revenue by featuring deals at your on-site restaurant or cafe, or any other revenue-producing services.
Departure emails provide a good opportunity to collect data via post-stay surveys and ask for reviews while the customer’s experience is still top of mind.
You can even amplify your triggered real-time customer communication with push messages from the Fuel’s white label app for hotels which won’t even require your guests to check their email inbox.
Your post-stay email strategy should keep your hotel top-of-mind. Whether that’s through surveys, thank you’s, and/or generating excitement for a return visit!
4. Cart Abandonment
Hoteliers can also implement an abandonment email strategy to recapture a customer or help expedite the booking process. We can capture the consumer at three stages and design an email based on each phase of the booking process:
- Visits a site but does not browse
- Browses a site but does not book
- Selects a room to book but does not purchase
Learn more about cart abandonment email strategies for hotels.
Get creative! Routine-triggered emails are overwhelmingly boring. Who said reservation information had to be mundane? A consumer’s experience of your brand begins during their search, not their stay. Check out our case study about animated emails: Boosting Email CTR with Animation.
And if you ever find yourself stuck or in need of a boost for your automated email campaigns, Fuel’s guest messaging software will provide recommendations using machine learning and real-time customer data.
Rule-Based Sends
Rule-based email sends can be simple or complex. They are single or repeating filtered sends based on a set of defined rules. These rules can include stay dates, number of children, canceled reservations, booked dates, and more. Some good hotel emails examples for rule-based sends include:
5. Anniversary Emails
Anniversary emails can be a good way to remind guests of the great stay they had with you and prompt them to book again. They can also be a great way for hotel marketers to utilize dynamic content. We’ve seen success with an anniversary email send based on book date with dynamic content based on previous stay date. Here the specials in the email will change based on the data we’ve collected from the guest.
6. Event Promotion/Area Attractions
Want to let guests know about what’s going on in town or at your hotel/resort? Unless you believe that what you’re promoting will make subscribers book, exclude those that don’t have a reservation. Don’t saturate inboxes with an email that doesn’t pertain to the audience it’s being sent to.
MacArthur Place does a great job of keeping up with their guest database by introducing their very own fall itinerary and gets their audience thinking of welcoming fall with a west coast trip to their property.
7. Announcements
Minor maintenance on the pool? Let your in-house guests during that period know it will be out of commission. Of course, this is just one example of a rule-based announcement. Tweak rules to send announcements to subscribers that will find them relevant.
Segmented Email Sends
Remember when we said, “Start utilizing your data in a way that benefits you AND your guests?” Well, we’re repeating it. Use your consumer’s profile attributes to send relevant hotel emails. We’ve already started integrating hyper-personalization into our email strategies by tailoring rule-based triggers and dynamic content. When you use Fuel’s guest messaging solution, you can drill down further with specific segments of what we know (or what we can find out) about our consumers.
8. Birthday Emails
Birthday emails serve as a good opportunity for hoteliers to provide exclusive deals for that possible impromptu getaway. Take it a step further and set up a birthday email campaign. Follow up a few weeks later to check in on how their special day went.
Beach Cove Resort does an excellent job of reaching out to its subscribers by offering a birthday incentive for providing additional consumer information which can go a long way in building and maintaining a relationship with past and future guests.
Re-engagement Email Campaigns
Email lists should be actively managed and cleaned. A subscriber can be active, bounced, held or unsubscribed. We recommend filtering and removing bounced and held addresses to streamline your list and improve success metrics. Use the following strategic hotel emails examples to re-engage with your consumers:
9. Unsubscribed Emails
Make your best attempt at preventing unsubscribes by providing the user with options. Give them the chance to receive fewer emails without opting out completely as well as an opportunity to change their minds and opt back in.
If they’re set on unsubscribing you can leave an impression with a clever campaign that benefits brand awareness (check out Groupon’s epic unsubscribe page and eight other effective options).
10. Unengaged Emails
Win back unengaged subscribers by determining who isn’t opening your emails and targeting them with revival content. Automate this process with a dynamic suppression list to exclude inactive email addresses per send.
Once you’ve mastered the art of automation, don’t turn a blind eye. Periodically check on your campaigns and rules to ensure email sends are seamless and not slipping through the cracks. Consumers change and hoteliers should adapt to accommodate what their audience wants. And make sure your guest messaging software has the smart segmenting capabilities to put you in a position of success.
By adopting these hotel email marketing examples, you can build strong relationships with your guests, enhance their experience, and ultimately boost your return on investment.
Stop working for your email and start making it work for you. Request a demo of Fuel’s Hotel Guest Messaging Solution today!
