Congratulations, you’ve built up a pretty impressive email database for your hotel full of past and potential guests. Now you have a magic tool that will fill your rooms with just a click of a few buttons… but something is wrong. It seems that for every new address you add, you’re losing two. Why is that?

Why are customers leaving your hotel email database? It comes down to one salient point:

You are failing your guests and potential guests by not giving them what they want. Your email marketing is both not effective and also alienating your guests.

This is no doubt very bad news. The good news, however, is that we are going to dig into why you are failing and give you some simple tips to make your hotel emails become your number one conversion source. Every email database acts differently, has different success metrics, and different thresholds for abandonment. Use these recommendations to examine your database and sending patterns.

Unsub Reason #1: You’re Sending Way Too Much

This is the number one reason people unsubscribe from marketing emails. You’re hitting them on the head over and over again with multiple emails per month, perhaps even multiple per week.

There is no hard and fast rule for the volume to send; you will need to experiment and find the right frequency. Based on our research, a single hotel (as opposed to a hotel group) sees the best results with a single send per month. In rare cases, we have seen weekly emails work, but the key is making the information you are sharing is unique and impactful.

The solution: Stop sending and start testing. Go to a single send per month and see if your unsubscribe rate falls down below a 0.1% rate. While doing this, closely monitor your analytics to see how this change impacts your revenue from email. If there’s no impact to your bottom line, a congratulations is in order. If your revenue drops, start testing a slightly higher frequency until you find the happy medium.

Unsub Reason #2: Your Content Is… Meh

Guess what people do to boring people and boring companies… That’s right, they ignore them or, in your case, unsubscribe.

You did an incredible thing by getting someone to subscribe to your email list. They wanted great deals, helpful content, inspiring photography. What they wanted was for you to give them a reason to visit your property. Instead, you delivered generic content that didn’t inspire them at all.

The good news is, people don’t unsubscribe the 1^st time they get a lackluster email; in fact, it takes a while for most consumers to pull the unsubscribe trigger. The bad news is, if you are getting unsubscribes for this reason, you probably have been boring them for a long time.

The solution: Put yourselves in a guest’s shoes and create content that is genuinely relevant to them. You don’t want to just remind them about your hotel, you want to provide real value. Provide a mix of great articles, news, events, and, of course, great deals.

Monitor your click-through rates and see what is and is not working. If you find that people are opening but no one is clicking, that’s a warning sign that you’re not giving the guest the information they want and they will eventually unsubscribe. Interesting, relevant content engages guests and you’ll find that an investment here pays big dividends.

Unsub Reason #3: You Didn’t Make it Personal

Emails get better open rates and higher ROI when you personalize them with a guest’s name or purchasing history. Understanding email segmentation will decrease your unsubscribe requests. The more specific the email, the better the engagement!

The solution: Use an email platform that connects to your guest database to send more personalized email. In addition to including their names in the subject line or email body, you want to create emails tailored to guest profiles.

More personalized emails make it worth staying subscribed. Some strategies to create personalized emails based on history:

• Filter guests by area and create regional specials. For example, a “local” discount for guests within driving distance.
• Email guests based on how their booking history with promotional content that reflects how they spent in the past.
• Use demographic data to target business vs leisure travelers with relevant content (see Unsub reason # 2!)

There you have it – the top 3 reasons people are unsubscribing from your hotel emails. Take these tips, clean up those lists, and get creative with your hotel email strategy!

Fuel has an email marketing system that helps you easily build eye-catching email campaigns and tailor them to your guests based on real-time guest data from your PMS. Learn more today!

Fuel offers a full suite of email marketing services. Contact us today for a free email marketing evaluation!