Email Marketing for Small Luxury Hotels
Make the Most of Your Website Opportunity
If your website is working properly, it will be generating email enquiries. Your site should be capturing the email addresses of all enquirers, assuming they’ve ticked the ‘opt-in’ box, so they can receive details of special offers, events, news, etc from you. The result is an emailing list that is like gold dust! After all, these are the addresses of people who have asked you to keep in touch! In my experience, a good, well written email promotion to your database will always generate sales / bookings.
However, the content needs to be worth reading and of benefit to the reader.
Don’t be put off because you don’t have a smart email template with beautiful photographs and colourful headlines. There’s nothing wrong with a promotion in plain text. Those experienced in direct marketing will often use plain text in a serif font, e.g. Times Roman (more legible which is why newspapers use it).
Email promotion content published as text can work better than HTML because often readers print out the email to be read and stored as hard copy, or because text is regarded as more personal. You can certainly write in a more personal vein. I recently read of an email promotion test where the text version of a newsletter achieved over 320% higher response rate than the identical promotion delivered as HTML.
Talking of testing, email promotions provide a wonderful opportunity to test what appeals to your database and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid of sending out an email promotion perhaps twice a month, testing something different each time. You need to monitor the response, of course, and note what sort of promotion generates the greatest response or amount of business. You will then be in a better position to create more successful emailings. Keep testing!
Your website has the potential to be your most powerful sales medium and email marketing is a well-proven method of generating extra sales.