Email Marketing Segmentation in the Hotel Industry: Trends And Examples

Email marketing is amongst one of the vital components of the hotel marketing and online distribution strategy, especially for hotels that want more direct bookings. The swing toward online buying indicates that the website is becoming a key point of entry to establish an interactive relationship with customers and obtain client email profiles. The Internet offers an extensive interactive, content-rich media, and highly growing distribution channel for the hospitality market.

Email gets the most attention of any hospitality marketing effort owing to the creation of direct revenue opportunities with past, present, and future clients. There is a reason for this. Consumers are tied to their smartphones. This also means that marketers in the hotel industry should create robust email marketing strategies contextualized to specific buyer personas and, when possible, contextualized to the individual. Experts report that 55% of consumers prefer email messages from hotels rather than direct mail, text, phone calls or social media messages. One of the main reasons for this is because email is less invasive than other marketing channels.

But having emails in your CRM, marketing automation tool or PMS doesn’t always translate into success. According to Revinate, a well-driven database segmentation leads to a 20% increase in email openings and 70% higher click-through rate (CTR). But there is more. Regarding revenue, a rocket database segmentation delivers 73% higher revenue per recipient.

Did you know that the average consumer checks his phone once every 12 minutes? This represents a massive opportunity for customer engagement in the hotel industry. Hotels have huge records of e-mail IDs of all their customers, but they don’t use it. It is necessary to have repeat sales and thus e-mail marketing helps to retain existing customers and gain new ones. In addition, SEO helps the hotel website to ensure organic growth online, which could also lead to more and better information from each of the potential clients behind each and every email ID.

Guest Segmentation: Ideas For Personalized Hotel Marketing

Watch this video to learn seven easy ways to segment your audience. These ideas will help you start with personalized marketing for your hotel or to find new marketing segments to update your marketing automation efforts:

1. Demographics: Analyze who your customers are based on criteria such as age, income, number of family members, race, gender, occupation, education, and nationality.
2. Skills and knowledge: These are the things your customers know and how they use this knowledge when they interact with your hotel.
3. Preferences: Take into account the things your customers like about your brand, facilities, amenities, services, location, staff, food, and more.
4. Behavioral activities: Analyze the behaviors and decision-making processes your customers follow.
5. Psychographics: Create segments according to lifestyle, personality traits, values, opinions, and interests of consumers.
6. How your customers use your product: Do they use your product like you initially expected? When do they use it? With other people?
7. How they buy your products: This is similar to the behavioral activities. Analyze processes, how much they spend, when they buy, from what device, if they buy based on a special flash-offer.

Email marketing strategies in the hotel industry make competitive sense due to factors such as:

• Personalization: Offers a personalized interactive relationship with clients. Using personalized videos is one of the most robust ways to onboard new guests and to recommending products and experiences based on who they are. A really easy way to start with email personalization no matter the email marketing tool you use is through spreadsheets. Spreadsheets help you structure and visualize your customer data. In fact, most organizations that create personalized videos to increase customer experience or engagement use them. Check this article to learn how to create personalized videos using spreadsheets.
• Reach: Functions as a sales force by reaching tens of thousands in seconds
• Protects brand integrity: enables the promotion of the latest specials on a one-to-one basis to a pre-selected audience without broadcasting to the world the newest discounts
• Low cost: Is the least expensive form of active marketing
• Instant Gratification: People can receive, respond, forward, and print email almost immediately
• Rich Media: Email marketing comes in various styles, such as e-Newsletters, text, HTML messages like a postcard or survey. The hotel gets its message across with Colour, sound, video, animation, whatever is most appropriate.
• Results: Outcomes-based, from knowing who opened the message, clicked on which links, how much time spent viewing each page, completed a transaction, or forwarded the email.

Email marketing segmentation and personalization example:

Here you have a great personalized email example based on a great segmentation. In the following video, I explain how to create personalized emails to increase opening rate, CTR and upselling:

We know “Kevin” likes sports because he has already told us that in his last visit. We also know that this hotel is known because of its amazing restaurant. Well, voila! In this example we use a personalized video to drive CTR and sales conversions, we also use a personalized image to grab the guest’s attention and a contextualized email copy with dynamic information.

This other image shows the personalization tags with the dynamic information:

Some of the major trends in email marketing in 2020 include:

1. Respecting personal data will change the email marketing strategy. Take a look at this free report about personalized marketing and GDPR to know more about how other organizations are succeeding while creating personalized marketing campaigns based on their customers’ data and what kind of opportunities and challenges they are facing.
2. Mailable ‘Microsites’ and personalized landing pages are adopted by more companies to increase customer research, engagement, and retention
3. The Conversational tone is utilized for more personal interaction with an audience
4. More business push for mobile-friendly design
5. Testing and deliverability need addressing further
6. Personalization and segmentation remain a high priority to continue sharing dynamic and engaging content.

Marketing Segmentation Examples And Ideas In The Hospitality Industry

As you can see, there are several ways marketing segmentation can make a huge impact in the hospitality industry. Let me share an example based on a real case study (although I changed the name of the hotel). Take a look at the following marketing automation workflow:

It represents the communication and customer journey from the moment a guests makes a reservation. The goal is simple: Maximizing the revenue per guest through personalized messages that adapt to specific customer characteristics. For example, the marketing automation workflow takes into consideration if the guest is a first-timer, or if it travel with a partner and/with kids. With this information, they are able to personalize images, videos, audios and the copywriting to create messages that increase conversions.

Watch the video where I explain this real-life example:

Conclusion

Creating marketing segments for your email marketing campaigns will help you deliver messages with higher opening and click-through rates because the messages will be based on how your target audience is, individually, what they need and your business goals. Email marketing segmentation takes sometime, specially at the beginning, but it certainly pays back. As audiences become more data-sensitive, segmentation will help your message stand out.

Customers require to be constantly wowed by your brands. In fact, they expect certain degree of anticipation from your marketing. Segmentation and personalization will help you connect with your clients to help them react to your marketing messages.