7
Handy Tips for E-Hoteliers to Boost the Bottom line
Email
marketing and online customer engagement has altered the landscape
of hospitality industry, by and large. Small hotel chains
with well-chartered e-marketing initiatives are giving the
Industry Goliaths a run for their money. As more travelers
clamp online, the trend reveals rising share of online booking
touching 40% by 2008.
Let’s examine the main faculties used in email marketing
in Hotel Industry
- Room reservations
- Packaged group reservation
- Dinner/tee time reservations
- Repeat guest/visitors
- Generates new leads
- Reinforces existing customer base
- Mail to a friend/interested recipient (Viral marketing)
- Increases brand awareness/value
- Reduces sales cycle time
- Induce traffic to your website
Underlined are the few quick snap shots of activities that
can help to revive and re-kindle email marketing channel.
Eke
Out a Quality Opt-in List
A permission mailing list is your trump card, which can
acquire you more business. Engage in continuous stream of
activities to collect and build a scaleable database. Acquire
new opt-ins from your website visitors sign-ups, user forms,
trade shows, agents, from offline communications, and from
third party sources. Acquire pertinent details of your consumer
that are relevant to your business (such as name, title, physical
address, telephone number, email address, preferred destination,
and marital status etc. The whole exercise is to enable you
to draw a customer profile and to engage in a two-way communication
channel with the prospects.
Segment
your Database
A vast database without segregation can offer little freedom
to exercise personalization. Sort out your database according
to age, sex, ethnicity, income, destination preferences, and
past booking. Personalized communication adds relevance and
value. Recipients respond more on personalized sales pitches
rather than generic ones. Develop key consumer segments and
reach them with unique getaway packages, special offers, and
seasonal offers. Launching one-to-one marketing initiative
provides unique customer value and loyalty.
Issue
Regular and Periodic Emails
Welcome/confirmation mail to new opt-in list holders stems
as good business practice. As soon as a new member signs inform
them the frequency of your mailers and gist of contents covered.
Forehand information about the frequency, timings and contents
gives recipients an understanding of your brand and foster
trust. Based on the subscribers’ relationship adhere
to the frequency of your communication. This helps your subscribers
to differentiate your mails from the un-solicited mails.
Optimize
your Landing Page
Visitors landing pages must visually and contextually rhyme
with the offers contained in your email promotion. The page
must grab the attention of the visitors with in-depth details
of the services you offer. But often in reality unfocused
landing pages, loose the scent of marketing and direction.
Confused and cluttered information presented can be catastrophic
and result in web abandonment by visitors in droves.
Response
Tracking and Campaign Evaluation
Dexterity of email platform allows you to examine the effectives
of every campaign. Automate the process of delivery tracking
and response measurement of your e-campaign. Include eyeball
tracking facility and track-able links that will help you
to measure the results of the campaign. But often, this tactical
measure is not tracked due to the excessive humdrum of daily
business activities. Best way to outrun this bottleneck is
to employ a professional email vendors capable of providing
extensive online reports and
Make
Attractive Template and Compelling Copy
Email template must carry appropriate and attractive design
along with adhesive content. Keep in mind the mindset of your
recipients. Destination travelers are often lured by attractive
display of facilities, views. Fine-tune your design, HTML
coding and content to allow your promotion to get past the
spam filters. Check your deliverability score or get it examined
by using third party resources.
Take
the Aid Of E-Newsletters for Soft Promotion
Keep the objective on hard sales in the back burner and leverage
on e-newsletters to build your brand and reputation. Articles,
expert opinion, recent travel trends, tips to travelers and
more help to draw more visitors to your site. This long drawn
marketing strategy can be employed to supplement your existing
marketing drives.
In Today’s 24/7 marketplaces, every hotelier thrives
and explores varied marketing channels to induce and induct
new customers. In this stream, email marketing has risen as
the most viable and evolving medium for hotel Industry. Tactics
from simple to highly evolved methods are played out daily
to pursue business goals and to increase the profitability
of the business unit. Are you equipped to handle it!
If you want assistance to market your hotel business online,
our specialists
can assist you.
|