I wanted the trip to be epic, and as the control freak I am, I wanted to have everything ready beforehand. The visa, papers, itinerary, hotel bookings; everything. 

The trip was indeed amazing. The best one so far.

Now that I think about it, I remember booking at those hotels who had their own website. Who had great reviews, and even a properly maintained Facebook page. 

Though, that’s my point of view. Not all travelers think like me, but a majority of them do. 

Those hotels I stayed at, were doing content marketing, knowingly or unknowingly. And that’s what influenced my decision. 

That’s the power of content. It can make or break your business. 

Today, all industries will agree that “Content is King”. BUT, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to master or even implement it. 

This blog will talk all about content marketing for hotels.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is all about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain your target audience. 

Putting in simple words, it is the practice of producing the content in forms of text, images, and videos and sharing it on different platforms, such as websites or social media channels.

A hotel’s content marketing focuses on producing content that your audience needs and likes to consume. 

The ultimate goal for hotels to do content marketing is to attract maximum people and acquire more bookings.

The key is to provide useful content that informs, entertains, and engages with your guests. Also, it’s equally necessary for you to ensure consistency in producing content.  

Let’s move ahead to the most common and obvious question in your mind. 

Why is content marketing important for hotels?

Most hotels must be implementing a wide range of marketing strategies, but somehow cannot achieve the desired results. 

One of the major reasons can be minimal or zero use of hotel content marketing.

I won’t be exaggerating, if I say that content marketing is the missing piece of your hotel marketing.  

This is exactly how content marketing strengthens your property’s market presence. 

1. Educates your customer

Your target audience is travellers; which can be further classified into business, leisure, group, solo travelers and so on.  

A deeper segmentation would lead you to the following basic categories: 

Segment 1: Passionate travelers, who look forward to exploring different cuisine, culture, unexplored places, and more.

Segment 2: Ordinary tourists, who travel once or twice a year to visit popular destinations. 

Now, your entire audience ideally has a lot of questions before booking with you. Obviously, you cannot answer them through your promotional messages. 

Here’s where content marketing comes into the picture. You can answer your audience’s and guests’ questions through content.  

2. Gives you a competitive advantage

When your hotel produces content, your guests start trusting you. 

This gives you a big edge over the competition, especially if they’re not offering the same services as you are. 

Your content marketing can show your guests that you consider them more than mere bookings. You want to deliver a better experience to them, and that’s what you want them to understand. 

Don’t go all “plain Jane” in sharing what you offer. Make them a part of a better story to grab more attention. Pictures, virtual tours, videos, texts; use anything and everything you can.  

Content marketing educates more than it sells. This will lead your guests to believe in you and select you over your competitors.

3. Lowers marketing costs

It is an undeniable fact that hotel marketing requires a massive budget. 

Getting the desired results might be more challenging than you think. Mainly because, the impact of sales and marketing has reduced (or has the buyer’s understanding improved?). 

As compared to older times, consumers are now less likely to respond to printed advertising or direct mail.

In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising and generates about three times as many leads.

Source

4. Helps cultivate long-term relationships with your customers

Consistent and regular content curation gives your guests a reason to come back for more and explore the untapped areas of your property. This develops a long lasting and loyal relationship with your guests. 

Eventually, your audience will pay more attention to your content if it connects to them and relates to them. 

With such content, you’re not just in it for a one-time sale.

Quality content can introduce your property to travelers, build relationships, and generate new leads and bookings—all for a fraction of traditional marketing.

5. Enhances your reputation

Not every guest will walk away happy. Guests may complain about poor room service, hidden charges, or rude employees.

However, with content marketing, you can control the narrative of your brand. 

Fresh hotel blogs, videos, and good website content will surely outperform your negative ratings.

On top of that, there’s an opportunity for your content to rank and show up in search for your hotel’s name.

5. Helps you in SEO

Content marketing paves the easiest way for you to rank higher in the search results. 

With just website content, it becomes challenging for you to write keyword-rich content. 

Whereas if you are producing blogs of average 800 words, then you can add at least 5-10 keywords in each blog. 

In this way, you are giving more content to search engines as well as your audience. When it ranks well on the search engines, you are assured to get significant online exposure. 

Basically, you MUST do hotel content marketing. 

As Robert Rose said, 

“Marketing is telling the world that you are a rockstar, content marketing is showing the world that you are the one.” 

Now, as I explained earlier, there are different types of content. How to decide which type of content should you produce? 

Let me explain to you about:

Which types of content can hotels produce and promote?

At present, OTAs are engulfing entire search results. They’re outranking hotel websites, which makes your brand exposure a lot lesser than expected. For that reason, content marketing becomes mandatory. 

And let’s not forget the fact that your guests are not looking for mere accommodations. Rather, they’re looking for a wholesome and memorable experience. 

They’re exploring Instagram, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Google reviews to make up their minds. They’re digging deeper than ever before to find what they like.  

And that’s why you need to have the right content marketing strategy in place. 

Here are some ideas to produce and promote content for your property:

1. Local Attractions and Events

Let me ask you a question. Why do guests visit you? Or rather, why do leisure travelers visit your city?

Simple, to explore the city and the culture which your city has to offer. 

Suffice to say, localized content goes a long way to attract your guests. Even the local guides on Google reconfirm this fact. 

Travellers are seeking rich, engaging, original tips, and ideas about your destination ALL THE TIME. You can (Read: SHOULD) provide detailed information answering all of these questions about local attractions. 

This is an excellent marketing opportunity for hotel properties. Create a welcoming guide that mentions your location, scenic destinations, and best places to eat, drink and hangout in detail.

Local events can turn into popular blog posts – what’s coming up, how to enjoy the events, and itinerary ideas around the popular events. From listening to live music in a fan-favorite pub to checking out a tourist attraction, you can customize this guide in limitless ways.

#Hotel content marketing tip: You can also partner with local businesses and offer some of their popular products in your rooms. So, guests get a local taste (sometimes literally) right when they arrive.

2. Photos

Factually and actually, visuals grab more attention than content.

As Brain Rules says in one of its articles, 

Hear a piece of information. Three days later; you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%. 

You experience this. And even I do. 

Content with images is much better than content without. But, RELEVANT images. 

So, when I ask to share pictures and videos, I don’t mean the old-fashioned and common hotel photos. Nah, I don’t want you to do mediocre. Be unique, and show that uniqueness to your audience. In fact, shout it out. 

For better photography ideas, take a look at Airbnb. You will see how properties are highlighting their unique aspect. All the images strive to show what makes their place different. 

So the key point is to showcase and celebrate your differences. Take rich, vivid photos of your property, highlight what makes the rooms different, and focus on the quirks and oddly beautiful things – like scripture, or colorful interior that makes your hotel room stand apart from your competitors.

3. Virtual Tours

As the name suggests, virtual tours are in effect, 360-degree videos that revolve around your property. Your guests get a glimpse of how your property is and what can they expect if they book with you. 

The Gen Z today is searching for more such experiences to help them in their decision making. 

A 360-degree camera can capture an entire room, and allow you to upload a self-guided tour where viewers can look at whatever they want. 

This helps increase site time and time invested in your brand too, so there are extra benefits.

If you have enough budget, you can even invest in VR/AR experiences.

4. Food, wine and other best things

Who doesn’t like to talk about food, wine, and similar indulgent experiences when on holiday – or even during a business visit? 

If you’ve got these services, flaunt them. 

Talk about seasonal menus, your wine list, how you choose your beers, the winemakers and brewers behind these beverages, your spa menu, and so on. 

If your property does not have a spa, write a blog about the top spas at your location. 

Expand your F&B focus to popular local spots – tucked-away eateries, local foodie personalities, new openings, and best of series.

5. Travel Tips

Travel tips and tricks are something that all guests are looking forward to and is an important part of your hotel content writing. Basically, you can create content around:

• What should travellers pack? 
• What will the weather be like? 
• Is the local water safe to drink? 
• How to book activities?
• How to get around? 

Travellers have a lot of questions about your destination. Use your blog to answer these and be relevant.

If you don’t have a dedicated content writer or if you do not produce content on a regular basis, you can also give an updated list of best destination blogs to read.

If your hotel is located in a foreign-speaking country, you can also make a list of useful everyday phrases in a language guide.

6. Behind the scenes (BTS)

At first, this might seem like an odd choice for important hotel content. 

But this is the trend right now. Businesses and even hotels are showing a sneak peak of how things work behind the scenes to make their audience connect more. 

Content marketing from B&Bs and hostels has blurred the line of difference between them and traditional hotels. 

People respond on an emotional level automatically when they see pictures and descriptions of other humans that they’ll get to meet.

So practice some employee advocacy, and use social media – along with your own site – to showcase happy pictures of enthusiastic hotel staff and why you appreciate them so much. 

People absolutely will make their booking decisions based on such emotional content (and your staff will appreciate it too).

7. User Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is a valuable source of social proof – and something that your audience totally relies on. 

There are a few ways to get such quality user generated content. 

1. Through Guests: Encourage your guests to leave reviews online. Remember to use this content for testimonials! These days, the trend is to get a guest selfie posted on social media platforms. 
   
   You can later use this content on your social media. 
   
2. Influencers: You can partner with influencers of your industry who can give you traction through their own content. In return, you have to offer them free rooms or other bonuses when encouraging them to write about your hotel. 
   
   It’s a sure shot strategy to attract millennial travelers.
   
3. Partners: These are businesses you work with for events, catering, supplies, local activities, and so on.
   
   If you have a good relationship with these partners, talk about creating content together to cross-promote your brands. 

#Hotel content marketing tip: It’s the era of celebrity culture with fans showering their love for their “FAVES”. So if you have a celebrity visiting your town, talk about it. Consider posts like “Meet celebrity A hitting golf at... "

These were a few ideas for your hotel content marketing. 

Now that you know which types of content can you produce and promote, let’s move on to content strategy for your hotel. 

How to form a content marketing strategy for your hotel?

You cannot start content marketing just like that. Without a well-formulated content marketing strategy, you may not see impressive results. Or worse, you may not be able to DEFINE your results. 

Don’t panic. I have shared how to do that in this blog. 

All you have to do is follow these steps.

Step 1: Understand your target audience

Too many hotels make a mistake of advertising to anyone and everyone. In the end, their message impresses no one. 

If you have a property for everyone, you will end up with no one.

Modern tourists want a personalized service tailored to their preferences.  But, you cannot have an offer that meets everyone’s needs. So decide which market segment you want to focus on..

To know more about your audience type, dig out some past data and find out which type of guests do you welcome at your hotel often? Are they couples, millennial travellers or business travelers, families and groups?

This is important because the entire content you create should be intended for the target group you choose to serve.

Step 2: Set the goals for your hotel content marketing

When you set your target audience, it’s important to know why you are creating content for them.

Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with the content you post on the hotel website, blog and social networks?

Of course, you want more bookings, but are those direct bookings or OTA bookings? 

Any strategy or plan without goal is just a wish. 

You should set specific goals for every piece of content you create. Without a goal, you may never realize what you have achieved. 

Do you want to increase the visibility of your hotel, or to strengthen your brand, get new guests or increase the number of visitors to your website? 

So, analyse your hotel’s requirements and set your goals accordingly. 

Step 3: Define your content tone and adhere to it

Hotel content writing is not as easy as it sounds. 

You should develop the content creation procedures – how photos are uploaded on different channels, what size should be used, what kind of copy goes with them, and so on.

These templates may take a little more time in the beginning, but they will also bring you recognition and save time later.

Moreover, this will make it easier for more people to do the job, or when “introducing” a new person – it’s much easier if there is a pattern that is being monitored.

Step 4: Tell your story

Storytelling is currently the biggest trend in hotel content marketing.

The stories are interesting and people love them.

They can sometimes be told with just one photo. Create your own little everyday stories, which convey your property’s characteristics. 

Make sure you tell the stories of YOUR hotel, and not copy those which you find interesting. , and not copy the others that are interesting to you.

You may like to read: 7 Ways to Use Storytelling for Brilliant Hotel Marketing 

Step 5: Stay active on social media

Use social networks in a professional way.

Although they should be used in a professional way, this does not mean that you need to have a boring corporate approach.

Social networks offer you an ideal opportunity to present your offer in an informal way, as you may not be able to do it on the website.

Use the opportunity to be witty and interesting.

Choose the right voice for social networking. How? Well, remember your research on your target audience. Who are these people, what do they want to hear from you, how can you address them? 

You need to have all these answers in your target audience analysis, and if you do not have one, do the analysis again, in great detail. This will help you to craft your social media messages to the specific needs and interests of your audience.

Create a content strategy for each social network. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you strategize your hotel’s social media marketing.  

Coordinate your hotel content marketing distribution through different channels. There are several places on the internet where the potential customer can see your offer: hotel website, social networks, blogs, e-mail, etc.

Design the procedures for placing content across these channels: when to post, who should post, and so on.

Step 6: Analyse regularly

Do not be afraid to look at your analytics. Do it daily, but make sure you know how to read what the data tells you. It is

Though, it’s not enough to just see your analytics. Track them, monitor them. You’ll be able to use them to make better marketing decisions. 

Look at pages that have higher visibility and are ranked well on Google. Make more of these content and pages. BUT, make sure it is unique and comprehensive. 

Find pages having low visits, low rankings, higher bounce rates. Analyze these pages, try to conclude why they are not performing so well and change them, or, in the end, delete them.

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Though seems simple and easy; email marketing is really a vast topic.

In this blog, I’m sharing a complete guide to hotel email marketing. 

It includes:

To begin with, let’s start with:

What is email marketing?

Putting it in simple words, email marketing is the art of using emails to promote your products or services.

Moving on to a broader definition, it is all about using emails (promotional or transactional) to cultivate relationships with prospects, and keep current customers updated on your brand. 

So, email marketing for the hospitality industry would mean; nurturing your booking inquiries to confirm bookings and engaging with your existing (and past) guests to keep you remembered – through emails. 

Why do hotels need email marketing?

Because, 94% of internet users use email. Suffice to say, emails are the most common means of communication currently. And they’re not going to lose their charm for a long, long time to come. 

Here, I’ve listed some benefits and uses of hotel email marketing. 

1. To spread brand awareness

Everything aside, the primary goal of hotel email marketing is branding. You are reaching out to your email list, engaging with them and nurturing them to book with you. 

Of course, not all emails may convert into bookings. But your emails will keep you in the recipients’ minds for sure. Even if they don’t choose you at the moment, they would remember you when they wish to visit again. 

The key is to have an informational approach rather than promotional. 

Share your blogs, region’s history, guided tours, recent updates, events and everything related to keep your guests informed. 

Once your brand is known to provide value to guests, add promotional elements subtly – which will eventually get your readers to prefer booking with you. 

2. To keep your existing and past guests engaged

Emails add a personal touch to your engagement, making your guests feel valued at every stage – from booking to even after the departure.

I’m throwing some light on how you can engage with your guests through email at each stage. 

• On booking: Effective booking confirmation emails are a great start to the guest’s journey with your property. Highlight your specials, suggest them an upgrade; and leave a memorable first impression on your guests. (READ: A guide to designing attractive booking confirmation emails)
• Pre-arrival: Your guests would be visiting for a myriad of reasons. Address those reasons before they arrive and give them a chance to explore your region. Make them aware of what you have to offer to make their stay memorable. Do not forget to mention your pick-up and drop-off services if you’re providing them. 
• On arrival and during-the-stay: Acknowledging their check-in would showcase your agility and quick response to their arrival. Emails during their arrival and their stay can talk about the current events in and around your property and quick suggestions to improve their day. 
• On departure: Similar to their on-arrival emails, your emails on guest’s departure should include their total bill, acknowledgement of the payment; and most importantly – your gratitude for them choosing to stay with you. 
• Post departure: Emails sent after their departure play an important role in bringing your guests back at your property. Send them updates of your property regularly, birthday and anniversary wishes, offers you’re running and festival greetings. 

It’s absolutely important that you focus on email marketing at all stages of a guest’s life cycle. Your hotel’s brand awareness will improve as a result. 

3. To convert probable guests

Probable guests include all the booking inquiries you’ve received up till now – whether from social media or from your website or even on phone. 

Cultivate a practice to collect email address, phone number and basic details from those inquiries. This will help you be in touch with those probable guests over time and have a higher chance to convert them into bookings. 

Promotional emails work best for this type of recipient. They’ve already expressed an interest in booking with you. So, a little push and they may turn into a loyal customer. 

4. To get higher ROI

Surprisingly, email marketing can get you the highest ROI. (Yes, even more than any other channel).

If we look at the stats, an estimated ROI of £30 can be achieved for every £1 spent with email marketing with conversion rates going 3 times higher than social media. 

That is because it does not need much effort or investment to run once you’ve begun. And, if planned and executed wisely, email marketing can definitely give you desired results. 

In addition to all of this, email marketing for hotels is a powerful medium to communicate with guests and keep them interested in their property. 

How to start email marketing for your hotel?

Email marketing includes a lot of elements; small yet important to get it up and running for any business. You miss one element, and you won’t get desired results. 

So, here, I’m listing a few mandatory requirements to kick start your hotel email marketing. 

PREREQUISITE: Subscriber’s box

Ask yourself a question. What’s required to send emails? 

Email addresses. Obvious. 

And where will you get those email addresses from? 

Yeah, you have email addresses of your past guests and maybe those of your upcoming guests as well. But do you want to limit it to just that? That’s why, the first requirement for email marketing is a subscriber box. 

If you have a website, DO NOT MISS to add a subscriber box; and make sure it is properly visible. 

If you don’t have a website, collect email addresses from inquiries coming through phone, social media and even in the guest registration cards when guests are checking in. 

Step 1: Build a list

Before you start sending out emails, you need to build a strong list of contacts (emails).

That sounds easy, sure; but how do you actually create a great email list?

Start with your subscribers and guests. Secondly, filter your email list regularly (say every 3-4 months). This will ensure that your emails are sent to relevant audiences, and limit your spam or unsubscribe ratio. 

Use metrics like open rates, bounce rates, and engagement to filter your list (more explained later).

I’d recommend NOT TO DELETE those contacts. You can remove them from your email list, but do keep them in your contact list so that you can engage with them through a different channel. 

Step 2: Segment your list

Your current list must be having emails of your existing guests, new ones, subscribers, booking inquiries and many more.

But, one thing to consider in your hotel email marketing is – you cannot (and should not) send the same emails to different kinds of audiences. Because all of them are signed up with you for different reasons. Few may be on the verge of booking, others may be considering your competitors; while the rest of them would be just exploring. 

That’s why, segmenting your list is a must. 

You can have the following segments: 

• Domestic and international travelers
• Luxury and business travelers
• Preferences 
• Frequency and duration of visits
• Deals and specials signups
• Guests who have cancelled a booking

Once you have the segments ready, it becomes easy for you to send relevant emails. 

For example: In case of business travelers, you can highlight your meeting and conference rooms, WiFi speed, and more. Whereas, luxury travelers can be made aware of the various recreational services and amenities that you offer. 

Step 3: Choose an email marketing tool

If you want to send emails to a lot of people at once, then an email marketing tool is the best way to do that. These tools have gained quite a fame in the past years. They’re extremely easy to use, are reasonable; and some of them even have a free plan which suits small to mid sized businesses. 

Here’s a list of a few email marketing software for hotels that you can use:

1. Mailchimp 
2. Sendgrid
3. Campaign Monitor
4. Aweber

Most of these tools also help you schedule your emails and even help in segmenting your list effectively. If you don’t have that big of an email list, you can start with GMass or MailMerge to send bulk emails from your GMail account. 

Step 4: Ensure that your emails are branded

Do keep this in mind for ANY email you send out. 

Your emails should tell the recipients about you. They should be able to identify with the sender and connect with the email. 

So, do not forget to add your logo, your property’s name and address and reply-to email in your emails. Keep them added in your templates, so that you don’t miss them. 

Step 5: Have a landing page

If I have to explain in simple words, a landing page is a web page that is created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s the page where visitors ‘land’ after they click on a link in an email, ads, social media, or anywhere else. The landing page is supposed to convert your visitors to leads – with information presented in a precise way to get the visitors to fill a form.

Here, for hotels, the landing page can be their booking page. If you want your visitors to book with you, your booking page should be attractive and engaging enough to make the booking or at least, make an inquiry. 

Your promotional emails must include a link to your landing page (booking page or contact us page). For other types of emails, you can share relevant links which can be your homepage, your blogs, amenities, hosted events and such likes. 

ADD ON: Try to expand your email list

This is something which can be done after your hotel email marketing is all set and running. 

Try expanding your email list apart from your guests and subscribers. Consider getting email addresses of guests booking through OTAs, run ads, try getting inquiries if not bookings. This will definitely build your email list, and give you a quality audience. 

Now that you know where to start email marketing for your property, let me share the type of emails hotels can send. 

What types of emails can hotels send?

Well, if I have to say, then there’s nothing as versatile as emails. They have the power to make or break your brand’s image. There are promotional emails, educational emails, announcements, updates, and so many which you can explore. 

For hotels though, these types of emails would be most beneficial. 

1. Promotional emails

Emails are the most effective way of letting people know about the special offers, discounts and promotions running at your property. 

These emails usually convey a sense of urgency, and focus on the benefits and inclusions of your promotions. 

Adopting a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) approach for your promotional emails would work wonders. 

For example:
1. Thanksgiving Celebrations at Royal Beach Resort. Book before 20th October!
2. Book your stay for Sunburn. Valid for next 10 days ONLY.

You can combine such emails with festive days like Valentine’s day, Mother’s day; as well as your regional festivals. You’d know best when people visit your property, so make the most of that knowledge. 

2. Highlighter emails

While most of your emails would highlight something or the other, send these types of emails where you can remind people about your beautiful location, local gourmet food and experiences, services and amenities. You can also add about local attractions, seasonal delights if there are any. 

Besides this, these emails can mention your newly added services or amenities at your property which can help the readers know what to expect when they visit your property anytime. 

For example: If you mention your SPA amenities in an email sent to luxury travelers, imagine how it would turn out. They’d love it and would even like to know more about it. 

Besides, you can even couple this information with offers before the holidays. This will make your guests excited to visit your hotel.

3. Event emails

Use emails to tell your audience the different kinds of events that will take place at your property – festivals celebrations, parties, conferences, seminars or some fun workshops. 

Your event emails should trigger the psyche of your receivers. You can use subject lines like - Manasi, you could be at the Tokyo Food Festival. (I’d definitely open this email!)

In addition, do keep a tab on global and local events happening in your city like Tomorrowland, La Tomatina. You can then highlight these events, past year’s pictures and other details in your emails. 

Later on, subtly ask them to book their stay with your hotel, if they are planning to be a part of such an event. 

4. Festival greeting emails

Make a list of important festivals in your region and mark them on your calendar. Now, it is NOT mandatory to combine a deal or offer in your festival greeting emails. They can be simple – sharing only happy thoughts and wishes.

Schedule such emails beforehand, so that you don’t miss these opportunities. Showcase your property’s festive decors, celebrations happening if any; give them an idea of your property’s environment during these festivals. 

These greeting emails also include birthday and anniversary wishes for your guests. This is a great way to make them feel valued and special. 

5. Loyalty program (Reward) emails

Now, loyalty programs are a powerful tool to increase your repeat customers and increase brand value. Add email marketing to that, and you’d rule at running those programs. 

If you have segmented your existing (past) guests well, then you can easily send them emails about your loyalty programs. Mention about your program, its benefits and how they can enroll for that. Do not forget how they can redeem their reward points, and how much can they save once they enroll. 

You need to build really attractive loyalty programs to have your guests join in, and equally attractive emails to go for it. 

6. Feedback collection emails

This is probably the most important email for hotels. You’ve welcomed your guests, provided them a great experience and now it’s time to get feedback on that stay and service

Keep your emails simple with a mention of gratitude for staying with you, and welcoming them again at your property. Such emails can either include a quick survey or a link to your TripAdvisor, OTA or social media profiles where they can leave you a review. 

7. Emails for abandoned bookings

According to a report released by Boxever and Skift, abandonment rates in the travel industry are a hefty 81%. This leads to a huge loss of potential revenue.

But an enticing follow-up email can help you win back those lost customers and convince them to complete the booking.

Here, timing matters. A study by SaleCycle revealed that the most effective abandonment emails are sent out within 20 minutes after a cart has been left. 

These emails should be short and to-the-point, influencing the visitor to finish the booking. You can send them an offer, a coupon code or a discount on the booking itself, or on an in-house extra such as a spa treatment, free room service, or a meal in your hotel’s restaurant.

So, these are a few types of emails you can include in your hotel email marketing. Do note that these are not the same as the pre-arrival, on-arrival and during-the-stay emails we talked about previously. These topics are PURELY to improve your branding and nurture your guests.

Now, we’ve seen how to start email marketing for your hotel, and what kind of topics you can cover. Let’s move on to the MOST important aspect – writing effective emails.

How to write effective emails for your hotel’s email marketing?

Gone are the days, when the guest experience used to begin at your hotel premises. These days, tech-savvy guests (READ: Modern) observe every single detail. Be it the booking confirmation email that you’ve sent, or even the feedback email – YOU HAVE TO NAIL THEM. 

55% of hotel guests are willing to receive personalized offers or promotions in exchange for personal details.

Oracle

Let’s see how you can write good emails. 

Step 1: Choose your audience

The very first step is to choose the audience you want to send emails to. Understand their purpose of subscribing with you. Think about what they would like to receive from you. 

Your audience selection will help you further decide the topic of your email campaign.

So, choose your audience wisely. 

Step 2: Select an email topic

Once your audience is finalized, start thinking about what they’d like to hear from you. Would they like to hear about your promotions, or new additions to your property? Or would they be interested in an event you’re hosting? 

Ask yourself – why do you want to send an email?

1. To promote your festive offer
2. For upselling your new amenities
3. To acquire more bookings in your weak season
4. To share about an event

Or it can be anything from the topics I mentioned in the previous section. It is not necessary that your email should focus on any one topic. You can combine multiple topics (yet relevant ones), and ensure that each of the topics is given equal importance in your email. 

Step 3: Have an attractive subject line

There’s a reason emails have gained popularity over the years. They reach right in your recipient’s inbox, and almost everyone checks their emails every day. 

But while it is important to stay in touch with your customers through emails, it’s MORE important to get those emails opened. And your email’s subject line is the first thing recipients will read. 

Your subject line is the deciding factor of your email’s success. 

How to create subject lines that get your emails opened?

1. Keep it short. The subject lines of 60 characters are visible on desktop and upto 25-30 characters are visible on mobile. So, the shorter, the better!
2. Personalization is a must. It improves your open rate by 82% (SaleCycle). Make sure that you emphasize more on such emails.
3. Generate curiosity through your subject lines. Ask questions. 
4. Use the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) approach. 
5. Include proof of concept – numbers that your guests would like to know. 
6. Avoid using spammy words like FREE, OFFER and so on.

If you are using an email marketing tool, a few of them will have an option of adding a preview text. The preview text is the text visible under your subject line. It is most useful for people reading emails from their mobile phones. 

Here’s where and how the preview text looks in desktop and mobile devices.

Your preview text should compliment your subject line, and should make complete sense while connecting with the audience as well. 

Step 4: Write proper content

A non-negotiable aspect – write proper, attractive and effective content in your emails. Your content should connect with your subject line and your purpose of sending that email. 

When you create your email content, you HAVE TO consider following things;

• Grab your audience’s attention from the very beginning
• Keep the interest and engagement consistent throughout the email
• End your email with a quick but compelling call to action (CTA). 

Keep the purpose and goal of your email in mind, and ensure that it is met in your content. 

Step 5: Add images for engagement

Do not forget to share beautiful images of your hotel, landscape, and amenities. The visuals impact your readers to a great extent. 

The average person remembers 80% of what they see and only 20% of what they read. 

Medium

If the email topic is not connected to your hotel’s pictures, then add a generalized image reflecting the topic of your email. There are various sites online where you can find versatile images free-of-cost such as pexels, pixabay, unsplash, and more. 

So, this was all about how you can write good emails.

Now, you’ve got all the elements ready to start your hotel email marketing. This would be a good time to consider a few important parameters while creating your email campaigns. 

Email marketing checklist

Every email should be sent with utmost care. But I’ve seen and made my fair share of misses and mistakes in emails over the past years I’ve worked in eZee. 

So, I am providing you an email marketing checklist which will help you ensure that you don’t make any mistakes and your emails are well received. 

1. Timings of emails

While the “what” and “why” of sending emails is crucial, the “when” just cannot be ignored. You need to be very cautious about WHEN you are sending your emails. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind while deciding your email timings. 

1. Which day of the week?
   For instance, Mondays are generally busy for your receivers, and on weekends they would hardly glance at their emails. So, choose any day between Tuesday – Friday. 
2. What time of the day?
   Avoid working hours when you send emails. You can try sending them during lunch time, but the best time would be in the morning or in the evening – before and after the working hours. 

Do consider the timezone for your international guests. You don’t want to send them emails at an awkward hour. 

2. Keep a check on recipients and sender

I know you must have an audience in mind while planning an email campaign. Make sure that you have selected the same audience when you’re about to send your email. 

Similarly, your email’s sender is absolutely paramount. Your emails should be sent from your hotel’s official email address. This would make them look authentic and affect your email open rates. The email address can be your manager’s, your own, or even a generalized one (Example: reservations@royalbeachresort.com). 

3. Add personalization

Personalization would mean – addressing the recipients by their names, adding variables like their preferences, their nationality, and other details depending on your email content. Such additions will make them connect with your email in a finer way. 

If we go by the facts, personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%. 

Demand Gen Report

That being said, with personalized emails, you’re increasing the likelihood of your readers engaging with your emails. 

So, consider this factor a powerful one. 

4. Avoid spamming

Oh, the most essential aspect of email marketing. As easy or straightforward email marketing sounds, it all comes down under the spam test. 

Sure, you get to reach your audience’s inbox directly, but if your email content or the subject line has any spam element in it, all your efforts will go in vain. 

#1 rule of email marketing is to get permission to email first. Never buy a list of email addresses, or you risk violating the CAN-SPAM Act and may be subject to penalties of up to $16,000.

A few examples of spam words you can avoid are:

1. FREE
2. 50% OFF
3. Congratulations!
4. Compare rates
5. Save big bucks
6. Full refund
7. No hidden fees
8. This isn’t spam
9. Deal
10. The best rates

You can check out the full list here. 

Avoid such words at all costs to send your emails in the inbox rather than spam.

5. Frequency of emails

Your frequency of sending emails has a significant impact on your hotel email marketing’s success. 

When you plan out all the emails beforehand, you can be sure that you are sending emails at right intervals. 

A hotel is not a news publication, and nobody wants or is expecting a daily or weekly tap on the shoulder from you.

A monthly or even a fortnightly schedule is fine, unless you have something exciting to share. Never skip more than one month, as some people may forget that they signed up for your newsletter; and may not engage with your emails further.  

Remember: Not too often. Not too late.

6. Test your emails before sending them

The last, and most important part of your email marketing checklist – TESTING. 

It is always better to test your email before sending out the final copy. Send it to yourself and your team, and check the following things: 

1. Grammar and spelling errors
2. Broken links
3. CTAs
4. Overall look and feel
5. Responsiveness of your email
6. The subject line

Testing your emails would help you ensure that you’re sending the right and proper content to your audience. If you leave any mistake in your emails, it will affect your brand value at a large extent. 

Now that your email marketing is up and running, you’d like to see how your emails are performing. So, I’ll guide you on how to analyse your email marketing’s success. 

How to analyse email marketing?

You’re investing a lot of effort and time in hotel email marketing. So, certainly, it is vital to analyse how it’s doing.

But the email marketing stats often overwhelm us and we get confused as to what actually makes sense. So, I’m listing down a few email marketing metrics that would help you to measure your performance. 

1. Open rates

Your open rate is the percentage of your recipients who opened your email. This metric lets you know how many people find your email useful, and how many people are actually wishing to read your email. 

The better your subject lines, the higher your open rates.

Additionally, the sender of your email would also affect your open rates. If people know that it’s sent as a generalized marketing email, then they may not open it. 

Do consider unique open rates, rather than total open rates. Total open rates also include the email being opened again and again in case of a group email. Whereas, unique open rates give a unique count of people engaging with your email. 

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

Your click-through rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link inside your email. Most of the time, getting your subscribers to click on a link inside your email will be the main goal of your campaign, so this is an important metric to measure.

Click-through rate: Total Clicks * 100 / Emails Delivered

DO NOT confuse this with the click rate which calculates the number of times your recipients clicked a link in your email against the number who opened the email. 

Generally, your clickthrough rate is dependent on the following factors:

•  The anchor text on the link
•  Location of the link in your email body
•  No. of links in your email

This metric denotes the engagement ratio of your recipients with your email. The higher your CTR, the more attractive your emails are. Which is how you know that you’re hitting the bull’s eye. 

3. Unsubscribe rate

Your unsubscribe rate is the percentage of your email recipients who unsubscribed with you through the current email. 

Unsubcribe rate = Total Unsubscribers * 100 / Emails Delivered

There are many factors that can affect your unsubscribe rate. Unengaging emails, misleading content and subject lines, unknown sender, infrequent emails are a few of them. 

Limit your unsubscribes by keeping the above factors in mind. 

4. Bounce rate

Your bounce rate is the percentage of undelivered emails out of total emails sent. Basically, the higher your bounce rate, the more unengaged your recipients are. 

Bounce is of 2 types – hard bounce and soft bounce.

Hard bounce means that either the email is invalid or it does not exist. Whereas, soft bounce would mean that the recipient’s mailbox is full or the email server is temporarily unavailable. 

You should worry about hard bounces in your email marketing. If the hard bounce count is high, it means you NEED to filter your email list ASAP and validate those emails. 

5. Conversion rate/Responses

The conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who performed the action and met the purpose of your email. 

If you wanted a booking, then the action would be a booking; if you wanted a website visit, then that would be your action. 

Conversion rate: Total Conversions * 100 / Emails Delivered

This metric lets you know how conversion-friendly your email was, and the level of engagement it had with your recipients. In such cases, you also have to ensure that your website or landing page is equally optimized for conversions. 

This metrics can reveal what you did right, which areas need improvement and which type of content performs the best. 

Now, if you have good click-through rates but no conversions, it means your target page is not converting well. Whereas, if you have good opens, but low CTR; it means your CTA is not compelling your recipients. 

Once you know what works, you can tailor your content accordingly, try to overcome the drawbacks, and improve the results. 

Here’s a short video on the A to Z of hotel email marketing:

That was all you needed to know to begin your hotel email marketing. I’m also covering some frequently asked questions to resolve any doubts you may have. 

Frequently asked questions

If you have any other questions in your mind, drop them in the comments below. I’ll address them in the best way I can.

The post A Complete Guide to Hotel Email Marketing appeared first on eZee Absolute.

In one of our previous blogs, we talked about how to avoid negative reviews. But today, in this article, we will provide you with some amazing tips on how to handle the good, the bad, and the ugly of hotel reviews.

Whether you’re dealing with a rave review or a scathing critique, we’ve got you covered. So grab a cup of coffee (or a stiff drink) and let’s get to work on managing your online reputation!

And we’ll get there step by step. But let’s start with basics first.

Online Hotel Reviews: How important are they?

Imagine running a hotel with no reviews. Guests come and go, no feedbacks recorded anywhere! And you have no idea how your guests found their stay. Was it good? Bad? Would they come back again? Would they recommend your property to their friends and family? All that remains unanswered.

Doesn’t this sound like a half baked fortune cookie?

Needless to say, your guest reviews have a significant impact on how travellers book for their stay. Figures have it all:

A whopping 93% of people check hotel reviews before booking a room.

AND

33% of guests do not prefer to book a hotel with no reviews.

If that’s not enough, there are a few other reasons why online hotel reviews are important for your property:

• To improve your hotel’s online ranking and visibility: In this era of content driven business, reviews add a lot of value to your hotel. Reviews also show at the top of Google searches. This helps improve your hotel’s rankings, brings awareness and visibility to your hotel. More visibility means more bookings and hence more revenue!
• Know where you stand: Guest reviews help you consistently improve your hotel’s performance in terms of service, operations and management. They help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and work on them.
• Improve booking opportunities: To say the least, reviews can make or mar a booking. Studies have shown that almost 70% of people’s purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews.

Moreover, a recent Barclays study reveals that there is an extra £3.2 billion to be earned over the next decade if the hotel sector becomes more attentive to online reviews.

With these reasons and figures, it’s time to ask guests for reviews after their stay. These reviews will add value in terms of unique, interesting and helpful content around your brand.

Our blog on Hotel Reviews and Reputation Management will give you a detailed insight on how to maintain your property’s online reputation.

Types of hotel reviews

We are sure you and your staff make all possible efforts to maintain a good reputation, but there are good days and bad days.

There are times when guests do not like the service, food, rooms or there might be other complaints in spite of your best attempts.

On the other hand, guests might appreciate your endeavors and give reviews out of will and joy. Let’s see the type of reviews you may get:

1. Positive hotel reviews

Happy or positive hotel reviews are not a rare thing to happen. If your guests are happy, had a good time at your property, have had excellent service that has made their stay memorable; they’ll go ahead and give you those sparkling 5-stars.

Here’s a positive hotel review sample:

2. Neutral hotel reviews

Neutral reviews arise when guests are satisfied with one of your facility, but are not happy with another. These guests do not wish to complain strongly, but at the same time, want to bring their experience to everyone’s notice.

Here’s an example of a neutral hotel review:

3. Negative hotel reviews

Your guests will use reviews to share about the bad experience they had at your property.

Do keep in mind that guests leaving negative hotel reviews are more active than those sharing positive reviews.

Afterall, you were not able to meet their expectations.

Most of the times, negative hotel reviews are genuine. But at other times, people might not be truthful about them. What do you do in such cases?

Here’s a genuine negative hotel review example:

Negative hotel reviews are very sensitive, and responding to a negative review might pose as a whole new challenge.

You should not let a fake, non genuine negative review affect your reputation.

Why do hotels get negative reviews?

There are a number of guests that visit your property. All of them have different requirements and expectations from your property. Of course there are shortcomings, but not all guests overlook those small things.

That is to say, you might be able to satisfy some, and few might not be happy with what you had to offer to them.

This is the main reason, along with few others mentioned here; why, in spite of all your efforts, there are negative reviews:

• Delay in check-in/check-out or other services
• Improper (unclean) rooms and housekeeping
• Staff’s mistakes (complaints about staff behaviour)
• Maintenance issues/complaints
• Additional charges or billing errors
• Bad customer experience in general

There might be more reasons for a negative review. You need to figure that out for a bad hotel review and respond to them accordingly.

Tip: You might want to get some tips on how to handle hotel guest complaints. 

Why should hotels respond to reviews?

As a matter of fact, reviews when published are open and public for the world to see and act on. A study says that:

A difference of 1 star in the ratings can result in 9% difference in revenue. 

Convert with content

Therefore, your hotel review responses will not only show your credibility, but also indicate your acceptance towards the feedback you get.

Here are a few more reasons on why you should respond to hotel reviews:

• To show that you have a great customer service: Replying to a review shows that you are listening and you care about your guests. The social world we are living in demands to be heard and to be responded to. Guests are more likely to visit and book your property if they see your responses on reviews. 
• To build a relationship and maintain reputation: Because you responded, you are now registered in the mind of a future guest. Besides, you also have the opportunity to build a relationship and increase the chances of that guest coming back to your hotel or recommending you to his friends and family. 
• To change the perception of reviewers: When you respond to a negative review which is fake and stand for yourself, you change the mindset of people reading the review. In this way, they get more inclined towards booking your property. 
• To gain insights: When responding to a negative review, you have an opportunity to gain insight from the interaction with the guest. If the problem mentioned by the guest is true, you have a chance to dig deeper, take the conversation offline and fix the problem so that future guests do not have to face the same thing.

A review once posted publicly cannot be undone. Yes, it can be edited on some platforms, but deletion might not be possible.

Here the perfect way to let the guests know what went wrong or what can be improved in the future is to respond to their reviews in the best possible way.

How to draft hotel review responses?

The importance of writing a response is pretty much evident by now. Each portal has guidelines, decorum and good behaviour norms that should be adhered to while writing a response. 

Positive hotel review responses might be easier and straightforward to draft. But as I mentioned previously, responding to negative hotel reviews is a tougher nut to crack.

And firstly, most of the hotels ask this one question very frequently:
How to respond to negative hotel reviews? OR How can I reply to negative TripAdvisor reviews?

And why not. Negative hotel reviews not only show your property in a bad light, but also influence your future guests to not book with you. For this reason, negative hotel review responses should be mandatory in your list.

So let’s focus on that first.

How to respond to negative hotel reviews?

While responding to a negative hotel review, or in fact any kind of your hotel reviews online, you need to follow certain guidelines.

I mean, you cannot just respond to all the reviews in the same way. Because each guest is going to talk about something different or the other. One may point out the perfect location of your property, and the other may highlight your staff’s inattentiveness.

Considering all those factors, we’ve drafted an ideal hotel review response formula, which can be primarily used to respond to your negative reviews.

Besides this, I’ve got some additional tips to draft effective hotel review responses:

Tip 1: When you offer a solution to the problem, take those conversations into a private space. Contact them directly if you can, or ask them to email you.  

Tip 2: Your entire response should be written in a respectful tone. It should NOT sound rude to the guests.

Tip 3: See if you can have your hotel’s guest relations manager or general manager respond to your reviews. This will leave a better impact on the guest and viewers.

Now let’s come back to positive and neutral hotel reviews.

How to respond to neutral and positive hotel reviews?

Unlike negative reviews, responding to positive hotel reviews is most of the times simple and straightforward.

So, you’d want to thank the guest for giving you a positive feedback, and even welcome him back at your hotel at the same time.

For neutral hotel reviews; well these kind of reviews are a mix of positive and negative. This is where you are confused whether to thank him for the good things he said or apologize for the experience he had.

How should an ideal hotel review response be?

An ideal hotel review reply should contain everything that you want to tell your guest.

Our free hotel review response templates will help you immensely in writing response on any of the portals such as TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com, Facebook.

These hotel review reply templates are ready-to-use and include negative hotel review response examples as well as positive hotel review response templates.

Let’s see an example. Say you get a negative hotel review as below:

Disappointing experience
The Hotel Manager is extremely rude. The facilities inside the room are horrible. Even the appliances don't work properly. I will never come to this hotel any more and will advise everyone not to commit the mistake of choosing this hotel for staying - you will repent.

In our hotel review response templates, you’ll find an optimum approach to respond to a negative hotel guest review like above.

Using the negative hotel review response template in our document, the response to the above review can go like:

Hi Guest, 

Thank you very much for making time to give us feedback. We’re really sorry for the inconvenience you had. We have addressed this straight away to our staff and escalated it to the management for immediate action; to ensure that this incident is not repeated again. At present we’re taking steps to upgrade our room facilities, and also implementing utmost care in our appliance maintenance. We’d like to invite you again at our hotel and experience the improved stay. If you have any further concerns, please share it with us at: grievances@royalbeachresort.com. Your feedbacks and suggestions are always welcome.

Hoping to see you soon!

Regards,
Edward Joe
Royal Beach Resort

We’re sure, these free hotel review reply samples will answer all your questions viz.

1. How to respond to reviews on TripAdvisor?
2. Ways to effectively respond to hotel reviews on Google
3. How to respond to guest complaints in hotel?
4. How to respond to positive hotel reviews?

Our templates will work for any platform, may it be TripAdvisor, Google, Facebook including the OTAs you are listed on.

Above all, as there is an abundance of platforms to write reviews on, you might lose a track to reply to reviews everywhere. A lot of hotels these days use review management software to track their online reviews and respond to them quickly.

Some systems also have an option to save your templates, and use them to respond to reviews with minor edits.

See, how Critique (eZee’s review management system) tracks and manages your reviews and helps you enhance your online reputation.

FAQs

We have gathered and addressed a few frequently asked questions by our customers which they encounter while responding to reviews.

If you have any other questions in mind about hotel review replies or need some help in responding to your hotel reviews, feel free to ask in the comment section below. I’d be happy to answer. 

In conclusion

Reviews give a picture of your property to future guests and your responses to those reviews build a good reputation and trust in your property.

So, while your hotel review responses would be great, but it is equally important for you to ask humbly for reviews when customers check-out.

Give them the best possible service so that you have to deal with less of negative reviews. A good review is the best way to do a word of mouth publicity for your property.

Take tips from your negative hotel reviews to improve your services and experience they get.

Use our free template which contains positive, neutral and negative hotel review examples for you to use.

The post How to Respond to Positive and Negative Hotel Reviews? [FREE Templates] appeared first on eZee Absolute.