What is a hotel newsletter?
A hotel newsletter is an email marketing tool designed to help create and nurture your relationship with existing and potential customers, enhance brand loyalty, and boost revenue. The content of your emails will depend on your own preferences, but will typically contain news, updates, promotions, and destination-specific news designed to connect with your audience and drive direct bookings.
Why are hotel newsletters important?
Hotel newsletters are important in the hotel industry because they help to promote and enhance your hotel brand. By creating high-quality content, you can set your brand apart from the competition, showcase your guest experience, and give potential and past guests a reason to engage with your brand. That way they think of your hotel when it comes time to book.
Newsletters can:
- Drive direct bookings
- Create brand loyalty
- Foster lasting guest relationships
- Answer FAQs that could be barriers to booking
- Allow you to gather information about guest preferences and profiles (based on the content they most consume)
- Enable you to leverage customer data to create more personalized experiences
Top marketing tools for hoteliers
There are a range of email marketing platforms to choose from, including Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Constant Contact. Ideally, you'll want to find a platform that will help you automate and optimize your processes so that creating a hotel newsletter is as straightforward as possible.
Some hotel property management systems like Mews, for example, will have integrations that will allow you to do everything within a single platform. This can enable you to create a user-friendly newsletter template that can be easily used by anyone on the marketing team to create top-notch emails and drive significant results.
5 tips when creating a newsletter strategy for your hotel
Now that you're convinced that you need a newsletter, let's take a look at some tips to get started.
1. Define your audience
The email newsletter you send to a business traveler won't be the same as the one you send to a leisure guest. The same goes for the emails you send to return guests or potential guests that found your brand via a webinar, social media, or who filled their details into a landing page. This is why it's important to define and segment your audience so that your message can be targeted to meet their needs.
2. Create conversion-oriented content
Your email content needs to be both engaging and focused on conversions. What this means is that you need to offer your audience interesting tips, local events, and brand stories that can help them connect with your brand, whilst also including deals and promotions with a clear call to action like "book now" so that you can measure how your content is performing.
3. The subject line is key
One of the most important parts of a newsletter is the subject line. It's so important, in fact, that many marketeers will do A/B testing to see what kind of subject line performs better. Make sure it's short, catchy, and creates an emotional connection with your audience.
4. Make it appealing
Beyond just ensuring the subject line is a winner, making the actual visual appeal of the content attractive can also improve how your newsletters perform. Make sure they are optimized for mobile though, as people are consuming content from their mobiles now more than ever.
5. Monitor progress and success
It's important to track hotel metrics like click-through rates, open rates, and conversion rates to understand how well your newsletter is performing and if you need to make any adjustments to see better results.
Crafting the perfect hotel newsletter
Crafting the perfect hotel newsletter starts with understanding who your audience is so that you can adapt your message to speak to their needs and desires. Do you have a special offer or promotion? Is there a local event that they might enjoy?
Make sure your content is engaging, tells a story and is supported by high-quality images that show off your property or local area.
You also need to establish a frequency to stay consistent and a goal so that you can measure how you're performing.
Unique aspects of hotel newsletters
A hotel newsletter should create an emotional connection with your audience, show captivating imagery, and give people a reason to engage. The right content about local events and festivals, or a local travel guide can connect your target audience with your hotel's destination and set them on the path to booking with you.
How to set your newsletter apart
Now that you know some unique aspects of newsletters, let's take a look at how you can stand out.
Tailored content for the hospitality industry
Travelers want to connect with their destinations and one of the best ways to take advantage of this is by focusing on local attractions and events in your email newsletter. Create the right story, with your hotel in the center, and you'll establish a connection to your audience.
Website integration for a seamless experience
By integrating a landing page into your newsletter, you can direct readers to your website for a seamless booking experience. From looking at your exclusive promotion to booking with you directly, the entire process should be completely smooth.
Enhancing guest relationships
Your newsletter content needs to provide value to your readers, or you run the risk of them unsubscribing. With that in mind, you want to find the perfect balance between updating them on your hotel or the hospitality industry, and giving them exclusive offers that make them feel valued and like they're saving money. This will then help you increase engagement and boost the results of your campaigns.
4 best examples of hotel newsletters
1. St. Martins Lane
This luxury hotel starts one of their newsletters with a fun and direct question "What time is it?" which they use to promote their new bar and terrace. It features a vibrant design and a call to action to "book now", as well as an embedded Instagram feed to show off their social proof.
2. Dream Inn
The Dream Inn is a beachfront resort with a specialty coffee shop and surf memorabilia. They start their newsletter with "We can't wait to welcome you to your dream vacation." and take full advantage of vibrant beach imagery with a special discount to excite their readers.
3. Booking.com
A travel agency might not exactly be a hotel, but Booking.com's Black Friday campaigns are too successful to ignore. With bold callouts like "Our Black Friday Deals are LIVE" combined with strict time limits, they manage to create a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and urgency.
4. Soho House
The popular boutique hospitality brand, Soho House, makes guests feel like valued and important with just a single line: "Stay like a member - not a guest". This bold statement helps reinforce exclusivity and makes guests want to book with them.
Choosing the best tool for hotel newsletters
The best tool for hotel newsletters is one that will integrate seamlessly with your hotel PMS, so that you have a single platform to manage everything. With all of your tools in a single place, you can easily segment audiences, personalize content, and optimize and track your various campaigns without switching between platforms.
Conclusion
Finally convinced that you need a newsletter for your hotel? Now you know how to get started, what you need to include to stand out from the crowd, and which specific tool to use. Put in the work with your email newsletter and you'll start to see positive results in customer engagement, brand awareness and loyalty, and customer retention.
On the lookout for a new property management system?
Download "The Hotelier's Guide to Changing PMS"
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