Learn the secret of the effective mailing

Is your contacts database growing every day? You prepare interesting offers and remember to put them into mailings? Do not forget to segment your guests to significantly increase the chances of receiving bookings.

Do you know what is most important before shopping? Preparation of the menu for the next days and with a view to it - product lists, preferably broken down into appropriate categories (vegetables, dairy products, etc.). The point is not to buy things that you probably will not use. Not only because of the growing problem of wasting food, but also to save time and money.

It’s the same with the mailing mail to guests. Not by dividing guests into segments first, but sending every mailing to every one of them, you waste time and you lose the chance to get more bookings. It turns out that despite the creation of an interesting offer and content, OR (open rate) is negligible, and CTR (the number of clicks in relation to impressions) is at a very low level. Your diligently created contact base is simply wasted.

Segmentation increases the opening coefficient by 15% and by as much as 60% the click rate (compared to non-segmented messages). Data MailChimp, 2017

Aim correctly

The key to communicating with guests is therefore personalization. If you want to reach a guest with an offer, it must be matched to his/her needs. Just like when building a rich contact database, you can also count on Profitroom CRM help in this matter.

Profitroom CRM is a virtual hotel employee that automates sales and marketing in the facility. Using CRM, visitor data (from both your website and OTA's) can be found in one place in the form of profiles that you can group as needed.

Your guest’s language

There is nothing more annoying than receiving messages in a language you do not understand ;)

The first thing when creating an email campaign should be to make sure that the content is clear to everyone. If you create messages only in your native tongue, make sure that it isn’t sent to foreigners and vice versa - by creating a campaign abroad, do not send it to guests from your country, who can simply be offended if they receive a newsletter in a foreign language, for example.

Your guests’ country

In order to get guests from abroad, we must also take into account the calendar of a given country. For example in Great Britain 1st of May is not bank holiday. By sending and promoting the 1st of May instead of the spring bank holiday offer among guests from Great Britain, you would not only waste your budget but also make them feel that the hotel did not put any effort to check to whom it sent a specific message. In turn, by creating packages for events and holidays that you don’t have in your country, you are able to change periods of lower occupancy in the high season!

For example, this year's Reunification Day, which takes place in Germany on 31/10/2019, falls on Thursday. It is, therefore, an ideal opportunity to prepare the offer from Wednesday and send mailing to guests living in Germany - both Polish and German. It will help you create two separate segments.

Last seen date

It is worth to remind our guests who have been with us once about us. For example, since last summer they have not shown any activity in communication with your facility. For this purpose, it is worth to extract a segment of such guests and send them information such as:

"We miss you! We haven’t seen you for a long time and we have prepared a few very attractive offers recently! Go to our website and check it out! ".

We hit the note of the loyalty in our guests acting this way - after all, they were with us, they liked it and did not want to hurt us by not contacting us. 

Offer category

If you want to promote engaging family packages, it is worth preparing a mailing addressed to guests who have already benefited from a similar offer. For this purpose, you can extract a segment of contacts who have booked an offer marked with a specific category.

Of course, guests who have visited your hotel earlier, e.g. for business purposes, may also be interested in returning as part of a private trip. You can send the same offer to such a group of recipients, but differently "wrapped", suggesting a choice - a family vacation or a romantic SPA weekend? Thanks to that, you still keep the impression of personalizing the offer - you know who your visitor is and by sending him offers different from his previous interests, you simply take into account that (s)he might be interested in staying but for a different reson.

Booking date

Knowing when your guest created the last booking, you can predict when to start planning his/her next trip. A hotel newsletter with current offers, received 3 days after the stay, will probably not be very engaging. However, one sent 3-6 months after may. You have a lot of information about your returning guests and you are able to personalize the mailings like "Maybe it's time to visit us again?". 

Date of last stay

You can prepare a message for those guests who last year benefited from a specific offer and arrived at a specific date and, for example, offer them an additional discount for the last few available rooms.

You can do even more using both filters - the date of stay and the date of the booking, you are able to remind all those who last year waited with the decision to book until the last minute and prepare a mailing campaign on the reason "There is no need to delay! Lower prices will not be waiting for long!".

Length of stay

This year's holiday offer provides an additional discount for guests staying for 7 nights and longer? Maybe those who stayed for 3-4 nights last year will not be interested, but guests who chose longer stays in the previous year are probably willing to check this offer. On the other hand, guests who usually visit your facility in the form of short weekend stays could be interested in a new SPA weekend offer or promotion during stays from Sunday to Monday.

Value of booking

Guests who usually book or check shorter, cheaper stays as part of basic deals with breakfast, will probably not be interested in the rich package offers. It is worth creating separate mailings for seekers of "Hot Deal", "Black Friday", "Lowest available price" offers, etc. and a separate offer with additional discount or services when booking more expensive stay packages.

Important! The above filters can be freely combined when creating segments to even better personalize an offer. Remember that the better you use the knowledge about your guests, the better you are able to find them.

Do you need help creating a milling campaign? Contact us via chat - our Revenue Specialists are available from Monday to Friday from 10.00-13.00.

Author: Sara Antoszewicz, Revenue Specialist