Most people would agree that working in hospitality is no picnic. 

You’ve likely faced your fair share of challenges, like the pandemic and the ever-rising cost of living, but this is where email marketing can transform hotel marketing strategies from lacklustre into measurable results. The hospitality industry generates average open rates of 45.21% (Hubspot), so if you’re not using email marketing already, you need to start now. 

80% of consumers want to book their trip online (TravelPerk), so appearing in someone’s emails is more important than ever!

In my experience, personalization and segmentation drive results in the hospitality industry. This guide will provide the best email marketing for hotels I’ve found through testing different campaigns and using beehiiv, designed to boost bookings, increase guest engagement, and elevate your business..

Table of Contents

• Why Email Marketing Is Essential For Hotels

• My Experience Testing Hotel Email Marketing Strategies

• The Best Email Marketing Strategies for Hotels

  • Automate Booking Reminders and Upsells

  • Create Personalized Post-Stay Emails

  • Use Seasonal Promotions To Attract Guests

• How These Strategies Improved Hotel Bookings

• Why beehiiv Is Ideal for Hotel Email Marketing

• Lessons From Testing Email Marketing for Hotels

  • The Importance of Timing

  • Segment by Guest Type

• Tips For Creating High-Performing Hotel Email Campaigns

  • Impressive Visuals

  • Compelling Subject Lines

  • Strong CTAs

• Final Thoughts: Start Transforming Your Hotel Marketing

• Google’s People Also Ask Questions

  • What is the 80/20 rule in email marketing?

  • What are the 5 Ts of email marketing?

  • How do I email a hotel?

  • What are the four Ps of marketing in the hotel industry?

Why Email Marketing Is Essential For Hotels

Email marketing is a key method of communication that makes several elements of hotel marketing much easier.

You can use email to drive direct bookings and reduce reliance on OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) that may cost you high commission fees. This gives your business more autonomy, driving sales directly rather than leaning on other companies.

Email marketing is also super helpful for building guest loyalty. 

By regularly appearing in your customers’ inboxes, you are reminding them of your brand so that when they need a hotel, your business is at the forefront of their minds. There are a range of targeted campaigns that you can create to maintain guest relationships - more on this coming up later!

My Experience Testing Hotel Email Marketing Strategies

In my personal experience, testing out different strategies before embarking on a full email marketing campaign was key to getting my processes right from the start.

I knew that automation, personalization, and promotional content would be key to my campaigns, so I set up a range of different campaigns to see what kinds of content suited different types of customers. 

Before long, I had some results I could build on.

My results informed me of what promotions worked best for my brand, how I could automate campaigns to save time, and ways I could personalize emails to drive my engagement rates.

Challenges I experienced along the way included low engagement and managing guest segmentation effectively. I found the beehiiv system super easy to solve these problems, giving me new ways to engage my customers and segment my audience seamlessly by behavior, location, or acquisition type. 

The Best Email Marketing Strategies for Hotels

So, what are the best email marketing strategies for hotels, and how do you implement them?

Automate Booking Reminders and Upsells

Automation is one of the most important strategies for hotels. 

Guests need to be regularly updated to ensure they feel your communication is up to scratch.

How long is it until their next stay?

Which of your hotels are they staying in?

Are there any extra services they may need during their stay?

These updates can be super time-consuming for staff without automation in place, plus manually completing these tasks leaves plenty of room for error or missing updates completely. 

Automating booking reminders can save your team time and improve efficiency, allowing them to spend their time on other tasks that need doing within your business. 

Your guests will love that they receive updates from you that are consistent and timely with their stay. Win-win!

Another great advantage of automation is upselling. You can set up a separate campaign targeting people who are due to stay at your hotel, offering them additional extras such as spa services, dining, or room upgrades to boost revenue for your hotel. 

Creating an upsell campaign that is automated means it runs in the background of your business, producing extra sales without needing to assign this task to an employee.

Create Personalized Post-Stay Emails

Personalization is another key strategy for hotels.

One of my favorite uses for this is via post-stay emails.

If a customer has recently stayed with you, sending them a personalized post-stay email can remind them of your brand and trigger them to book another visit. For example, if a customer has stayed in one of your standard rooms, you could send them a discount code offering them an upgrade to a premium room next time they stay with you. 

Explain that you appreciate their business and you’d love to reward them next time they visit as one of your valued customers.

Another idea is to send tailored feedback forms to recent customers. For example, if someone has used your spa facilities, make sure to ask them directly about their experience so you know more about your service and what you could improve.

Personalization can be super effective for customer loyalty and driving new sales.

Use Seasonal Promotions To Attract Guests

Promotional content is the bread and butter of the hotel industry.

Email marketing is an excellent way of pushing out this type of content. Using holidays and seasonal events can be great inspiration for new promotions, helping to draw attention to your brand and boost bookings. We know that spending increases around the holidays, so make sure you’re making the most of seasonal events to draw more attention to your business.

Some examples of seasonal promotions you could use include:

• Holiday packages for key dates such as Christmas or New Year’s

• Deals for seasonal activities such as ski trips and festivals

• Weather-inspired promotions, e.g., Summer Savings or Autumn Offers

For more fresh ideas to engage hotel guests, check out this beehiiv blog!

How These Strategies Improved Hotel Bookings

Together, these strategies can significantly improve marketing for hotels, helping to drive bookings and build relationships with loyal customers.

Tracking metrics via an analytics platform allows you to measure the performance of your emails and make decisions moving forward to improve results. Some metrics that you should track to understand the effectiveness of these strategies include:

• Open rate: Personalizing emails (particularly subject lines) can lead to much higher open rates, meaning that the percentage of subscribers opening an email is much higher.

• CTR rate: Using promotions can have a positive effect on CTR (Click-Through-Rate), encouraging users to click through to a link, such as your website, from an email. 

• Conversion rate: The more personalized and compelling a campaign is, the more likely you are to achieve conversions, leading to an increased conversion rate and ultimately more sales.

• Unsubscribe rate: Even the best campaigns will have some level of unsubscribes, which is what contributes to an overall unsubscribe rate. Using the above strategies can help to keep this rate as low as possible by ensuring emails are engaging and sent to the right people at the right times.

• Bounce rate: Your bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes. I found that using automation to manage tasks such as list cleaning gave me a higher-quality subscriber list and resulted in a lower bounce rate overall.

Take a look at this beehiiv blog for the essential metrics to track with email marketing.

Why beehiiv Is Ideal for Hotel Email Marketing

beehiiv is a hero software for email marketing in the hotel industry.

Its user-intuitive platform requires no coding knowledge to get the best from its tools – this is integral for hotels with limited marketing staff, ensuring that anyone can use it. Another perk of beehiiv is that it can reduce costs associated with marketing agencies or expensive tech teams.

Some of my favorite uses for beehiiv when creating emails for hotel brands include:

• Audience Segmentation: beehiiv’s segmentation tools allow you to separate subscribers by different filters such as demographic or behavior, allowing you to send more granular, relevant campaigns for improved results.

• Easy Automation: Automation in beehiiv is easy to use, with triggers allowing you to send the right email at the right time in the most efficient way. You can create multi-sequence onboarding campaigns and re-engagement emails at the click of a button, and allow results to happen while you focus on other important elements of your brand.

• Advanced Analytics: beehiiv’s advanced 3D Analytics is one of its key stand-out features, allowing brands to track a wealth of metrics such as revenue performance, subscriber growth, and retention rates in real-time to make data-driven decisions for their businesses.

Lessons From Testing Email Marketing for Hotels

There are some important lessons I’ve learned from testing email marketing for hotels.

I’ll let you in on some of these lessons in the next sections so that you can fast-track your email marketing campaign and learn from my mistakes rather than making your own!

The Importance of Timing

Timing is everything when it comes to email marketing. 

This is never more important than in the hotel industry. I found that the best time to send an email in this industry was between 8 am - 10 am. This is likely because it coincides with the work day, with many people checking their emails on their daily commute. 

Business customers looking to book hotels for upcoming trips are a key demographic for the hotel industry, so emailing commuters on their morning train journey proved highly successful in my experience. Sending emails between 10 am and lunchtime yielded few results, telling us that perhaps people were busy working rather than checking their emails.

With this experience in mind, I created a consistent schedule for content so that we were taking advantage of the best times each day. This also meant that our subscribers began to learn when they would hear from us, helping to build relationships and reliability.

Segment by Guest Type

I learned quickly that it was important to segment my data by guest type.

This meant I could send specific types of customers relevant information. A big mistake I made in the early days of hospitality marketing was sending a leisure customer an email all about my brand’s great meeting rooms and working spaces. As you’d expect, these emails had low engagement rates, and my subscribers were less likely to open future emails from my brand.

Lesson learned.

With my new learnings, I started segmenting my data so that I could avoid this mistake moving forward, but also so that I could create positive engagement rates by sending my customers details that were super relevant to them.

Some examples of campaigns I sent include:

• Sending business customers offers for a complimentary breakfast

• Encouraging leisure customers to make use of spa facilities/purchase treatments

• Sending repeat customers links to loyalty packages

Here’s a beehiiv blog on top segmentation methods if you need inspiration!

Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!

Tips for Creating High-Performing Hotel Email Campaigns

High-performing hotel email campaigns are formed by quality, results-driven content. 

Here are some key areas to focus on to ensure that your emails are producing the best results they can.

Impressive Visuals

Including eye-catching visual content within your emails can be the difference between a high and low engagement rate. Anyone can send an email, but templates that are eye-catching and high-quality are much more likely to produce great results.

Think about some great imagery that you can include in your emails.

Your inviting hotel rooms.

The beautiful spa that guests can enjoy.

Examples of the delicious meals available in your restaurant.

Imagery of your services will give your guests an idea of what to expect when they arrive, and can encourage them to book so they can experience your hotel for themselves.

Compelling Subject Lines

A short, compelling subject line that is between 0 - 20 characters has been proven to produce the highest open rates. 

You want to craft a subject line that quickly explains the content of your email in a few words, ensuring it appears correctly on all device sizes and compels your subscriber to open your email.

You could include an enticing offer within your subject line, or include your subscriber’s first name to catch their attention and increase the chance of them wanting to read further.

Strong CTAs

A strong CTA (Call To Action) can be the difference between a high conversion rate and dwindling sales figures. A CTA could be a button or section that drives users down a sales funnel - this could be a link to a booking form, for example.

Think carefully about the language that you’re using for your CTA. A short, sweet statement that drives users towards an action, here are some of my personal favorites for the hotel industry:

• Book Now

• Reserve Your Stay

• Enjoy Early Check-In

• Take A Tour

Final Thoughts: Start Transforming Your Hotel Marketing

I hope that delving into my experience of email marketing in the hospitality industry has excited you about how you can produce great results for your own brand!

To summarize:

• Email marketing allows you to reach customers where they’re already browsing - their phones.

• You can use email marketing to drive direct sales and save money on OTAs.

• Personalization, automation, and seasonal offers are key to success for hotels, and email marketing is a simple way of providing these features.

• Remember to include high-quality visuals, compelling subject lines, and strong CTAs in every email.

• Use analytics to track your results and make data-driven decisions moving forward.

Check out the beehiiv system for an all-in-one, go-to platform for building impactful e-marketing campaigns. Built on a foundation of measurement and results, beehiiv has a variety of features that allow you to segment data and send high-quality, interactive campaigns to drive sales and keep your regular customers coming back. 

With a free trial, you can test out key features such as automation, personalization, and analytics to see how the strategies I’ve discussed today work and measure the results they produce in real-time.

Begin a free 30-day trial with beehiiv to get started and boost your hotel marketing today!

Google’s People Also Ask Questions

What is the 80/20 rule in email marketing?

The 80/20 rule in email marketing is also known as the Pareto Principle, and suggests that 20% of an email marketing list makes up 80% of the results produced.

In short, a small number of subscribers are the most engaged and therefore produce the most results.

Marketeers can use this theory to their advantage by segmenting email lists by engagement and focusing their efforts on the key customers. 

However, it’s also important to bear in mind that the remaining 80% will only produce results if they’re regularly nurtured. Re-engagement campaigns may be useful here to optimize subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand recently.

What are the 5 Ts of email marketing?

The 5 Ts of email marketing are:

• Targeting: Knowing who your audience is and how they behave based on demographics, purchase history, or user behavior. Knowing who you’re targeting is essential for personalized, relevant content.

• Testing: Testing different elements of your emails allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t. Carrying out A/B testing, for example, can determine which subject lines produce the best open rates.

• Timing: Ensuring emails are sent at the best times can drastically impact results. Think about your audience and when they’re most receptive to learn when you should be sending your emails.

• Triggers: Automation involves scheduling email sequences based on certain events or ‘triggers’ to yield the best results. An example of this is setting up a welcome series that users receive when subscribing to an email list, ensuring they hear from your brand when they’re at their most interested.

• Tracking: Measuring results and tracking conversions helps you understand how your campaigns are performing and what can be improved. Make sure to track metrics such as open rate, conversion rate, and bounce rate to determine if your emails are working.

How do I email a hotel?

You can usually email a hotel by finding its email address via its website or social media channels.

Once you’ve found their email address, simply copy the address into your email provider and draft your email.

If you’re struggling to find the email address for a hotel, try giving them a call and asking for it.

What are the four Ps of marketing in the hotel industry?

The four Ps of marketing in the hotel industry are:

• Product: This refers to the hotel itself, including rooms, services, amenities, and the overall guest experience at the hotel.

• Price: The price of your hotel includes room pricing, customer packages, and upselling services. Pricing strategies should consider competition, profit, and the target market when being drafted.

• Place: Where your hotel is based can have an impact on bookings due to accessibility, local amenities, and how easily guests can book.

• Promotion: This involves marketing efforts to promote your hotel, such as promotional deals, public relations, general advertising, and other activities.