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As a hotel marketer, you have a lot to consider when it comes to email marketing. You want to make sure that past guests book again, keep current guests happy with their stay, and get future guests excited about their upcoming trip, all without bombarding them with too many emails.
If you’ve seen our anatomy of the perfect email newsletter, you’ll know that content layout and type, audience targeting, subject lines, and calls to action are integral to any good email newsletter. On top of that, you’ll want the ability to automate things like sign-up emails, promotional offers, and booking confirmations; track open and click-through rates; and have a way to create mailings and manage your contacts lists.
If you’re a hotel owner or marketer and want to improve your email marketing efforts with these best practices in mind, check out some of these email marketing apps to take you to the next level.
Mailchimp
The king of all email newsletter makers, Mailchimp, is the natural choice when it comes to email marketing. It’s ease of use and low-cost implementation (it’s free for up to 2000 subscribers a month) make it especially useful if you’re less experienced with email marketing. You can use stock templates or create your own, A/B test different headlines, and use list segmentation to target campaigns to specific audiences, such as past or upcoming guests. It also integrates with a ton of popular applications, so chances are you’ll be able to pull in data from other apps you’re already using.
Most importantly, you’ll get data and insights into the success of your campaign, and can track historically to see how your marketing efforts are improving over time.
Campaign Monitor
For the hotel guest on the go, you’ll want to make sure that your emails are smartphone-ready. Campaign Monitor has mobile-ready templates that’ll ensure that your emails show up nicely, whether on tablet, smartphone, or desktop. Like Mailchimp, it has tracking and analytics so that you can track your campaigns and open-rates, as well as integration with lots of popular cloud apps.
Campaign Monitor gives some powerful automation options that will let you automatically send follow-up emails after sign-up, as well as reminder and even reactivation emails to get your guests back in for another stay.
FreshMail
FreshMail is perfect if you’re looking to integrate data or documents that you’re already using into your email marketing efforts. If you’re not using a CRM, you can import your contacts from a .csv or .xls file to turn it into a mailing list. If you have an HTML document that you want to turn into a newsletter template, you can do that too by importing it into FreshMail.
If you need a little inspiration and prefer to go with something pre-made, you can use the industry specific templates, all of which have responsive design.
Infusionsoft
If you’re looking for more than just email marketing, Infusionsoft comes as an all-in-one CRM, sales, and marketing automation tool with a strong email marketing function. If your hotel’s website has a lot of traffic, Infusionsoft’s campaign builder tool will help you make custom campaigns triggered by almost any action or activity on the page. Say, for example, that someone proceeds to the checkout but doesn’t end up booking– you can send a follow-up email based on that action to encourage them to complete the purchase.
If they’re returning guests, the integrated CRM will help you manage your contacts and make sure that all of your emails are personalized and tailored to your guests’ needs.
SendinBlue
If you want to double-up your efforts, SMS and email marketing go hand-in-hand with SendinBlue. With all the basics necessary to deliver an effective email campaign, you’ve got campaign creation, contact management, and analytics all at your fingertips. In fact, you can integrate SendinBlue with your existing Google Analytics account to track activity coming from your email campaigns.
SendinBlue prides itself on being easy to use with plenty of tutorials and on-call support, so if you don’t have a lot of experience with email marketing or creating campaigns, it’s a good option to start with.
UP Hotel Email Marketing
Designed specifically for hotel marketing, UP Hotel Email Marketing is a tailor-made solution that’ll help you target and engage your guests. In reality, it has many of the same features as the others on this list: intelligent segmented lists, analytics and tracking, and coordinated emails to keeps guests engaged.
The benefit is that it comes from a suite of products that are designed especially for hotels, meaning that all the metrics, designs, and functions will be well suited to your needs.
Many of these products offer the same robust set of features that you’ll need for your email marketing campaign. When deciding which one is right for you, take a look at the number of guests you’ll need to contact, how frequently you’ll be sending emails, and which features are most important to find the one that best suits you.
If you haven’t found anything on the list that suits your needs, check out our ranking of the top 25 email marketing apps.
Images: ”Author’s Own“
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