With 89% of marketers using email as their primary channel for lead generation, consumers are being inundated with messages from brands. Will your messages be ignored or deleted or opened and clicked? The answer depends on how good a job you do at segmenting your database and sending relevant, timely emails.
Generic email blasts are as passe as requiring bathing caps in the pool. These blasts not only contribute to low open and click-through rates, but they make recipients more inclined to unsubscribe, delete emails, or worse, mark unwanted messages as spam, which hurts the future deliverability of your email campaigns. Consider these statistics from Hubspot:
- 68% of consumers delete unwanted email
- 58% of consumers unsubscribe when they get unwanted email
- 49% of consumers mark unwanted email as spam
With so much noise cluttering email boxes today, it has never been more important to segment your audience and ensure recipients are only getting content that is meaningful to them. Keep reading for common mistakes hoteliers make when segmenting emails and how you can avoid them.
1. Collecting “dirty” data
An expression commonly heard in marketing operations meetings when discussing email performance is, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ If your database isn’t clean, you can segment your audience to your heart’s desire but it’s not going to help your email performance. “Clean” data is data that has been collected from the guest at check-in or on your website or via a double opt-in email campaign, which ensures that your email recipients want to get your emails. “Dirty” data is typically purchased from a list vendor or collected years ago and never updated. It includes people who either didn’t sign up for your emails or no longer want to receive them.
While having a big database is important, the quality of your data is more important than size so focus on capturing data from guests who want to hear from you versus chasing numbers. For great tips on ways to keep your data clean, see this blog post.
2. Not segmenting throughout the customer journey
Hoteliers should be personalizing every pre-stay, on-site and post-stay email they send. To do this effectively, you need access to guest data. Some great sources of guest data are the PMS, survey responses and past campaign engagement. With these three sources of data, you should be able to effectively segment and personalize emails to drive engagement throughout the customer journey.
