In today’s rapidly changing, increasingly digitized economy, email marketing software has become the lifeblood of savvy hotel marketers. It can often be the determining factor between success and failure both for your marketing campaigns and for your brand.
But today’s marketing software landscape is flooded with thousands of solutions offering varying features and benefits: There were, in fact, more than 3,500 solutions on the market as of 2016, and that number is likely to only go up.
That sort of environment can make it nearly impossible to find the right marketing technology for your hotel.
Here are nine valuable tips to help you make the right decision for your brand, whether you’re a small group or an independent property, to enhance your core hotel marketing initiatives.
1. Determine the ‘Why’
Before you begin any sort of hotel email marketing software selection process, you should ask yourself “why”: Why do you need it? Uncover the top five things that matter most to you, which is how you will define success in this process.
For example, as a hotelier, you might need an automated solution for confirmation emails. You might be looking to reach out to past guests to win repeat bookings. Or, you might want to implement an upsell strategy to incoming guests.
Once you have specific goals in mind, those central issues can help you to determine a detailed list of the problems you are looking to solve. How big are the problems? What sort of impact can this software have on your bottom line? Answering those questions can lead you to uncovering the core features you require in your hotel email marketing software.
Vendors can then discuss with you how their software can help you. Once that process is complete, companies that you feel comfortable with can compete for your business through the RFP process.
2. Advance what’s working
When we’re searching for solutions, we tend to focus on what’s not working and what we need to fix. But in the case of buying software, you should carefully look at existing behavior and advance what your team is doing right instead of just starting from scratch.
Analyze and share your current workflow processes, and make sure you pay just as much attention to what is working as you do to what isn’t. Put it all out there. You want your email marketing solution to make your marketing processes easier and better, so it’s important to zero-in on current solutions that already help do that.
