With the holiday season fast approaching, senders are gearing up for their holiday promotions.
NB: This is an article from Revinate
Black Friday, which is historically the highest volume day of the year, will cause many senders to start thinking about how they can remain on the “nice” side of the inbox.
It becomes increasingly important to start thinking about how you can effectively send this holiday season. Like Santa, the Revinate team has created a holiday-themed checklist that will help get your messages marked as nice.
Naughty – Blasting All Your Past Guests
Email Blasting is a negative term used to describe sending to an entire database. Often this strategy is matched with an increased frequency of promotions that often fall short. The common belief is that sending to more people will increase revenue, but this isn’t the case! Instead, you should look for ways to target past guests in more creative ways. Studies have shown that targeted sends will produce high engagement and conversation rates. Be sure to segment your audience and focus on creating positive user engagement. Doing so will help your team with bypassing some commonly delivery mistakes that traditionally occurs during the holidays.
Nice – Unique Messaging and Offers
Past guests want to receive promotional offers that are unique to them. Having them feel like their past stay was valued can make all the difference in getting them to book again. You can achieve this by personalizing either in the subject line or the body of the message.
Naughty – Sending too Many Messages
Sending past guests too many emails is a common misstep for Holiday sends. To stay top of mind, many properties will send multiple reminder emails to keep their past guests engaged, but consider the experience of the email recipient! No one wants to be inundated with emails. Instead, you should focus on thoughtful engagement strategies and create promotional offers that you would personally like to receive. Changing your perspective on an engagement strategy will often produce better results.
Nice – Use a Clear Call to Action
It is easy to try and do too much. Messages you send should be clean and to the point. Adding too much content, and making it hard to find the deal or offer in the process, will possibly lead to customer fatigue. Your past guests have a finite amount of time, so scrolling through a message to find the promotional could spell disaster. Keeping the content ratio to 60/40 (Images/text) should mitigate these issues and focus your program’s content on what matters most, driving traffic to your property website.
Naughty – Questionable Contact Lists
Feeling the pressure to drive more spend, many hoteliers will look to outside help to acquire new email addresses. The results usually aren’t great. Hoteliers are often faced with the reality of poor performance, possible blacklisting, and low placement rate by using these lists! Instead, focus on organically growing the list throughout the year. This includes OTA Winback campaigns, Post Stay Engagement, or Customer Surveys to have the customer opt-in for future promotional messaging.
Nice – Double Opt-In
Properties who send to confirmed opt-ins will often see a much higher lift in engagement compared to properties that don’t. The reason for this lift is because expectations are clear from the start. Properties who set a clear expectation with their past guests, earlier on, will see engagement (Opens/Clicks) and conversations that are considerably higher than properties that didn’t clearly set expectations.
So how will your program fair? Is your property getting ready for a sweet treat, or lump of coal? With the holidays fast approaching, it is easy to forget the basics of a successful send. Thankfully, keeping these ideas in mind will put your property in a position for a successful holiday send.
