With 2023 quickly approaching, the top email marketing trends for 2023 are on the horizon.
NB: This is an article from Travelboom
As an essential part of digital marketing for hotels, email marketing has the power to nurture guest relationships, generate new business and drive repeat business. In order to compete on this ever-changing, competitive channel, you’ll need to not only master the basics, but also keep in touch with industry trends, new technology and well, everyone else.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
See what 2023 marketing trends are on the horizon that will help improve your overall hotel email marketing performance.
1. FOCUS MORE ON EMAIL CONTENT & MESSAGING
With nearly 90% of businesses communicating with customers via email, the top 2023 marketing trends are all about delivering content that stands out amongst the crowd.
Enhanced software functionality allows hotel marketers to embed a variety of elements in emails to create more compelling content experiences. Experiment with different tactics and employ A/B testing to find the content that resonates with your audience most to drive engagement and bookings.
Storytelling
Storytelling is a marketing trend expected to take off in 2023. This fresh approach presents your customers a persona (a hero or character), a problem, and a solution told through an impactful narrative they can relate to. Whether this is a single, long-bodied email or a drip campaign series, the payoff of this tactic is a more engaged audience.
User-Generated Content
When you need to fill a content gap or you’re looking for something new to refresh your email marketing, turn to user-generated content (UGC).
This approach reuses customer photos, testimonials, or reviews in your emails (with their permission). Messages that feature UGC often resonates with guests because of the authenticity and personal voice they offer.
Interactive Email Content
An upcoming email trend for 2023 is embedding interactive content into your sends, where subscribers are encouraged to engage with text or image elements directly in the body of an email.
Examples of interactive content for a hotel might include an image carousel showing off a resort destination, a video about a new service you offer, or a form for guests to rate their recent stay.
2. USE EMAIL TEMPLATES
The days of coding emails from scratch are over and the trend of using templates is (and has been) here – with new features to boot. Your software’s design library likely provides a shortcut to achieving a consistent on-brand look without requiring you to be a tech expert.
Whether you’re creating an email campaign or an individual message, a drag-and-drop interface makes rearranging and modifying templates simple. Best practices are built in, so your email is automatically responsive, images are optimized, and accessibility features like alternate image text are in place. If your CRM doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop builder, opt for pre-built responsive templates, instead.
3. PERSONALIZE EMAILS WITH AUDIENCE SEGMENTS
Email personalization isn’t new, but this marketing trend is expected to be a dominant strategy in 2023. The shift toward sending personalized emails is a result of improved tools and positive results from subscriber satisfaction.
Email programs now help hotel marketers to marry data with a subscriber list to get key messages in front of the right audience at the right time. Here are a few ways to engage subscribers with 1:1 marketing in mind:
- Segments: Create flexible audience groups and target them with relevant content based on interaction with your website, demographics, spending habits, and other variables.
- Automated Emails: Also known as “triggered” emails, these employ an automatic workflow to send messages to customers throughout their guest journey, from pre-arrival to post-stay.
- Send-Time Optimization: While you can use data to schedule email distribution for when your subscribers are most responsive, many CRMs now utilize AI-powered optimization for elements such as time of send.
4. OPTIMIZE EMAILS FOR MOBILE
Optimizing emails for mobile devices is a trend all marketers should focus on for 2023. Most—as in 75% of smartphone users—check their email on their mobile devices. Using responsive templates ensures your messages render correctly and adjust to fit any screen size or orientation. Follow these tips to make sure the elements of your email are ready for any device:
- Keep the subject line within 30 characters so it shows in full on a small screen.
- Take advantage of pre-header text to entice readers to open your email.
- Break copy into consumable chunks so it’s easy to digest on a small device.
- Include white space between links and buttons for more manageable clicking.
- Utilize buttons over text links to offer more clickable real estate.
5. MONITOR EMAIL PERFORMANCE
An ongoing trend for digital marketing is data-led decision making, but a change coming in 2023 will shake up how businesses track individual email stats. Apple’s latest privacy settings will seemingly inflate open rates, rendering this metric unreliable to some degree.
What does this mean for monitoring the performance of your emails? The change puts a larger emphasis on other metrics.
To combat any tracking challenges, use a comprehensive reporting tool to accurately report on individual campaigns and overall performance. This includes measuring engagement through clicks and click-through rates, monitoring the health of your list with subscribers and bounce rates, and using booking revenue to make sure you’re working toward achieving your goals.
Email Marketing FAQs
Is email marketing still effective?
Yes, email is still an top marketing channel for businesses. It is a cost-effective way to reach customers using targeted messaging to increase brand awareness and drive revenue. Email users are expected to top 4 billion in 2023, so marketing to this growing audience will remain an essential tactic for businesses.
What are the best email marketing tools?
Email tools that create audience segments and send targeted, automated campaigns are topping the list of must-haves for marketers in 2023. Hotels should begin with a reliable CRM that can manage customer interactions and improve the effectiveness of campaigns through personalized messaging and timely lead-nurturing.
