One of the tricky actions to keep contact with the checked-out guests is sending e-mails or mobile push notification messages to guests. These may be a celebration message, a promotional message, periodical newsletters, and etc.. The first two of these are quite straightforward and they equally affect a checked-out guest. But periodically delivered newsletters continuously arouses curiosity and keeps the previously visited guests’ interest alive.
Using newsletters is not a new trend to stay in touch with past and future guests. Most of the hoteliers use newsletters to inform their past and potentially future guests. There are several key factors in order to be successful in terms of affecting the target clients.
Create and update your client database focusing on quality audiences
There are many contact channel of guests for a hotel like booking sites, their websites, surveys, social media and so on. After gathering contact information, the most important thing for an effective newsletter campaign is to have a quality contact list.
If our aim is to increase bookings while publishing a newsletter, our contact list has to consists of the travellers who are interested in staying our property. To increase the chance of success of a newsletter campaign, we should have as much as details of our guests or target clients. This details may include gender, the purpose of travel, age, marital status, and other demographic information. If we consider the big picture, our clients may divide into the following categories.
- Already acquired guests; who are previously stayed in our hotel
- Website visitors; who are most probably in the research phase of a guest journey.
- New audiences: who have not stayed in our hotel, or not looking for a stay currently but potentially would be in the search phase of a guest journey in the near future.
Categorizing contact list of client database in such a way enables us to deliver targeted newsletters by focusing on the intentions of clients.
Create a communication strategy according to clients’ profiles
Enabling clients to customize their e-mail preferences based on their interests is the best solution to categorize clients since nobody can argue to categorize the clients perfectly. As hoteliers, we can only guess the interest of our clients according to their past experiences and behaviours. On the other hand, if we directly let them specify their e-mail preferences via a web page or account screens of our hotel’s mobile application, we can directly categorize our clients for a targeted newsletter campaign.
After specifying the client categories we can deliver the targetted newsletters by e-mails or push notification messages. The categories and contents of newsletters may change according to our client profiles.
They may be;
- concierge newsletters, which informs clients according to our hotel,
- entertainment newsletters which may pursue them to stay in our property
- sales newsletters, informing guests about the current promotions
- seasonal newsletters which may tell about the experiences related the current season, like Christmas, summer, spring season, and etc.
Or even you can tell about your preparations for the summer season at your hotel.
Create impressive newsletters
Undoubtedly, the visual impression is the most important factor in reading a newsletter. Is there anybody who focuses on the text before looking at the pictures in a newspaper or in a magazine? The answer is simple and obvious. Of course, the content must be impressive too. It should not contradict with the attractive visual design and should be equally impressive. Moreover, the text must express the message clearly and briefly without wasting the time of audiences, since they can easily unsubscribe from the newsletters, which may frustrate all our efforts.
