Email Marketing
Email is a powerful tool for your business. It’s a personal and friendly way you can build relationships and stay connected with potential and past customers. Email is a leading channel for getting the best return on investment.
Once you have a booking, you will usually have a customer’s email address, which gives you the opportunity to contact them at various points in their journey. Consider a welcome email pre-visit, a follow up email post-visit or a regular e-newsletter to stay in touch.
E-newsletters can be a good way to stay connected with your clients and update them about your business. However, it’s important these activities are done strategically not randomly. There should be a purpose to your mail-outs and they should be in line with your marketing goals. Do your research and consider the development of content, timing and implementation and measurement (how many people read, clicked or accepted and offer).
Top five tips for email marketing
1. Personalise
Rather than sending out generic emails to everyone in your database, try to personalise your emails. This way, customers feel like an individual that is important to your business rather than just a number or a booking.
2. Optimise and retest
You should always optimise and retest your email campaigns, which means using two slightly different campaigns to see which responds better. Most mailing list providers offer an A/B testing component, which is easy to implement. A/B testing allows you to send out two variations of the same email so you can compare which one is more successful in terms of being opened, read or clicked on. Use the results to refine future campaigns.
3. Give space
Customers do want to hear from you—but not every day. Don’t bombard your customers with promotional activities; they’ll feel harassed. Define a schedule, based on feedback, or use your welcome email to let customers decide how frequently they’d like to be contacted.
4. Get mobile
All your emails should be optimised for being opened and read on mobile. Increasingly, people are accessing the internet exclusively via their mobile devices. Most email list providers automatically provide optimised campaigns.
5. Content is king
Make sure you are offering relevant and interesting content to engage your customers. Think about including new product updates, news for the region, competitions or promotions. Keep the tone conversational rather than corporate.