In this week’s episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, we’re featuring a webinar from our webinar series, Hotel Moment Deep Dive.
Revinators Bailey Yeats, Customer Education Specialist, and Maggie Stothart, Lead Email Marketing & Data Specialist, advocate for advanced preparation when it comes to email marketing if hoteliers want to achieve record ROI this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The two explore the factors that influence buying behavior this time of year and reveal why a detailed segmentation strategy can not only drive conversion but guarantee you’ll target the right guest at the right time with the right offer amid a crowded inbox.
Tune in and determine if your email marketing strategy is ready for the holidays so that you can maximize deliverability and exceed your guest’s expectations.
Meet your host
As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.
Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.
Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com
Connect with Karen
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Transcript
Intro – 00:00:00: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting-edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.
Bailey Yeats – 00:00:37: Hello everyone, and welcome to our Hotel Moment Deep Dive with Revinate. Today we are going to be discussing our Black Friday Cyber Monday webinar all about winning email strategies for hotels. With me today, I have my friend and colleague, Maggie Stothart. Maggie, would you like to start with your introduction first?
Maggie Stothart – 00:01:00: Sure. As Bailey said, I’m Maggie Stothart, and I am the email deliverability specialist here at Revinate. I have been with Revinate for eight years — going on nine. We are far too soon, but I have been working in email marketing for 16 years. So when I started, email deliverability wasn’t even a thing yet. So it’s been fun seeing it evolve.
Bailey Yeats – 00:01:24: Yeah, and my name is Bailey Yeats, and I’m an education specialist here at Revinate. I was a user of Revinate before I was a trainer of the products, so prior to my role here, I was a marketing director for a hotel chain in Canada where we used both the Marketing and Guest Feedback solutions from Revinate. So feeling like I’m a little bit well-versed in the solutions, and excited to be here today with Maggie to discuss something that’s becoming more near and dear to my heart, which is this deliverability and making sure that your campaigns are hitting your inbox for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Today’s agenda we are going to be talking about, as I mentioned, this anticipation for a strong year with Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So looking at our email marketing strategies, we’re going to talk about successful email deliverability to talk about pre-sending strategies as well as what happens after Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And we’re going to show you some 2023 successful campaign example,s and we’ll wrap up our day or our half an hour-ish with some key takeaways from today’s webinar. Maggie, go ahead.
Maggie Stothart – 00:02:30: All right. Well, I’m really excited to kick off today’s webinar with this slide as it perfectly supports the main takeaway we’re going to focus on throughout this session, which is planning ahead and starting early. Not only does the strategy keep you competitive and top of mind for your audience, but it also helps avoid those dreaded “oops” emails. You know, the ones that go out when a mistake happens at the last minute. Let’s dive into the details. Brands are increasingly sending promotional emails weeks before Black Friday, which is no surprise given the 22% increase in email volume this past November compared to 2022. Starting early is the key to staying ahead of the competition, and ensuring you’re not lost in the sea of emails your audience is bound to receive. From a deliverability standpoint, starting early also gives you a chance to gradually increase your send volume — avoiding massive spikes later. Those spikes can raise red flags with email inbox providers, especially if your domain reputation isn’t perfect. And none of us want to end up on the spam folder during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. One interesting finding is that the biggest surge in email volume happened two weeks before Black Friday — showing a 34% increase from the previous year. This data tells us that timing is everything. You don’t want to wait until the last minute. Start ramping up your efforts early. A well-planned series of emails, including teasers, main offer emails, and last-chance reminders keeps your audience engaged throughout the Black Friday period. There is also a 16% increase in email volume compared to the previous year, with over 2 billion emails sent each day. I’m fairly certain most of those 2 billion ended up in my inbox. With so many emails flying around, it’s essential to manage your email deliverability very carefully. Avoid getting flagged as spam by focusing on your email reputation management, especially during this high-traffic period. Throughout this session, we’ll be talking about how these trends impact your strategy and most importantly, how you can optimize your email campaigns to cut through the noise.
Bailey Yeats – 00:04:38: Yeah, that’s a lot of emails being sent to inboxes during this holiday season.
Maggie Stothart – 00:04:46: So many, and it just really impacts your deliverability, and it matters more and more as we get into it. Now let’s move on to one of my favorite topics: successful email deliverability. I know email deliverability is very overwhelming, especially because of all the moving parts. But to simplify things, we’ve highlighted the key factors that impacted on this slide. I’m going to go over each point here, kind of at a high level, to get us started. The sender reputation is one of the most important factors. It’s based on how trustworthy your domain and IP are perceived by inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo. If your reputation is low, your emails may go straight to spam. List hygiene is keeping your email list clean by removing an inactive or invalid email address. Poor list hygiene can hurt your reputation, and lead to high bounce for email content. The contents of your emails matter both from a compliance standpoint — avoiding spammy language or shady offers — and from an engagement perspective. Inbox providers are smart enough to recognize low-quality content. Engagement — how your recipients interact with your emails, with open clicks, etc., will influence future deliverability. Low engagement can indicate to inbox providers that your emails are not wanted. Authentication protocols or making sure that your proper authentication and records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are in place is essential. These protocols help to verify your emails are coming from a legitimate sender and compliant with regulations. It’s important to follow all local and global email regulations like can spam or GDPR as noncompliance can lead to deliverability issues and even legal trouble. So as we approach Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s important to ensure your emails are not only delivered but also engage your audience effectively without landing in spam folders. First, let’s review what volume and send cadence is. Volume refers to the total number of emails sent in one campaign. It’s important to avoid sending a high volume of emails suddenly as this can negatively impact your deliverability, especially if you’re not ramping up gradually. Cadence refers to the frequency at which emails are sent establishing a consistent cadence helps build trust with inbox providers and your audience. Sending too many emails in a short time can lead to complaints or unsubscribe. I mean, how often does that happen to you where you sign up for an email because you want that 10% off, and then all of a sudden you’re getting 20 emails a day. Don’t be that person. Together, these two factors, volume and cadence, form the foundation of your sender reputation. It’s all about maintaining steady, consistent engagement with your audience. So here’s what we recommend: Avoid major volume spikes. If you can send more emails during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, start increasing your email volume now to avoid those spikes. Recommended cadence — newsletters, monthly or quarterly, send them around the same time to maintain some consistency. Promotional campaigns — one or two times a month. Ensure they are relevant, targeted, and valuable to the recipient. Segment your audience, and send emails weekly to different groups instead of sending them all at once and automated campaigns which would be ongoing. These should be part of your continuous engagement strategy. And lastly, keep it consistent. Plan your promotional campaigns in advance. Create a schedule and share it with your team to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Bailey Yeats – 00:08:30: Maggie I just want to ask if someone did want to start ramping up their volume for how much they were sending to prepare for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, is there still time between now and then to do that? Is that still possible for you?
Maggie Stothart – 00:08:42: Absolutely. But I would definitely encourage starting that process — getting started as soon as you can.
Bailey Yeats – 00:08:52: That’s very cool. Really great. So I know everybody loves to have a little cheat sheet and make a plan. So we’ve provided one here for you. So in order to track your cadence and make sure that you’re organized leading up until Black Friday, would recommend putting together some sort of calendar like this one. And you’re welcome to have this one, by all means. It’s really just to make sure that your goals are aligned so you can see holistically when you want to send it what you want the content to be the subject lines, pressure lists, all of the details that you need when you’re planning on sending out a campaign all on one document. And this document is fantastic to be able to share at something like a department head meeting or to share just generally with your colleagues so everyone knows what’s going on with the marketing efforts. And so they’re better able to either contribute to those efforts or generally just know what’s happening when you’re promoting these activations around property. So to ensure this good email deliverability when it comes to sending out promotional campaigns, we want to make sure that you have a few filters that are turned on. So these are our top three filters that we would encourage. The first one is a Stay-recency filter. So this means that your checkout date is within the last two years. So this is people who have stayed with you and checked out within the last two years. You know that people who haven’t stayed or they’ve stayed longer past that two years, they’re going to have lower engagement rates. They’re going to have increased complaint rates, and you’re going to have increased bounce rates. And those are just things that don’t help deliverability. They’re things that you don’t want to see. We don’t want to see. Nobody wants to see. So making sure that you have that recency filter on as well as excluding your domains. So any of the booking.coms that experience any sort of domain that you have as a filter to be able to remove, go ahead and take that right out of there because if you don’t exclude it, these are the type of email addresses that are going to certainly drop your engagement because likely they’re not even hitting your inbox. If they’re a temporary email address, like an OTA email, they will expire 20 to 30 days after that guest has checked out. And it’s just going to bounce if you try and send to the email address. So the best thing you can do is exclude the OTA domain altogether. The last one is making sure that you have the no future stays total turned on. So we do not want to send out any special promotions or offers with those lower rates to existing bookings, because if you work in a hotel, you know exactly what’s going to happen. They’re calling your front desk and they’re asking for that lower rate. So in order to protect your rate integrity, we want to make sure that you are checking off the box that says, I don’t want to send this anyone who has a future booking at the property. And then for anyone who is in and EU member state, make sure that you have that safe mode enabled, which is a GDPR best practice. So when you’re actually building out your segment, once you’ve built out the segment, then you have these additional options. So the first option allows you to target people who have not received, opened, or clicked any of the marketing campaigns within a certain period of time. So this is another recency filter based on when they’ve received the last campaign. Now, if you’re a frequent sender and you’re concerned about the amount of messages that your users receive, the filter only include guests who have not received any marketing campaigns in the last week will help regulate the volume of the emails for your recipients. And takes it back to Maggie’s point about making sure your volume is appropriate. It is a best practice, not to email anyone that hasn’t engaged with your message in a long time. So the filter opened or never received a marketing campaign in the last year or two years is also really valuable. Making sure that you’re only emailing those engaged users now, I think it used to be two years, was kind of the best practice, but as more emails get sent out, is that sort of changing a little bit?
Maggie Stothart – 00:12:46: Writers are starting to deactivate email inboxes sooner, so two years is a good safeguard, but one year is an out of the question either for an inbox being closed down. So that’s why a lot of programs are moving to that one year.
Bailey Yeats – 00:13:05: Gotcha. Okay. All right. So the next one, the second option, this one allows you to filter based on engagement with your previous marketing campaigns. So this is the option that you can target people based on them having received, not received, opened, not opened, not clicked any particular campaign. Now, if you scroll to the very bottom of this list, it’s going to show you the most recent campaign that you’ve sent. So from a timeline perspective, all the way to the bottom is what you’re looking for. And when you’re sending out these big promotions, it is a good idea to reinforce it with a second email some days later. So following up and making sure that you are choosing the ones that have maybe not clicked your first campaign in order to increase those conversions.
Maggie Stothart – 00:13:49: All right. Contact list best practices never purchase contact lists. This is one you just can’t stress enough, not only as a poor practice, but it also violates GDPR regulations using purchase lists also exposes you to legal risks, potential fines, and can severely harm your email strategy in the long term, mostly because you don’t know how those email addresses were gleaned, and most of the time they’re not valid email addresses. So you’re just launching to a bunch of inactive spam traps. GDPR and proof of consent. When dealing with GDPR compliance, it’s important to maintain proof of consent for every user on your list. This means ensuring that you have a clear record of each user’s opt in data. You as a hotel, are responsible for providing this information if requested. Implementing double opt-in has quickly become an endless three standard for email marketing, and ensures guests’ activities confirms their consent to receive promotional emails, reduces negative engagement such as spam, compliance and unsubscribed, and validates the email is real, which also improves your deliverability. Remember, negative engagement metrics lead to poor inbox placement.
Bailey Yeats – 00:15:04: Essentially that if you don’t have permission history sending to these people your first you’re going to be ending up in their spam folders or they’re going to be unsubscribing. Bad things are gonna happen. So this is a great reminder for sure.
Maggie Stothart – 00:15:18: Okay, let’s take a look at pre-sending strategies to help plan and proactively manage the campaigns you have planned for the upcoming holiday season this year. We’re heavily emphasizing the need to plan ahead by preparing all marketing materials early. You can streamline your process and, focus on delivering impactful designs, collaborate closely with your revenue teams to develop a comprehensive strategy for the holiday seasons. Using a calendar similar to what Bailey showed earlier is super helpful. Don’t wait until the last minute. Begin your sale efforts early to capture holiday shoppers and build momentum leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Create and schedule your marketing campaigns well before the holidays. This proactive approach reduces stress and minimizes errors, so we actually mean going into the product and working on your campaigns and even getting it scuttled early if you can. Unexpected changes can occur, and they’re pretty much expected during the holiday rush. So it’s crucial to build in some buffer time for any last-minute adjustments. This flexibility can help ensure your campaigns run smoothly and effectively. We don’t love those moments when we run out of the product, and then we have to go back in and change the campaign to reflect that. We don’t let any halfway. So yes, and it almost always affects your imagery. So you need a good designer in planning ahead businesses is very important. So some ideas for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns to get those creative thoughts go on. Exclusive discounts, stays, offer a limited-time discount 25 to 40% off for bookings made during Black Friday weekend to create urgency and exclusivity. Free nights stay. Promote — stay three nights, get one free deal to encourage longer stays, and increase booking value. Room upgrades. Include complimentary room upgrades for guests, booking specific dates or packages, enhancing their experience at no additional cost. All-inclusive packages. Create special Black Friday packages that include perks like a free breakfast, spa credits, or dining vouchers to enrich the guest experience. Add gift card incentives. Offer bonus gift cards. An example would be $50 free for every $250 spent to encourage bookings in future add ons and flash sale. With a countdown timer, nothing gets more time-sensitive than a timer that tells you 24 hours early. So that creates an urgency. Hopefully it gets them across the finish line with some deeply discounted offers for limited rooms.
Bailey Yeats – 00:18:01: All right. So we’re going to dig into some segmentation next. When you’re working on your campaigns, and you’re planning them out, it’s really important that you also consider who are you sending this to you. So what is your audience and taking advantage of the guest data that you have available to you? In reality, you want to make sure that you’re leveraging the segmentation and targeting the audiences with specific messages that are catered to that group. A few options that you do have are your demographics, which is your location, your number of nights, the work time they’ve stayed, their total lifetime spend. We really love a good local drive campaign. Maybe your rooms are full for the holidays, but you want to just drive more traffic to your restaurant. You can even just send out a campaign to anybody who lives within 50 miles to invite them to come for holiday dinner. We also have stayed out. So day of the week, Maggie talked about an offer that was kind of like a stay long and save. So maybe stay three nights, get one free. You might do this just midweek so you can set up your segmentation to say, stay date is day of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And people who have stayed in those past days midweek, they’re going to likely be interested in staying midweek again. And then, of course, guests who have previously stayed during the holiday season, they’re a great option because we know that they came and stayed before. It got those memories of what it was like to stay during the holiday season. And you can really play into that with your messaging to talk about, “Are you ready to create those memories again? Come get your photos with Santa again. Look how much the kids have grown.” So many different ways you could go about this. So if you have those holiday packages that you offer every year, and you want them to have a first chance at those dates, that’s a really cool thing to do for those guests that you kind of rewarding them for being loyal guests who have stayed over the years over the holiday season, making sure that anyone who has been a repeat guest, you can also use your segmentation tool to say anyone who’s stayed in the past doesn’t even have to be during the holidays. But maybe they’re going to get early access to your holiday deals. People love to feel that special moment of, “I’ve stayed before, so that makes me a little bit more special than the people who haven’t.” The other great thing about segments is that every time that new data comes into Revinate, you don’t need to create a new segment every time new data comes in. Those guests who qualify for the segments that you’ve already created, they’re just going to be added to that segment. And so they’re going to qualify for that specific campaign spend. So you don’t need to be creating things over and over and over again. You just kind of set them up once and they continually add new profiles into that segment. So that’s a really great benefit. So once you have a dataset of clean guest profiles, and you’re into your segmenting, we really want to deliver that personalized communication. So that’s talking to those specific audiences. Now this is a great study that validates the importance of the hyper-segmentation, and the impact it has on revenue conversion. So with this specific study, we studied 5 million emails that were sent from our Revinate platform. And with that study you can find that the sweet spot of sending is to have 4 to 7 segment filters. So you can see at the very bottom here, we’ve got all of the different filter numbers. So two filters, three filters, and when we get to that four, five, six, seven, you start to see that it’s about a 9% increase in engagement, and a 20% increase in revenue conversion for every single email address that you’re communicating with. So this study goes to show that by unlocking and activating your data with the right technology and the right strategy, you are no longer leaving millions of dollars on the table that could be in your pockets. Here’s a few other great examples that are all about targeting those different audiences. So the first one is guests who have stayed in November and December. So any November and December in the past, letting them know that you have your holiday programming that’s scheduled and ready to offer to them, the next one is rewarding your high spenders. So anyone who has in this example, total spending, let’s say it was greater than $5,000 that they spent when they stayed at your property. So this is going to be your higher spenders. You can offer them room upgrades, you can offer them special high value events, things like that. The next one is your repeat stays across the group. So maybe you have a group account, and you want to talk to anyone who stayed at multiple properties that are under your group account. You did offer them a welcome amenity. You can offer them a room upgrade, early access. Again, people love that early access. The next one on here is the holiday dining. Maybe you have what’s that? Local drag market. So you have a dining event or some sort of holiday celebration that you’re looking to drive a little bit more of the staycation type audiences. And then lastly, family travel. So obviously, if Santa is coming to town, the children want to know about it. Mostly the parents actually want to know about it so they can bring the children. But if you are doing something like a Santa brunch, or cookie decorating, or any sort of family happenings targeting guests who have had reservations with children on them in the past, or have reservations with children on them in the future, are great opportunities to invite kids back now that we know who we want to send it to. Let’s talk about what the campaigns actually look like and some of those sending strategies. So we love a good reminder of the email anatomy — making sure that you’re hitting all seven of our key areas of an email. So at the very top you’re going to have your logo and then your image, Make sure that you’re adding alt text to any images that you have on your email. Give the alt text as a backup text. I still provide some context in case that image is blocked by a service provider, or if it’s turned off by default, or if someone’s using a screen reader, then this provides the option to be able to see what the image is all about. Now, when you’re writing out your alt text, we want to make sure that the text that you have written on your images matches the content of the email. So on this specific one, we would want to say something like, “person skiing on top of the mountain” because ISPs are going to look at what the image is. They’re going to look at what your alt text says. And if those two things don’t match, that’s going to wave a red flag for them. We also want to make sure that you’re thinking of that 60/40 rules. So make sure that you have 60% text and 40% imagery. Okay. The next one is your headline. So again, what I said about writing the alt text to match the content of the email, we want to do the same thing. So your headline should have content that’s easy to read. For one, you want to make sure that everybody can read it, and that it aligns with the image and what your subject line talks about. So the expectation is, “I’m opening an email that talks about skiing. When I get into the email, it’s still talking about skiing and I’m seeing this other deal right now as bait and switch.” So for the content, you want to make sure that you’re highlighting your message, but make sure that it is short and concise. We don’t want to see really long promotional emails, the highest performing campaigns that we find are campaigns that are within that one scroll on a desktop and within 1 to 2 scrolls on mobile. So really making sure that you shorten up the copy, and it’s all right there for your guests to be able to see. Then the next part is the call to action button. So the call to action button. We love a call to action button to be in the first scroll if possible. So really it’s above the fold. Being above the fold is before the user has to scroll either on their desktop or on mobile. So keeping it up nice and high so it gives them the option to click right away. And of course, because we’re on this trend of we want to see the subject line about skiing you open the email and it’s still about skiing, but when you hit the cold action button, it should still be about the topics that you’ve been talking about on the email. So it needs to go to the correct URL at the very bottom. You always want to make sure you put your contact details, your unsubscribe link. You must have to be compliant. And lucky for all of you, Revinate doesn’t actually allow you to move forward without an unsubscribe button. So that’s great, but always make sure that it is visible the link for unsubscribe, and it’s not the same color as a background. That’s something that scammers do. And we are not spammers. We are really excellent email marketers. So the last thing at the very bottom is the social media icons. Of course, we want to encourage your social media icons to be on there so that your guests know where else they can go find you. They can go look for that social proof of who you are and what you have to offer them. And lastly, always, always, always test your email marketing campaign before you send it out to your guests. This gives you a last chance to make sure that if something looks a little off, that you go in and adjust it and always make sure that all of your links are acting as expected, going to where you think they should, where you’ve set them up to go. So we talked about actual content, but what about the subject line? If the subject line is no good, we’re going to have a hard time getting them to actually see that content. So how do you stand out in a busy inbox? And this goes back to what Maggie was saying about in the original one of the first slides that we talked about that lots of different properties are sending their campaigns earlier on than Black Friday. Because Black Friday, I don’t know about you, but when I get my inbox of Black Friday, it is full of all sorts of things that I could have four options. It’s overwhelming. Yeah, overwhelming. And so to have something a little bit earlier, and not have to stand out amongst the noise as much is really going to help. But regardless of when you send it, we want you to stand out. We want you to look the best one in there. So here are some of our best practices on things to avoid and things that we promote. So we’ll start with the don’ts. On the left hand side here. Please do not use all caps in your subject lines. We also don’t want to use exclamation marks excessively because it does appear as yelling. So the next is using our feed and forwards. So reply and forward pretending that you’re replying back to them or that this is a forwarded email. It doesn’t work. It’s not been proven successful and it does look pretty spammy if you ask me. Don’t be overly salesy, so make sure that your subject lines are authentic and genuine and that they’re not too long. We don’t want them to get cut off. And if they do end up getting cut off in your email service, spiders in the inbox make sure that if it gets cut off, it’s being cut off in an appropriate place so that they’re still getting the idea of what’s in the email. But if they’re interested enough, they’re going to open it up and learn more. And the last part on here is the preheaders. So we want to make sure that you use the preheaders, but make sure that they’re not awkward. The preheader is going to show up underneath your subject line on mobile and on desktop. So making sure that you’re not just using the same thing twice, otherwise you’re going to have subject line preheader both give you the same information, and making sure that you actually use a preheader because if you don’t use a preheader, the service provider is going to pull the first text out of your email and pop it into your preheader for you. So that’s the things to avoid. Now on to the things that we do want you to do. So we have a little DO acronym here. CURVE. So the first one is Curiosity, trying to frame your subject line in ways that are to be discovered, right? We want to invoke curiosity amongst your users. So why now is the best time to visit Hawaii? I mean, for me, any time is a good time to visit, but I would love to learn more about why now is the best time to visit. The next one is Urgency. So with Black Friday, it’s really easy to create urgency in your subject lines. “Keep in mind this is a flash sale, 24 hours only”, whatever those might be, and they’re expected during Black Friday. So make sure that you are creating some sort of urgency, if you can, to increase the higher open rate relevance. So this kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, making sure that the urge to open an email immediately is based on the subject line. So it has to be Relevant to your audience that you’re sending to. Next is Value. So showcase the value of your message for your guests to open your email. Make sure that you’re using things like create new holiday memories, evoke that emotion with them, and that’s the next one is Emotion. So finding a connection with your guests, making sure that you’re using the personalization, you can even use merge tags, add in the guest first name. Another great thing to add in there would be you visited us last year sort of messaging and we’d love to have you back again this year. That’s really going to hit at the heart because they probably have some really beautiful memories from the last time they stayed. Next up is our mobile-friendly email campaigns. But across all industries, not just hospitality. Mobile traffic is now accounting for more than half of all web page traffic worldwide. And in the US, this figure is even higher. It’s actually around 57%. I mean, we all do it. It’s a clear way that this is the best and most effective way to get through to your credit card. So make sure that when you are doing this, you’re placing that CTA within the first scroll. So that means before they have to scroll on their phone will see that call to action button. And the nice thing too, with Revinate’s composer, is that you do have that easy-to-adjust mobile campaign version versus desktop version. So you can click between the two and use responsive design to make sure that your guests are seeing what’s appropriate for them on the device that they’re opening the email.
Maggie Stothart – 00:31:58: Post sending for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Let’s dive into how you can really get a handle on your email. Campaigns can be a bit tricky to figure out if things are going well, especially if you’ve got a ramp-up of emails going out. But by focusing on some key metrics, you can gauge success and engagement. First up, we have the delivery rate. This metric tells you how many emails actually made it to your audience. A high delivery rate is important if you want your campaigns to be in fact got to get those emails into the inbox for them to be seeing next. We have the open rate. This is all about interest. It shows how many people clicked your emails and open them. Crafting catchy subject lines like Bailey spoke through earlier and choosing a recognizable sender name can really help boost those numbers. I mean, chances are, hopefully you’re top of mind, especially if you’ve been sending ahead of the holiday. So if people are aware that you’ve got a deal going on, they’re going to look for your name. So make us something that is easy for them to recognize. Now, let’s talk about the click rate. It shows how many guests actually clicked on the links within your campaign. And by tracking this, you can see what content really grabs your audience’s attention and resonates with them. The bounce rate is another important one. Ideally, you want to keep this below 5%. I usually encourage writing to stay around 2% just to give you that window. And just to clarify, a hard bounce means that email was permanently rejected oftentimes due to an invalid email address, and then a soft bounce typically is temporarily undeliverable. That could be because their inboxes full or something is going on with the server at the time. Yahoo’s down, unfortunately, so it’ll try again later and hopefully catch them regularly. Claiming your email list can really help minimize these bounces. So it’s good to stay on top of that. And speaking of deliverability, you need to keep your spam reports below 0.3%. Gmail and Yahoo did introduce some new regulations on that this year and it is being enforced. And lastly, let’s touch on the unsubscribe rate. You want this to stay under 1%. If you see people opting out, it’s a really good opportunity to pull back and look at your sun volume and cadence again and just to make sure you’re delivering relevant content to your subscribers. And as we wrap up this slide, let’s remember the importance of keeping track of what worked and what didn’t. It’s great to look back on your every year and keep making improvements. Let’s talk about the importance of follow-up campaigns. First off, we have nurturing leads. The goal here is to re-engage subscribers. You showed interest in Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers, but didn’t end up looking for whatever reason. It all starts with identifying who we’re targeting. We want to focus on those who clicked on links or even visited the booking page but didn’t complete their reservation. These subscribers have shown an interest so let’s give them a little nudge. Once you’ve identified your audience, it’s time to craft personalized messages. A little reminder about those enticing offers can go a long way, especially if you want to create a sense of urgency. Let them know that these deals are too good to miss. And speaking of deals, let’s consider offering some exclusive discounts or bonuses to encourage them to book. Whether it’s a percentage off or an added perk. These incentives can be just the motivation they need to finalize their plans. And don’t forget about your multichannel strategies. I know this is focused on email, but using SMS and social media and retargeting ads to reach those leads is also a great outlet. The more touch points, the better. You want to stay on top of mind and make it easy for them to engage with you. Now let’s shift gears and discuss win-back strategies. This is all about reengaging past customers who might have missed out on your sales because their inbox was tearful. Start by pulling a list of previous guests who haven’t engaged with you recently. They might have forgotten about you, which is hard to believe, but it’s your job to remind them what they’re missing. When you do reach out, you like a tailored message. Highlight any new experience CSEs or services that you have to offer and make sure to emphasize just how much you missed them. To sweeten the deal, offer them some exclusive incentives like discounts or loyalty points for their next day. This gives them a reason to come back and experience what you have to offer. And here’s a valuable tip. Include a survey to gather insights and why they didn’t book. This feedback is gold for improving your future offers and understanding your guests better. And lastly, timing is crucial. Consider sending these one back emails a few weeks after the sales to catch customers who might be planning their next trip. It’s all about being there when they need you.
Bailey Yeats – 00:37:04: All right. So let’s take a quick look at some of our 2023 successful Black Friday Cyber Monday campaigns. So this first one by Seaside Palm Beach. What we love about this campaign is that not only did they send it in two different languages, that we can see here in Spanish and English, but they also sent it in French and German. So they were urging their guests to plan their winter and summer retreat for holidays early with their Black Friday offer. And you can see they had a little countdown here at the top. This is a really great campaign. They had a click-through rate, an average click-through rate of just over 9%. And look at that. Revenue generated towards $70,000. That’s fantastic. We also really encourage you to take a look at these subject lines because just remember, they’re not going to make any booking if they’re not intrigued to open the email. So subject lines are really, really important. Don’t hold back any longer because Black Week is Back, and then they have a little black heart emoji. Next up is the Fullerton Sydney. So this is a 24 hours only. So they used that urgency that we talked about Black Friday, “Book now and get 20% off for 24 hours only.” Urgency for the guests too. But they invited them to view experiences around the property on social media. So they actually have the option to go take a look at what they had for offerings on social and they made it applicable for dates on different ranges throughout the year. When it works for them. So during their low season, I’m sure was when they made these reservations, for we have a place for 82% and just over a hundred thousand in revenue generated. The next one is Canterbury, Coast Samoa. And with this campaign they’ve got the gate break graphic offering up to 35% off. They’ve got a pretty basic subject line. But this is our Black Friday exclusive offer. It’s finally here. So I bet you that their guests know that every year they offer some sort of campaign like this, and they just get excited about it. So they have that urgency to complete the booking before a specific date, which is also great that almost a 5% to rate and over $338,000 in revenue generated. Great work, team. Next up is the Finolhu Baa Atoll Maldives. I’m sorry if I butchered that. I tried my best. Prepare for the biggest sale of the year. So this is a property in the Maldives. So making sure that their guests are seeing that the Black Friday sale is coming soon. So this was a teaser campaign right there, letting them know that the biggest sale of the year is coming. So this goes back to what Maggie was saying about getting that volume coming. This is one of those campaigns that you could send, let them know, and then you can even get them on a waitlist like they maybe did here. At this rate, more details. They had a 7.6, then click-through rate, and they even generated some revenue from this, even though this was just a teaser campaign. The Streamsing Resort. This is their holiday gift guide. So when they sent this out, their goal was to drive ancillary revenue, and they’re pretty successful at that with $314,000 revenue generated, and they had almost 3.6% of their average click-through rate. And it looks like exactly as expected in the subject line. We said the holiday gift guide they get in here. We’re still talking about the holiday gift guide, and then it goes through and gives you all the different gifts. So this is a great example of making sure that everything is on par with exactly what they said they were going to be giving their guests or their subscribers, I should say. Here’s a cheeky little creative campaign from Autocamp. So this is another teaser offering up to 40% off coming up. So “Mark your calendars. This is coming up, and we want you to save the date.” So, “ur biggest sale of the year is almost here.” Great click-through rate — 2% revenue generated again, almost $56,000 just on a teaser campaign. So good job Autocamp. Nice work. Next up is 21c Museum Hotels. So this was the goal to drive more engagement by resending to anyone who had not opened the previous campaign. So with this they wanted them to have a little bit of urgency to book at any one of their properties. So this is a group account looking to book at any of the properties, and they’ve included a pretty decent discount obviously here of 35% with their cyber sale could see a rate of 1.3%, but revenue generated almost $129,000, and that was to people who hadn’t opened the recent campaign. So this is a nice little revenue driver. And then our last one here is Miraval Resorts. So this is a group account as well talking about this revenue generated. We saw, or they saw over $2 million in revenue generated from this beautiful campaign. It’s got the urgency It’s got the value-based offer where the resort credit is going to the guests. And the subject line is very simple. It’s that the cyber sale is selling out fast. So it created urgency. Talked about the fact that it’s a cyber sale. We get in here, and we got the same messaging with a simple option “Book now.” Now you’ll notice, too, that their, “Book now” button on their image is above full. So they also satisfied that desire and need to have those call-to-action button above the blurb. So great work Miraval. Well, you all did a fantastic job here, too.
Maggie Stothart – 00:42:28: All righty. So key takeaways. We’ve gone over a lot in this webinar, but I think it was all really useful, and I hope you do too. So prepare your campaigns ahead of time. Don’t wait till the last minute. Get into the marketing app. Create your campaigns. Build out that calendar. Use your data and target the right guest at the right time. Learn from your data to achieve optimal ROI, and follow deliverability best practices to make sure you land in that inbox.
Bailey Yeats – 00:42:58: As I mentioned from the education to you, we have a series of spotlight trainings that we offer that are group trainings that are free for any of our customers to join, as well as we’re always here to help. So if you ever need anything, by all means, we are [email protected], and we’re happy to help where we can. Thank you so much for joining us today. All of your questions will be answered either in the chat with our team here that’s answering quickly on the side there, or by Maggie or myself in an email to come after this campaign. We really want to thank you for being here. We’re so happy to be able to host this and to be able to spend an hour with you today. Just try and partner with you today. So thank you and we look forward to seeing you again next time.
Outro – 00:43:46: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.
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