One-to-One Email Marketing for Hotels
Increase Guest Engagement with Every Email
Elevate Your Hotel Marketing With Every One-to-One Email.
Welcome to the ultimate guide to one-to-one email marketing at scale for hotels. Enjoy your stay!
In this guide, you’ll discover how, with every email your hotel staff sends, you can:
- 12 Practical Ideas to Engage Your Customers Through One-to-One
- Email Improve Every Aspect of Your Guest Engagement Journey
- Meet Key Industry Trends
- Strengthen Your Hotel’s Internal Communication
- Measure Your Success
- See One-to-One Hotel Email Marketing in Action: The Brooklands Hotel Case Study
- Best Practice to Create and Manage Hotel Email Signatures
High Impact Hotel Marketing Strategy
Today’s hotel guests are looking for personalized hotel experiences and communications that make them feel special – before, during, and after their stay. Your hotel staff send thousands of individual one-to-one emails every month, each with the opportunity to run targeted, personalizable, interactive brand messaging. It’s a match made in hotel marketing heaven!
Whether you’re marketing a luxurious beachfront resort, a boutique townhouse business hotel, or a reliable nationwide budget hotel chain, this guide is here to help you enhance guest engagement with every email, ensuring guest satisfaction and improved hotel performance.
This guide covers everything from consistently branding all hotel staff emails and driving year-round direct bookings to meeting the latest hotel industry trends and recruiting and retaining the best hotel staff. Whatever the challenge, we’ve got you covered.
Rocketseed one-to-one email marketing at scale brings together your hotel brand, staff, and most active communication channel so your hotel can creatively, compliantly, and costeffectively stand out in the crowded, competitive hotel marketplace.
Ready to elevate your hotel’s marketing? Be our guest. Let’s get started!
Achieve Key Hotel Marketing Objectives
From brand awareness and bookings to reviews and repeat stays. Rocketseed one-to-one email marketing can be used both strategically, for example, to raise hotel brand awareness, and tactically to promote packages, special offers, and events.
Here are our top 17 one-to-one email marketing tips – with examples – to help build your hotel brand, drive direct bookings, maximize guest revenue, and boost your hotel’s online reputation.
12 Practical Ideas to Engage Your Customers Through One-to-One Email
#1: Increase Hotel Brand Awareness, Recognition & Recall
Keep your hotel’s brand top-of-mind in a competitive market by incorporating your hotel logo, imagery, and messaging at the top and bottom of all your staff’s one-to-one emails.
Make Your Hotel Brand Eye-Catching in Every Email
Hotel marketing is highly visual, so commission professional photography and use the most atmospheric, enticing imagery of your property and facilities in your email banners. Show potential guests precisely what to expect and excite them about booking their stay. Use concise, compelling headline copy to capture your hotel’s brand promise.
You can also feature multiple properties under one brand umbrella to help recipients remember your brand when booking their next hotel. As these banners drive traffic to your website, ensure that it is attractive, easy to navigate, and, most importantly, fast.
TIP: Use concise, compelling headline copy to capture your hotel’s brand promise.
#2: Ensure Your Hotel Stands Out From the Competition
You know how tough it is out there. With new hotels and Airbnb options popping up, you must find ways for your hotel brand to stand out and offer something unique to attract and keep guests.
Show Your Hotel’s Value Proposition
Show recipients the facilities and services that make your hotel a special place to stay. Is it the ambiance of your spa, the luxury of your suites, or the culinary experiences in your eateries? Give pride of place in your email banners to those facilities your customers tell you they value most, and that makes the most significant difference when deciding whether to book.
Want to amplify your experiential marketing? Link your email signatures and banners to a 3D virtual room or hotel tour so that they engage with your property and brand
TIP: Use banners to show recipients your unique facilities and services.
#3: Increase Customer and Prospect Database
Your hotel staff email signatures are a powerful way to boost newsletter sign-ups.
Increase Hotel Newsletter Sign-ups
Simply include a compelling call-to-action button urging recipients to click through to your hotel newsletter online subscription form. Banners can be used to highlight the value recipients will receive regularly by subscribing, including exclusive content and offers.
It’s a great way to grow your database and build long-term engagement.
TIP: Outline the value of your newsletter in banners to drive sign-up.
#4: Drive Booking Whilst Reducing Reliance on OTAs
Regarding hotel success, the bottom line is booking revenue. Reduce reliance on online travel agents (OTAs) and their large commissions – and boost your profit margins – by directing guests to your branded booking engine (with real-time rates and availability) via one-to-one email banners and a clear, clickable ‘BOOK NOW’ call to action.
Run Direct Booking & Exclusive Banner Deal Campaigns
Everyone loves a deal. Offer recipients an exclusive one-to-one email discounted room rate so they can book with your hotel directly instead of through competitors or an OTA.
Ensure your hotel booking platform is user-friendly, rivaling OTAs for ease and clear price comparison so that when recipients click ‘BOOK NOW,’ they’re confident they are getting the best deal.
TIP: Mobile-optimized banners are key for the 45% of mobile hotel bookings.
#5: Drive Bookings Without Discounting
Want to drive direct bookings without being reliant on discounts?
Promoting Package Deals Through Direct Email
Use your banner campaigns to add appeal to guests (and drive higher revenues) with added-value package deals. Run email banner campaigns that entice guests to book a more multi-faceted experiential stay, for example, a sporting package (golf/tennis), a romantic package, a gourmet dining package, or a spa package tailored by season.
TIP: Use Rocketseed’s segmentation ability to accurately target package deals.
#6: Increase Occupancy All Year Around
Drive year-round hotel revenue with one-to-one email banner campaigns showcasing your seasonal offers.
Showcase Seasonal Offers
From peak season upselling and off-season discounts to romantic Valentine’s Day packages and celebratory Christmas stays, use clear time limits and compelling calls-to-action to give your hotel’s seasonal banners a sense of urgency and exclusivity.
Plan ahead and never miss a campaign deadline with Rocketseed’s automated banner campaign scheduling.
TIP: Use key set-piece events, like Valentine’s Day, to drive seasonal offers.
#7: Increase Hotel Meetings and Events Bookings
Use your events team’s everyday emails to boost event bookings, from business conferences to birthday parties.
Promote Your Hotel as a Meetings and Events Venue
Use one-to-one email banners to showcase your venue spaces, conference facilities, and meeting rooms and link to relevant content to assist event organizers and increase upselling opportunities.
Promote custom packages and link to pricing, layouts, virtual tours, catering, equipment rental, and group accommodation deals. Post events, use banners for surveys, reviews, and incentives to seal client loyalty.
TIP: Engage business customers specifically through targeted segmentation.
#8: Increase Wedding Bookings
Simplify wedding planning using one-to-one email marketing.
Promote Hotel as a Wedding Venue
Use eye-catching banners to highlight your hotel wedding venue, link to relevant website pages, and promote personalized packages with decor, catering, and entertainment options. Encourage virtual venue tours and inspire by linking to previous wedding galleries and testimonials.
Link to your hotel’s events calendar so couples can check venue availability and encourage group room bookings to maximize hotel profits.
TIP: Personalized and engaging interactive emails are perfect for wedding clients
#9: Maximize Guest Revenue
Both pre-stay and on-property one-to-one email banners are the ideal way to maximize guest revenue via upselling and cross-selling.
Upselling and Cross-Selling Email Banner Campaigns
For example, a booking confirmation email can carry a banner encouraging guests to click through to “upgrade your room”, “add a relaxing spa treatment” or “secure your dinner reservation” to improve their stay and generate additional spend in the hotel.
Email banners can also be used to promote local leisure partners such as golf courses to further enhance the guest experience.
TIP: Add room upgrade banners on pre-stay emails.
#10: Measure Guest Satisfaction
Have your guests enjoyed their stay? Let them rate their experience easily by adding an interactive one-click survey banner to every post-stay email.
Measure Guest Satisfaction in a Single Click
Positive responses can trigger a detailed survey, review request, and promotional offer for their next stay. Rocketseed’s real-time alerts enable your guest services team to resolve any negative responses immediately so you avoid poor reviews and also prove your hotel’s excellent customer service!
TIP: Incorporate one-click surveys to your banners to gauge immediate feedback.
#11: Manage Hotel Online Reputation
Online reviews can make or break your business. They spread like wildfire and are crucial to building traveler trust. You’ve got to keep your guests happy and manage your online reputation like a pro.
Increase Guest Reviews with Review Request Banners
Enhance your hotel’s reputation and online search ranking by garnering positive online reviews. Need more reviews? Just ask. Add a ‘How was your stay?’ banner with a ‘Write a review’ CTA button on all post-stay emails so recipients can click through to TripAdvisor or other review platforms.
Thank respondents for positive reviews and address any negatives immediately. You can feature your best new reviews on your next email banner campaign.
TIP: Direct customers to review sites to build your online reputation.
#12: Increase Repeat Stays
Make sure your guests come back again and again.
Promote your Hotel Loyalty Program & Next Stay Deals
Use your email banners to promote your hotel loyalty program membership sign-up, showcase current member perks, offers, and exclusive access to amenities and upgrades, or remind recipients to check their loyalty program points total. Depending on guest status, your hotel loyalty scheme banners can link to your membership sign-up page or your website’s exclusive member portal.
Alternatively post-stay emails can include a time-limited discount banner to encourage a repeat booking.
TIP: Feature member perks in email banners to encourage sign-up.
Improve Every Aspect of Your Guest Engagement Journey
Enrich Every Stage of the Guest Journey
When to use Hotel One-to-one Email Marketing at Scale
You can use one-to-one email marketing to enrich every stage of the guest journey, from pre-booking inquiry replies to post-stay feedback requests.
Pre-booking
Even at the consideration stage of the guest journey, one-to-one marketing campaigns can be run across reply emails to guest inquiries. These can create brand impact and increase interest, support conversion, sow seeds for upselling, and encourage sign-up to your hotel newsletter.
Booking / Pre-stay
Anticipation is a pivotal part of the guest experience. Booking confirmations and pre-stay one-to-one emails (such as booking reminders and detailed directions) provide opportunities to run email banner campaigns that can help increase your profits by upselling, such as offering a room upgrade, additional activities, and restaurant reservations.
On-property / In-stay
One-to-one emails continue to play a vital role once guests arrive. A welcome email can be significantly enhanced by adding an interactive banner, adding value by promoting on-site amenities, including fine dining experiences, luxurious spas, recreational activities, and more. Special event notifications and exclusive promotions can enhance your guest’s stay and encourage further exploration.
Post-stay
The guest’s journey extends beyond their departure. Post-stay emails foster continued engagement. Adding email banner campaigns can make it easy for guests to rate their experience and encourage them to leave a review to boost your online reputation. Email banners can also encourage repeat stays through exclusive post-stay offers and promoting your hotel’s loyalty program, or even cross-selling other properties in your hotel group to entice guests to plan their next visit.
Meet Key Industry Trends
From smart technology to sustainability, one-to-one email marketing shows your hotel is on-trend.
In a constantly evolving hospitality industry, hotel one-to-one email marketing enables you to embrace emerging trends and easily integrate them into your messaging. From in-room tech to eco-friendly initiatives, with Rocketseed your hotel’s emails are always on trend.
Strengthen Your Hotel’s Internal Communications
Strengthen Hotel Staff’s Internal Communications
Engage your team with internal one-to-one email marketing at scale.
Your staff are the key to your hotel’s success and your biggest brand ambassadors. But recruiting and retaining the best professional staff is increasingly difficult. Internal one-to-one email marketing gives your hotel’s HR department an engaging communication channel to meet these challenges and strengthen your hotel’s workplace culture
Get the Right Hotel Staff to Deliver the Best Service
Recruitment, Onboarding and Training Banner Campaigns
Use email signature banners to advertise vacancies internally and externally. Interested recipients can then click through to a detailed job description and complete or download a job application form.
A series of onboarding banners can be automated for new employees to click through to information on their role requirements, quickly familiarizing them with your hotel’s brand values, customer-first approach, and relevant health and safety information.
Further, one-to-one training banners connect staff with the newest training content. Not only can you track individual employee engagement but it shows you are committed to individual employees’ career development.
Keep Staff Up to Speed with What’s Happening at Your Hotel
Staff Information Banner Campaigns
What’s happening in your hotel this week? New out-of-season deals to sell? VIP wedding event at the weekend? New staff uniform policy?
Ensure your team is up to speed by adding an eye-catching interactive banner on your internal email, linking to the relevant deal, events calendar, and policy documents.
Increase Staff Morale and Retention
Increase Staff Morale and Retention
How happy are your staff? Happy enough to stay? Measure hotel staff satisfaction by running interactive one-click survey banner campaigns on your hotel’s internal emails
Positive responses can link to a more detailed survey or ask for suggestions, while any negatives can trigger an alert giving you a chance to follow up before valued staff decide to quit!
Strengthen Your Hotel’s Workplace Culture
Motivational Banner Campaigns and Inclusive Signatures
Strong internal one-to-one email marketing can keep staff engaged with your brand and focused on the same goal, creating a solid hotel brand culture. This can be especially important in strengthening relationships between departments and geographically spread properties in your hotel group. Use email banners to encourage them to contribute marketing ideas or link them to instructions for content sharing.
Email signatures show staff they are an essential part of a hotel brand they can believe in and makes them valued and valuable brand ambassadors. In addition to your hotel brand, including employees’ preferred pronouns, name pronunciation, and diversity and equity accreditations in their email signatures, you can show your hotel’s commitment to an inclusive work environment.
Measuring Your Success
Monitoring Hotel One-to-One Email Marketing
A hotel one-to-one marketing campaign is only completed by evaluating its impact. With Rocketseed analytics and reporting, you can track every recipient interaction with your hotel email signatures and banner campaigns. Understand individual guest engagement, compare campaigns, refine strategies, and shape your hotel’s future campaigns.
Reporting Dashboard
From a snapshot of your hotel’s campaign success in a key numbers report to in-depth analysis by sender and recipient, Rocketseed gives you all the data insights you need.
Real-time Click Notifications
With Rocketseed’s real-time click alerts, your hotel’s sales and marketing teams can reach out the moment a recipient engages with your one-to-one marketing email, increasing the chance of converting a booking or showing just how responsive your hotel’s customer service team is in remedying any guest feedback that is less than positive.
Integrations
Rocketseed Integrates with your hotel’s CRM and Google Analytics so you can track engagement throughout your guests’ customer journey and attribute conversions and revenue to specific one-to-one email campaigns, enabling you to measure channel ROI.
Post-stay
The guest’s journey extends beyond their departure. Post-stay emails foster continued engagement. Adding email banner campaigns can make it easy for guests to rate their experience and encourage them to leave a review to boost your online reputation. Email banners can also encourage repeat stays through exclusive post-stay offers and promoting your hotel’s loyalty program, or even cross-selling other properties in your hotel group to entice guests to plan their next visit.
Measures Available
You can measure campaign performance with the following key metrics:
See One-to-one Hotel Email Marketing in Action
The Brooklands Hotel Case Study
The Brooklands Hotel: Accelerating One-to-one Email Marketing with a 12.7% engagement rate
Rich in motor racing heritage, the UK’s luxury Brooklands Hotel chose Rocketseed to help it achieve consistently branded staff email signatures and 12.7% engagement through one-to-one email marketing at scale.
By centralising everything to ensure consistent company-wide signatures, coordinated marketing campaigns and creative, cost-effective design, Rocketseed makes email branding very simple!
Ceri Richardson Head of Sales & Marketing, Brooklands Hotel
Best Practice to Create and Manage Hotel Email Signatures
Creating professional hotel email signatures ensures that every email your staff sends makes the right first impression and boosts your hotel’s brand.
Hotel Email Signature Management Best Practice
Managing hotel email signatures at scale can be a challenge. Here are 4 key factors to ensure you manage them effectively and increase guest engagement through email signatures.
Email signature consistency in hotel marketing is essential in order to build guests’ trust. The key to achieving consistency is via clear hotel email signature branding guidelines and centralized management so that individual hotel employees cannot get creative with their own signatures. Rocketseed’s email signature software for hotel businesses puts you in central control with tamper-proof signatures. This way, even global hotel chain-wide email signature updates can be implemented instantly and simultaneously.
With travelers using smartphones to access reservation details, make bookings and check-in online, mobile-responsive email signatures for hotels are essential to ensure a seamless guest experience. Hotel email signatures that display poorly on mobile with misaligned text or missing images appear unprofessional, deter potential guests, hinder communication and damage your hotel’s brand and reputation. Rocketseed’s hotel email signature management tool removes this risk by ensuring all signatures display perfectly on every device to encourage engagement.
It is vital that all employee contact information in hotel email signatures is correct. But does your hotel’s IT team have the time to update them individually? By integrating Rocketseed’s email signature management software with your hotel’s Active Directory or Google Directory, staff signature contact details are automatically updated in line with any changes made in the directory.
Proactively protect your brand with a hotel email disclaimer. Location is a key factor in determining your hotel email signature legal requirements. Email disclaimers play a pivotal role by stating legal obligations, including guest data protection and confidentiality. They shield the hotel from liability, demonstrate compliance, and ensure transparent communication, safeguarding both guests and your establishment.
Hotel Email Signatures Design Best Practice
You’ve invested much time, effort, and money in creating your hotel’s brand identity. It looks great everywhere, from your hotel digital marketing channels to your staff uniforms.
Don’t risk your hotel’s email signature becoming the weak branding link. Simply follow these email signature design tips for hotels:
Rocketseed recommends keeping your email signature size to 650 pixels (px) wide and between 90-150px high.
Limit your signature palette to 2 or 3 colors in line with your brand guidelines. Contact details must be easy to read, so use a font size between 11px and 26px, and make sure to use websafe fonts.
To aid brand recognition, we recommend using your hotel logo in your email signature at 100px x 100px (for a square or circular logo) to appear sharp on all devices. Your logo should link directly to your website in interactive hotel email signatures. Ensure all images are embedded (as opposed to referenced) – this is simple with Rocketseed and ensures your hotel images will display perfectly on all devices.
Keep hotel staff contact information to no more than 3-4 lines. Include full name (as well as phonetic name pronunciation) and job title to aid guest communication and provide appropriate direct and departmental (e.g., reservations or events) telephone numbers and email addresses.
For a personalized touch, include professional headshots of hotel staff members to help foster familiarity and trust.
Incorporate social media links in hotel email signatures using icons, each sized 22px x 22px. Only feature your hotel’s social profiles that are actively managed with regularly updated content.
If your hotel or hotel group has an established, welcoming tagline, consider adding it to help connect with recipients.
Showcase your hotel’s standards and successes by including any recent hospitality industry awards won and industry accreditations such as for sustainability.
Include a glowing guest quote or overall rating to show your commitment to guest comfort and satisfaction
Add hotel email signature promotional banners to meet a wide range of marketing objectives, trends and challenges.
Add an appropriate call to action so recipients can easily click through to the most relevant content, such as your latest blog or booking engine
Hotel Email Banner Design Best Practice
Adding promotional banners to all your hotel emails is key to successful one-to-one email marketing. These email banner design tips will help you maximise guest engagement.
Using Rocketseed, you have the option to apply hotel marketing banners to the top or bottom of your staff emails. So whilst a new spa launch or package deal promotion banner can make an immediate impact at the top, a guest survey banner might be more appropriate under your email signature
Rocketseed recommended an optimum hotel email banner width of 650px and a height of 90-150px with a file size no larger than 40kb.
Use eye-catching imagery of your hotel, rooms, restaurants, spa, or event spaces, depending on the offer you’re promoting – it pays to invest in professional photography to show off your hotel at its best.
To showcase more than one aspect of your hotel in the same banner, add animation. Simply using a GIF, 2 or 3 images can appear in sequence in your banner, making it more attention-grabbing.
Keep your banner headline clear and concise in your hotel brand tone of voice and give the recipient a compelling reason to click your banner’s call-to-action.
Whether it’s ‘Find out more,’ ‘Book now’ or ‘Leave a review’, the essential part of your hotel’s email banner is the stand-out, clickable call-to-action button (CTA) linking to the most relevant content for the recipient. Experiment with contrasting colors, fonts, and sizes to see which receives the most clicks.
Hotel Email Banners Campaign Management Best Practice
Hotel Email Banners Campaign Management Best Practice Your hotel can use email banner campaigns strategically – for example, to raise awareness of your hotel’s brand – or tactically, such as when promoting exclusive booking deals.
As with email signatures, Rocketseed puts you in central control of all one-to-one email marketing so you are guaranteed that all your hotel promotional banner campaigns are implemented correctly and coordinated.
As this is one-to-one email marketing, both audiences and senders can be segmented down to the individual.
With Rocketseed’s recipient targeting rules, you can always reach individual recipients – prospective and current hotel guests, suppliers, partners and internal hotel staff – with the most relevant email banner campaign messaging.
It always pays to plan ahead and with Rocketseed you can prepare your hotel’s email campaign banners in advance and schedule them to automatically run in line with your promotions calendar. This is ideal for your hotel’s seasonal and limited time offers and ensures you never miss a campaign deadline.
Need some help with your email signatures?
