In an earlier post, we talked about digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts. There, we highlighted some of the most important components of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for the modern world, which included email marketing as one component of a data-driven and multi-faced marketing strategy for bed and breakfasts.
Email marketing is an essential aspect of any comprehensive strategy in digital marketing for bed and breakfasts, particularly as it’s one of your best tools to reach out to and connect with your past guests. More importantly, it’s one of the tools at our disposal to help us curate brand loyalty and turn a one-time guest into a repeat and loyal customer. Repeat guests are, as we like to call them, the bread and butter of the bed and breakfast industry!
Our team at Inn Marketplace can connect you to leading industry experts that can help set you up with a revenue-driven email marketing campaign. To get started, book your free consultation with our digital design experts, Logan Marketing. For even more ideas on how best to market your property and set you up for your best year ever, consult with our in-house bed and breakfast consultant, Get Heads in Beds.Combined, these industry leaders have well over 50 years of expertise in the Bed and Breakfast industry to share and will no doubt make 2023 your best year yet.
Using Email Marketing to Increase Your Revenue
In addition to having a solid content-creation strategy that is supported by data, your digital marketing agency should be engaging in email campaigns. Email marketing is often your best tool to establish and increase loyalty. Though you can buy email databases and market to audiences who haven’t yet stayed at your property, the best use of these types of campaigns is to market yourself directly to guests who have already stayed with you.
These past guests have already (hopefully) had a great experience with you, and they are far more likely to return again for another stay. More importantly, you can sweeten your offer by offering promotions, discounts, and other packages as appropriate to your business model, but do so only to reward loyalty. Utilizing data in the form of open rates, click-through rates, and heat mapping on email newsletters, in addition to new technologies like call tracking, can go a long way in helping you determine the overall success of your email campaigns and adjust them when needed.
As you create your email marketing campaigns, there are a few things that are important to keep in mind. First, we all know our email inboxes are inundated daily with constant sales pitches, promotions, and discounts. If you’re anything like us, you delete most of these without even reading them in an attempt to at least clear some of the clutter from your inbox for the day. Knowing this, it’s important to keep any emails you do send out relevant to your guests.
Don’t overly rely on promotions. We like to tell our guests that only 10-20% of their email marketing campaigns (if that!) should be promotional – the rest should be all about connecting with our readers, inspiring them, and, hopefully, bringing them content that is interesting, useful, and/or informative in some way. Think of this tool as an extension of your social media in that it’s a great way to build and maintain community with your readership!
The Best Email Marketing Platform
We’ve already called out WordPress as being the best website-development platform. Just like web development platforms, there are several email platforms one can use, but the best and most commonly used one is Mailchimp. Though the email marketing platform space is relatively competitive, and you’re likely to get a different answer to this question from various industry professionals, the best overall email marketing platform has long been recognized as Mailchimp.
At its core, an email marketing platform is an essential tool for helping you develop, schedule, send, and monitor your email marketing campaigns. However, well-designed software such as MailChimp will let you do much more than these basic functions. The best platforms also make it easy for you to increase your audience, segment your lists based on various factors, and even combine multiple marketing channels to truly harness the earning power of your business. There are even some built-in automations that can be extremely beneficial in harnessing the power of your email campaigns.
One of the things that, in our eyes, makes Mailchimp the best email marketing platform is its relative simplicity and ease of use. You don’t need to be a marketing expert to use it and see results. Mailchimp has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop campaign builder that allows you to customize the look and feel of your campaigns, and it also offers easy-to-use tools for A/B testing so you can gain further insight into the performance of your emails (part of the importance of data-driven marketing we talked about before!).
MailChimp’s reporting is also easy to use and understand, and it will integrate with various other software platforms. It can get pricier with larger databases and email lists, however, we find that the cost is usually offset dramatically by the success of our email campaigns.
The Importance of Mobile-First Email Marketing
Just as it’s important to choose the right email platform and to understand how to interpret the data from any email campaigns you may send out, it’s also important to design your email marketing campaigns to be read on a mobile device. In fact, we’d go one step further and say that it’s critical to implement mobile-first design practices when designing templated marketing campaigns.
Though most people used to primarily log in to their email accounts via their computers, that has drastically changed in recent years. As of early 2023, more than 60% of emails are now opened first on mobile devices, and that number is only expected to grow in the coming years. Much of this email reading, of course, is done as we are waking up in the morning. Given that more than half of people are interacting with emails on their mobile phones, you want to make sure you’re catering to those users and designing an email that is easy to read in such a format.
Luckily, email campaigns designed to be easily read on mobile phones are also easy to read on laptops and desktop computers. The reverse is most certainly not true. How often have you tried to read an email on your phone, zooming in here and there, only to get frustrated that it wasn’t formatted readily for viewing before deleting it? Once is too many, particularly when every engagement is a potential sale and truly counts toward your business’s bottom line!
Mailchimp also makes it easy for you to preview what your email marketing campaign will look like on both a desktop and a mobile device, so there’s no excuse to not have an email that looks great across platforms.
If you need help with planning and implementing fantastic, data-driven email marketing campaigns, turn to the experts at Logan Marketing, the comprehensive digital marketing specialists working exclusively with Inn Marketplace. Book your free consultation today!
