The Power of Electronic Direct Marketing

“With the popularity of social media, you might think that email marketing is old hat and doesn’t provide much traction for hotels anymore, but you would be wrong. Email remains a very powerful marketing tool, because people will often take action based on information or promotions included in an email, but only if you are providing solid value to your guests”. Source: InTouchData

What makes for an effective EDM (Electronic Direct Mail)?

It needs to entice people to open the email, read the content and do something like visit your all-important website to make a booking. To succeed, your EDM needs an enticing subject line, strong, personalised copy that propels the reader to the end, and a clear, simple call to action.

An informative and well-planned newsletter or email blast that covers a range of topics within a best-practice formula will achieve much higher success in all areas of deliverability: open rate, click-through rate and call to action.

The subject line needs to avoid spam trigger keywords and promise the reader they will gain something by reading the email. Some sure-fire ways to grab attention are to create a sense of urgency, include a benefit the recipient will get, offer to solve a problem, or arouse curiosity.

Content and images within the EDM need to be engaging and informative, with a heavy lashing of “What’s in it for me?” for the reader. Examples of topics could include a current or near-future local-interest story, testimonials, follow-up on a previous promotion or competition, product promotion and feedback options.

Organisations that send messages of a commercial nature by email, SMS instant message or MMS must comply with the Spam Act. MOM has extensive experience in setting up and managing these direct marketing requirements, what is legally permitted and how to stay compliant. This requires:

• commercial electronic messages to be sent with the consent of the recipient
• accurate sender identification including the sender’s contact information
• a functional unsubscribe mechanism

Once the property database is spam compliant, MOM uses the database for general promotions, special events, to raise brand awareness and advise guests of changes or problems. It is imperative that email addresses are collected from all guests, especially those who book via OTAs, to build this valuable business resource.

The database contacts are used exclusively for the owner property, remain the intellectual property of the owner property and are not sold or transferred to any third party.

The direct marketing platform that MOM uses has interactive graphs and in-depth reporting features used to monitor open and click-through data in real time. This transparent reporting method enables improvements to be made to the email strategy and provides instant insights to evaluate what’s working and what possibly may not be.

When this article was originally published, the MOM monthly service fee included spam compliance and a professionally designed quarterly email newsletter or monthly e-blast, depending on the service model.