E-mail marketing is a large part of any successful hotel marketing strategy, as e-mail is one of the key ways hoteliers and hotel marketers communicate with current, future and past hotel guests. The email marketing platform, Mailchimp describes transactional email as,

“An email sent to an individual based on some action. It could be:

• an action they took directly

• an action they were the target of or,

• perhaps even inaction on their part

A warm welcome sets the tone

For example, if a user signs up for your website, you should probably welcome them with a lovely email. Bam! That’s a transactional email. Signing up is the “transaction” in this case. Simple, right?”

In the case of your hotel, a common transactional email would be a booking confirmation or, an email thanking the guest for choosing your property after they check out.

While you might think that this is a nuts and bolts type of message, research shows that there is a potential to drive more revenue from this transactional emails, because they tend to generate much better open rates than other types of email. This makes sense, given the transactional email will often contain information the recipient needs – such as their booking reference.

So, could transactional emails play a bigger role in your hotel marketing solutions? Do you need to rethink your e-mail marketing solutions to get more from them? Read on to check if your transactional emails are making the most of these opportunities.


Optimise Your E-mails

In an increasingly mobile online landscape, it is vital to ensure hoteliers take note of the need to optimise their e-mail marketing content for mobile users as well as those on a desktop. Failure to do so could result in e-mails which are difficult to read and even more difficult to engage with, which dilutes your offer and any information you are seeking to convey via this otherwise valuable methodology. Hotel guests increasingly book, search for and read e-mails on their mobile devices, so think in terms of using a mobile-responsive template and always check how your content appears on multiple screen sizes prior to scheduling or hitting ‘send’. The simple act of making your transactional emails better suited to mobile devices could result in more revenue and a better user experience.

Personalising your e-mails will help your customer feel like a valued hotel guest, not simply another number or a way to fill an empty room. An added benefit of personalisation is that it provides a low-to-no cost way of relationship building at source before your customers have even had a chance to see their hotel room or try out any of the features your hotel has to offer. In cases where your e-mails are focused on soliciting custom rather than confirming a pre-existing booking (such as welcoming someone who has signed up to your newsletter to receive offers) taking the time to personalise these automated messages could increase your transaction levels significantly.

Another way of ensuring you have adequately optimised your e-mail marketing solutions to get the most out of your transactional emails is to perform some key tests on both the aesthetics and content prior to (and after) sending. Whether this testing takes the form of some clever A/B testing or takes advantage of analytics data to check opening rates and engagement levels as a means of improving future efforts, this could have a significant and positive effect upon the revenue boosting potential of your e-mail marketing with minimal extra hassle.