Why your Hospitality business needs Email Marketing

Email Marketing is used to promote hospitality businesses, selling your product or services and, building relationships with customers. A study by HubSpot shows that 3.9 billion users email daily, making it a popular communication channel that your venue should be using!

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a popular marketing channel, a form of direct and digital marketing that can promote products or services. It can help make your customers aware of the latest items such as a new dish added to the menu or offers. It can also play a vital role in marketing strategies as it can help hospitality businesses build brand awareness, build relationships and keep customers engaged.

Why you need Email marketing?

With email marketing, businesses can measure the effectiveness of their messaging based on metrics. SPARK’s email marketing system allows hospitality venues to create email campaigns. SPARK does this through custom templates, where they can target specific emails to subscription groups and see how many people were engaged by it. This helps hospitality businesses see what appeals to their customers.

Venues can use email to drive traffic to blogs, social media, or anywhere else an establishment would like their guests to visit.

Emails help businesses keep in contact with their target audience. They inform consumers, keep them updated about deals, offers and events and, allow them to check their inboxes when it is convenient to them. According to Campaign Monitor, 47% of all people across demographics use a mobile application for checking their email. Hospitality businesses can reach their customers in real-time, anywhere!

In comparison to social media, emails have a larger following, they are more personal and are one of the few ways you can sign up for a social media account. They have been around longer than social media so it naturally has a larger user base. Statista estimates that 4.1 billion people worldwide use e-mail. By contrast, Facebook, had roughly 2.8 billion monthly active users at the end of 2020 making this a popular channel that hospitality venues should consider using.

Building usable data

Collecting data will help venues gain more knowledge on their potential customer’s profiles. The more information included, the better insight businesses will have on their consumers for venues to create a more personalised experience.

Ways to get this data:

• By encouraging people to subscribe. This could be to a newsletter which includes special offers. When getting a new subscriber, businesses can send a "thank you" email directly to the contacts with a survey to gain more data.
• Point of sale (POS), having a system that can collect personal data to create a profile of who they are and their buyer persona.
• Social networks, adding a link on a Facebook post where people can subscribe for more updates about your venue.
• Customer service teams can collect data on consumers.
• At events, meeting potential customers face to face is an opportunity to collect data.
• Providing more relevant content and products to those who have subscribed. This will help capture more contacts as current customers would recommend your venue to others.

Personalisation

Personalised emails stand out within the inbox as highly relevant, tailor-made material. They make emails more likely to be opened and clicked on and strengthen customer experiences by sending the right content to the right people at the right time.

When writing tailored emails to customers make sure it is clean and organised, keep paragraphs short and make sure keywords and phrases stand out to readers. Bullet Points are a great way to capture skim readers to make sure they take in the vital points. Also, use images to illustrate your content which captures readers attention and makes them more engaging.

To help get email marketing introduced into hospitality businesses, they will need an email builder and templates, some good examples are HubSpot, MailChimp and Moosend. Having a template builder will allow the establishment to have better design features, help to save time and, will save money. By using templates, hospitality venues will be able to communicate clearly and efficiently with customers.

Discounts

A study by Campaign Monitor shows that 70% of people open emails from a brand or company in search of a deal, discount, or coupon. Giveaways, discounts, coupons and vouchers are always a good type of incentive, these can be presented to a customer in an email. For example, restaurants can send specific discounts/vouchers to those who love desserts, offering them their favourite meals at a better price. This will boost sales and revenue, and improve customer satisfaction.

Segmenting

Segmentation is when you divide up your contacts into smaller segments based on the information they provide such as their gender, age and location. This information can help you further personalise your email campaigns by tailoring content to their specific information, including past purchases, browsing history, and geographical location.

Segmentation helps marketers to be more efficient in terms of time, money and other resources. Market segmentation allows venues to learn about their customers. They gain a better understanding of customer’s needs and wants and therefore can tailor campaigns to customer segments. For example, hospitality venues can send special offers to consumers who have their birthday in May creating a more personalised experience for them.

Linking to social media

Statista has reported that around 49.25 million users are active on social media in 2021. Social networking has become one of the simplest and easiest ways to communicate with a consumer. With this being so popular, linking emails with social media is beneficial.

What are the benefits of integrating social media and emails?

• Sharing email links on social media platforms can help venues grow their subscriber’s list. Creating an effective CTA to take them from social media to their emails is a quick and effective way to increase the open and click-through rate.
• Sharing links to social media, a 'social sharing button' will help guide consumers to different platforms that they can also engage with.
• Integrating the two will help businesses track their email performance metrics, enabling them to identify key influencers.

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How SPARK can assist you with email marketing

SPARK's Cloud HQ gives hospitality businesses the option to:

• Gather in-depth customer data through CRM (customer relationship management). For example, the information gathered can help create specific emails tailored to customers who have birthdays in May.
• Use CRM data collected to create loyalty schemes.
• Send an email to anyone who has reserved a seat recently.
• Create custom templates, adding custom images and logos allowing venues to design the email the way they want.
• Businesses can create their subscription groups tailored to potential leads.

Click here to find out more about Email Marketing