Holiday-Themed Email Benchmarks: Learnings for 2016

We have long advocated that hotels should look to leaders other industries to help them decide how to take their businesses to the next level. Retail is one industry that is on the forefront of business-to-consumer marketing practices, as they constantly test new technologies and methods of connecting with their customers.

Recently, Yesmail put out a report that marketers may find interesting for the purposes of increasing engagement and deliverability in their hotel email marketing campaigns. The report was based on data for 30 major retailers collected between June 1 and December 31 in 2014 and 2015. Yesmail researchers searched for terms such as “Halloween,” “Thanksgiving,” “Black Friday,” “holiday,” and “Christmas” in campaigns to identify emails with specific themes.

The results? The key findings were:

Marketers are seeking new ways to drive traffic between Cyber Monday and Christmas: Green Monday and Free Shipping Day gained traction in 2015 with 10% and 23% of retailers, respectively, using those themes to capture consumer attention.

More marketers sent holiday-themed emails in 2015: 13.4% more brands deployed holiday-themed messages.

However, holiday-themed campaigns saw a decline in engagement: Except for Green Monday, average open rates for holiday-themed emails were generally lower in 2015 than they were in 2014.

Higher adoption of holiday-themed emails across brands in 2015 may have led to these lower open rates for many themed campaigns, as more brands were competing to attract consumers’ attention with the same tactics over the same period.

What’s the takeaway for hoteliers here? Simply embracing holidays and seasonal events without considering how they relate to your customer base is not enough to drive engagement. This goes back to the idea that generic blast emails don’t work anymore. A large number of hotels are probably planning on sending holiday themed emails. The hotels that stand out from the crowd will be those who deliver messaging that is personally relevant to each guest.

Want to learn more about sending targeted messages to your guest database? CLICK HERE to access our email marketing learning resource for hoteliers.