Every year, Revinate publishes a Hotel Marketing Benchmark Report to provide the industry with actionable and comparative insights from hotels around the world. We analyzed more than 368 million emails sent in 2020 from Revinate’s Marketing customers so that we can provide a unique review for a unique year. Below is a snapshot of the Section 6, Campaign Segmentation

You can download the full 2020 Benchmark Report for free here.

At Revinate, we talk a lot about segmentation and how it can affect campaign results. The fact of the matter is that segmentation can improve overall campaign performance by up to 425%. 

Your guests want to hear from you, but only in a way that lets them know that you understand who they are and what they need. If you’re not sending relevant content, you’re increasing your chances of being ignored, dismissed, or –*gasp*– unsubscribed.

To build targeted audiences, hoteliers need to leverage guest data from their PMS. Most generic email solutions can’t integrate with the inflexible environment of hotel software, so it’s imperative to have a proper hotel-specific email partner, like Revinate.

Connecting your PMS with an email marketing platform allows for the creation of hyper-segmented audiences.

This empowers your marketing team to use existing data for better targeting. Doing so allows marketers to send the right email to the right audience for the best chance at conversion. Rather than talking about your hotel in the same way to all guests, you need to get personal. 

For example, if you know that 70% of travelers are looking to travel domestically during the pandemic, you should be segmenting your database by location and focusing on your drive-to market.

In 2020, hotels realized that blanket campaigns wouldn’t work because  international traffic was shut down and a promotion sent to a traveler who couldn’t reach you would be considered tone deaf.

The days of hotels blasting out the same email to their entire database and hoping for a great response are long gone. Today, with so many businesses using email to engage with customers, capturing consumers’ attention requires personalization, especially since Covid-19 affects market segments in different ways. 

As travel recovery begins, smaller hotel marketing budgets and increased competition will mean that your emails need to perform better. That’s why hotels must segment their campaigns. 

Effective Conversion Rate by Segment Size

If you’re looking to drive bookings (and let’s face it: who isn’t?), hoteliers should take note from the chart on the left. Segmentation plays a major factor in full-funnel conversion. In fact, emails sent to segments of less than 5,000 guests saw 4.2x the conversion rate compared to segments of 50,000 guests.

As an example, for every 10,000 emails sent, smaller segmented groups would generate 21 reservations, whereas larger segments would only generate 4 reservations.

Download the full Marketing Benchmark Report today to get the actionable insights you need to improve your hotel marketing and benchmark your success. We cover 9 topics including marketing campaign performance, hotel database size, trends in 2020, and amenity and room upsells.