How to Optimize Your Hotel Emails
We find that most guests are happy to leave you feedback. They just need a reminder to do so. Sending an email to each guest a few days after they have checked out is a great way to remind them.
But in addition to optimizing the survey itself, you also need to think carefully about your post-stay emails. By understanding your performance metrics, you can identify where you can optimize your hotel emails.
Delivery Rates
Delivery rate is the percentage of emails you send that actually reach your guest. The average delivery rate for all of our customers is 84%, but we see a range between 50%-99%. If you find your delivery rates are on the lower end of this spectrum, look into making an effort to verify with guests that the emails they have provided are correct, whether this is at your front desk or a check-in kiosk.
Open Rates
Our customers have an average open rate of 50%, with a range between 33%-81%. If you find that your open rates are below average, consider your subject line. This is your main piece of real estate to catch your guest’s attention, reminding them of their stay. A good best practice is to keep it under 40 characters, and keep it simple. Also, though we have seen a variety of subject lines work, we have noticed that subject lines with promotional messaging have resulted in lower open rates. We can conclude that these types of messages may seem like marketing messaging and may be off-putting.
The timing of your email delivery can also have an impact on your open rates. Industry standard is 2-3 days, but we do not see a significant difference in open rates between industry standard, and those who send their review invitation at a different time. But, your feedback may be more accurate if you choose to send the email sooner rather than later. If you choose to send the email too much later, your guests’ memories of their stays might not be quite as fresh and they may not recall their stay in as much detail. Feel free to test these options out to see if it has an impact on the quality of your reviews.
Click Rates
Click rate refers to the percentage of people who opened your email and then clicked on your survey link. The success of this will depend on how you have crafted your email invitation.
Our customers have an average click rate of 45%, with a range between 15%-78%. There are a few components to consider in your email invitations:
- Look and feel: If your email has an image header, make sure your image header looks sleek and professional. We have seen that image headers work best when something is designed specifically for that space in the email. Avoid shrinking or blowing up an image as it could result in poor image quality, which could be a turnoff for your guests who otherwise felt they had a stay at a hotel where no detail was ignored. It’s the little things that count.
- Email body: Keep your email short and sweet, but be clear about what you are hoping to accomplish. Introduce yourself and explain that this feedback will be used to improve the guest experience. In addition, provide an estimate of how long it will take to complete. Also, make sure you have a clear call to action link or button that leads to the survey. Though you may have other things you want to communicate to guests, you may want to save it for other communications. If your main goal is to receive feedback from your guests, then you’ll want to make sure nothing is distracting them from clicking on that survey link.
Once your hotel emails are optimized for delivery, open, and click rates, you’ll get more responses to your hotel surveys, thus capturing more data. The more data you can get, the better insight you’ll have into your guest experience.
Want to drive more direct revenue and connect with guests? Download our free Email Marketing Strategy Guide. Never before has there been a more jam-packed, industry-specific guide to help hoteliers master the art (and science) of email marketing. Over 40+ topics with actionable insights, strategies, and best practices for email marketing.
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