Anisha Yadav [00:00:00]: Making sure that the offer, the package or the campaign that you’re running really resonates with this audience and with this segment that you’re sending that to.

Karen Stephens [00:00:13]: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate. The podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in for our guest episodes where we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experience. Alongside our conversations with guests, we have episodes for you. Hosted by revinator Brenna Turpin on resources available to you. All these resource packed episodes have granular advice on overcoming industry and operational challenges so you can emerge as a hotel superhero. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate hospitality together.

Brenna Turpin [00:00:58]: What if guests never get your emails – bounced, dunked into spam? You put all the time and personalization into your holiday email campaigns, but you’re left scratching your head asking yourself why they didn’t break through your guest’s inbox. The answer? Deliverability. Email deliverability can be your bottom line’s worst nightmare if it’s neglected, but we aren’t going to let that happen. In this webinar we’re featuring, you’ll hear proven tactics to improve email deliverability and and ensure your hotel campaigns go straight to your guests inboxes. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday even closer than they were last week, it’s imperative that your email strategy is foolproof. Because the average email open rate for travel and hospitality is 45%, you won’t want to tank that number because guests never receive your emails in the first place. We also get you ready with the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday trends you need to know to stay competitive this holiday season. There are several email campaigns that we dissect in this episode, so head on over to YouTube if you want to see what those look like. We show you how to design and write high performing emails that meet inbox requirements and maximize open rates during the peak holiday season too. And if you need an article to read, we’ve got that as well. Check the link in the show notes for an article on deliverability. All right, listen up.

Anisha Yadav [00:02:20]: Hi everyone. Welcome to Hotel Moment Deep Dive. Thank you for joining us and our topic today is continuing from our last session that we hosted on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday, so we’re going to cover more about email deliverability. We have some guest speakers here joining us again today and focus more on the trends and tactics that are boosting deliverability for the holiday season. That’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday. So with that, let’s kick off with some introductions. I’m Anisha Yadav and I lead customer and product marketing at Revinate and super excited to have two of our experts here on the webinar today, Melissa and Freya. And I’ll let them introduce themselves.

Melissa Hsu [00:03:02]: Hi everyone, I’m Melissa Hsu. I’m the Senior Director of Product Management here at Revinate and I run the activations channel side of the house. Excited to be speaking to y’ all today about deliverability and all things preparation for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Freya Craig [00:03:15]: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I’m Freya from the customer and product marketing team at Revinate.

Anisha Yadav [00:03:22]: Awesome. Thanks Melissa and Freya. So with that, let’s get started and I’ll kick us off with the agenda. We’ll start with the Email Deliverability Foundation. So maximizing and making sure that you’re standing out in the clutter of the holiday inbox, that’s going to be the case for the Q4 season. We look at some pre and post Black Friday Cyber Monday sending strategies. We look at some new features and tools that have been launched by our product team. So super excited to show that to you all. We look at some top performing tactics that are driving revenue for our customers for the holiday season from last year. And lastly, we have some time saved for questions as well. So with that, let’s kick off with how do we ensure that our email deliverability is done well and we are able to drive revenue throughout the holiday season? So I’ll pass on to Melissa to talk us through that section.

Melissa Hsu [00:04:14]: I’m really happy. This is one of our first sections here, y’all. We’ll talk about email deliverability and first we’re going to look at critical factors that directly influence your email deliverability. So while the topic might seem complex and vast, we broke it into a few key areas to simplify understanding and for time’s sake. First and foremost is authentication protocols. And I think y’all have heard from Revinate in the past. This is so, so important to do right. We’re talking about SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These protocols verify that your emails are legitimately from your hotel. Microsoft has now joined Gmail, Yahoo and Apple in requiring them. So I want to reiterate here, authentication is no longer optional. It’s an industry requirement for inbox placement. Second is sender reputation of course this is top of mind for all of you. This is how trustworthy your domain and IP address are perceived by inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo. To simplify this, bad reputation equals spam folder which is not what we want. Compliance with regulations is third here. It’s important to follow all local and global email regulations like CAN-SPAM or GDPR as non compliance can lead to deliverability issues and even legal trouble which we do not want you to get into. Then of course there’s list hygiene, engagement and email content, all of which we’ll get into in the slides following here. So let’s get into the foundations. Let’s look at deliverability foundations at a high level and get into the how and why a bit more as these are the building blocks of any campaign. First, we’ll start with sender reputation. This is one of the most important factors of getting an email to land in a guest inbox. It’s based on how trustworthy your domain and IP are perceived by inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera. Again, if your reputation is low, your emails may go straight to spam. So in order to protect sender reputation you should be consistent with your sender identity. You should also monitor spam complaints. Google Postmaster is really the only way for customers to monitor their sender reputation with Gmail. This is especially important since Gmail has proven to be the strictest inbox provider in terms of industry mandates and impact on deliverability. The requirement for robust email authentication is no longer just a best practice, it is an enforced mandate by the world’s leading email service providers. So across Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, they all have a universal requirement in terms of what they need, that is the SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These are all strict requirements for inbox placement, especially for high volume senders. So what is the consequence of non compliance? Without these protocols, correctly configured and aligned, emails are highly likely to be marked as spam or rejected outright by the receiving server. This directly impacts your conversion rates and sender reputation and finally the trust economy. ESPs use these protocols as a fundamental measure of sender legitimacy. Authenticated email signals to algorithms that the sender has taken due diligence to secure their domain, making it a prerequisite for gaining inbox trust. As cyber threats like phishing and spoofing rise, ESPs are aggressively prioritizing authenticated travel to protect their users compliance with regulations. It’s important to follow all local and global email regulations like CAN-SPAM or GDPR. As we mentioned earlier, as non clients can lead to deliverability issues and even legal trouble. This can include things like including a visible unsubscribe link in your campaigns and providing hotel contact info in the footer. I think the TLDR of this slide is that there are some simple rules you need to follow and if those rules are followed by your emails will land in your guest inboxes. We’ve highlighted the main ones here and we’ll continue to tell you a little bit more about deliverability as we go on here. So leading up to the holiday, there are a few things you can do to protect your deliverability. The first is ramping up gradually. Email providers will look at your sending history to determine if you’re a trustworthy sender. So if you suddenly start sending BSCM content to large lists, spam filters are more likely to flag it. So before Black Friday Cyber Monday, send campaigns to exercise your list and prove that real guests engage with your content, which will increase your inbox placement. Second is run segmentation. Don’t blast your entire database at once. I think as marketers y’all probably know you need to segment. You need to create content that’s relevant, personalized to that segment. But make sure you are not blasting your entire database at once. We’ll look at some segment suggestions and filters and you can apply them to your campaigns in a few minutes to engage your guests while protecting deliverability. Third is monitoring engagement. This will tell you who’s ready to hear from you. Adjust your filters based on opens, clicks, bounces, etc. To ensure you’re reaching those that are most engaged. And finally, keep high risk segments separate. Avoid sending to unengaged contacts during the busy season. The key takeaway here is consistent volume keeps your emails landing in inboxes and maximizes revenue potential during peak season. Let’s move on to list hygiene. This is all about who makes it into your send list in the first place. So let’s take a look at some best practices. Golden Rules: Never purchase contact lists. Not only is it a poor practice, but it also violates GDPR regulations. Using purchase lists expose you to legal risks, potential fines, and can severely harm your email strategy in the long term. GDPR and Proof of Consent: When dealing with GDPR compliance, it’s important to maintain proof of consent for every user on your list. That means ensuring you have a clear record of each user’s opt in data. You as a hotel are responsible for providing this information if requested. Finally, implementing double opt in. This has quickly become an industry standard for email marketing. It ensures that Guests actively confirm their consent to receive promotional emails. It also reduces negative engagement such as spam complaints or unsubscribes because they have explicitly and double opted in. Finally, it validates that the email is real, which improves deliverability. Remember, negative engagement metrics lead to poor inbox placement. On top of these golden rules, we’ll give you helpful filters you can apply along the way. We have stay recency, exclude OTA domains, as well as excluding guests with future reservations. Then there are best practices you can implement at your hotel for maintaining a clean list like validating emails at check in or booking and collecting real emails in place of OTA domains. I’ll do a plug here for arrivals reports. They are a great way to operationalize email collection. Takeaway here: A clean list equals stronger inbox placement, higher engagement and more revenue. With that, I’ll pass it over to Anisha to talk through some of these helpful segmentation filters.

Anisha Yadav [00:10:56]: Great. Thanks so much Melissa. So let’s repeat that. Never buy a list, right? So making sure that you’re driving high engagement during the holiday season. So what you’re seeing here on your screens is a screenshot of how you can implement that within the revenue product. So like Melissa mentioned, recency of stay and recency of engagement, those are the two important metrics that you should consider, especially when you’re looking at the peak days of executing and activating these holiday campaigns. So one of the ways to do that within our product is or if you’re using Revinate or if you’re using any of your CRMs, making sure that you have ways to execute on that. So what you’re seeing on your screen is specific time frames that you can pick the engagement for. So open and clicked or has not received. So you can make sure that you check that box and then you can define the timeframe being the past year or past two years. And also on the left you can see the segment that’s been created which is based on the past stays of the guest for this property being the last two years. On the next section we’ve covered what that looks like generally speaking for any engagement to specific campaigns. So what you’re looking at here is a checkbox kind of covers has engaged with specific campaign or campaigns that you can check from the dropdown list on the screen here. So a couple of ways in which you can kind of select that and define that within the Revinate product. And moving to the next section here we’ll see how you can define the audiences within our segmentation tool. So on the right. We’ve kind of listed out most commonly used segmentation filters, be it location, geotargeting, be it lifetime spend thresholds for all those high value holiday packages that you’re doing, or if it’s survey NPS. So if the guest is a promoter versus a passive versus a detractor, having messaging that resonates with those survey NPS guests. And again, looking at the point of sale system. So if you move on to the next section, we’ve kind of broken that down into your restaurant data, your spa data, your golf data, along with your room stay that you’re kind of pulling from the PMS. So different ways in which you can kind of personalize the audience and making sure that the offer, the package or the campaign that you’re running really resonates with this audience and with this segment that you’re sending that to. And why is that important? Like we all want to do what we want to do is have successful campaigns that really drive that direct revenue for your hotels. And what we’ve seen with our study is the more segmentation filters that you add, so say in the range of between four to seven, we are seeing higher conversion in terms of direct revenue. So about 4x more revenue and about 2x more engagement with these segmented campaigns. So this is based on our own customer data and some ways like Melissa mentioned, how are we seeing that get executed with our hotels? So one example would be past stays. So making sure that guests who have stayed on your property either in the last couple years or maybe same time during the holiday years in the last couple seasons. So that’s one way. The other way would be high spenders. So if you are doing a high value package, making sure you’re tapping into guests who’ve spent more historically across your portfolio properties and then thinking of cross promotional stays. So not just that one property, but if you have a group account using that cross property data to really cross sell other locations as well. Locals and drive market is a great example. So for all your restaurant promotions, your spa offers, making sure that you’re tapping into the locals only drive market and family travel. So we see a lot of guests who are traveling with families. So making sure that again your offers and packages are specific to family travelers versus couples and you’re able to use that audience filter to segment them accordingly and have that personalized offer for them. And with that I’ll pass on to Freya to speak through beyond deliverability and some post peak season strategies.

Freya Craig [00:14:47]: Thank you, Anisha. Okay, so now moving beyond deliverability and segmentation and looking at timelines and post peak season strategies. So taking a quick step step back. As we move into the peak season, we know that timing and coordination plays a big part in creating a successful campaign, especially if you’re running omnichannel campaigns. So looking at the next two months, we’ve outlined some key dates to keep in mind. So we see that hoteliers typically start to tease the BFCM campaigns around the beginning of October. And then in the middle of October we move into Canadian Thanksgiving we have Diwali. And then moving into November we have Singles day which is big in APAC. We start to see hoteliers launch to an early segment of their BFCM campaigns around November 23rd ish to 26. And then we have Thanksgiving on the 27th, Black Friday Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday. So having a plan around these important dates is really key to planning out your peak season. So after those key dates and your big campaigns have gone out and your engagement might be strong, but not everyone is going to book right away. So so that’s where these post holiday nurture strategies really come into play. And we have three different strategies today. So one is to plan to re engage your new subscribers who have signed up during Black Friday Cyber Monday but haven’t yet booked. So this is your chance to share your brand story, share what makes your property unique and warm them up with some inspiring content. Then send them a time sensitive offer to fill those rooms. Next is to make sure that you are nurturing your engaged leads that haven’t yet booked. So these are the visitors that have opened your campaign, clicked around, maybe even hit your booking page but haven’t yet completed their booking. So they’re warm leads and they just need a little nudge. So for example here you could send a reminder email or a warm nurture call campaign that your sale is ending soon. You’ll really want to create a sense of urgency and make it easy for the guest to come back and book. And then finally we have winning back past guests who might have missed your sales. So here we see that using personalized nostalgic messaging really works. Remind guests what they loved about your property and invite them back to experience something new. So these follow ups are really important to help convert those almost bookers and re engage past guests to drive more revenue. And you can always learn what our customers are doing on our website, at revinate.com/inspirations we share a bunch of campaign examples there. Moving on, once Black Friday Cyber Monday is behind us, we should be turning our focus to Learn more about optimizing the rest of the season. So we have four key actions that you can take post peak season to protect both your deliverability and your future results. So one is just to imbue your engagement trends, spot any shifting behaviors, make note of those and adjust accordingly. Two is analyze your deliverability performance. So check your inbox placements, your bounce rates, your complaints across different mailbox providers, and check to see if maybe any one campaign made those spike and adjust from there. And then you’ll also want to make sure to update your suppression and engagement windows and that will help avoid dragging your inbox rates down and protect your sender reputation. And then also a friendly reminder and you’ll thank yourself next year for this, document any lessons learned that you and your team could benefit from for next year. Now that we have some strategies behind us, I’ll pass it over to Melissa who’ll take us through some new tools in Revinate Marketing Hi again everyone.

Melissa Hsu [00:18:18]: Yes, I know everyone has AI on the mind, so I am happy to share that Revinate does have a few AI tools available right in the Composer for y’all to use. But the best way to use these is to help with your heading, your text as well as your buttons. You can also use them to generate images. So one of my favorite customer visits all of my customer visits are my favorites, but one of them was when we went to visit a customer who had brought a little pony, a tiny pony, on site to take photos for their marketing campaign where they were going to have a tiny pony at the event. With our AI image generation, what you could do is plug in an exact description of exactly what you want to show as your image and the AI image generator will help you with that image and you can plop it right into your email campaign in terms of heading, text CTA’s. We’ve heard from customers that this is a great way to create your campaigns seamlessly in one place versus having to go to your AI tool, type in what you’re looking for, then having to bring it over to Revinate Composer. This is live today in your composer. So if you go through creating a campaign, you’ll see on the right hand side where you go and add in blocks, et cetera. Next up we also have the ability to add countdown timers as well as embedded video content. And I’m sure you all, as my marketers already know the effect of these types of content in your email campaigns. But some statistics that are really great to hear around this is that click through rates explode by 65% when there is a video or countdown timer in your email. We also saw that unsubscribes plummeted by 26% and it’s just really effective way to capture interest when someone opens your email. I know that whenever I see a timer, I immediately know that there’s some urgency associated with that timer. So highly recommend that y’all try this out again. This is available for our pro customers and it is available in your composer today.

Freya Craig [00:20:25]: Next. We’ve made it really easy to reuse content blocks across templates and and campaigns. So now you can build a block once and use it again and again again without rebuilding it from scratch. So a small change that makes a really big difference when you’re managing multiple properties and seasonal offers or whatever it might be. Next. And if you’ve ever hit send before you realized a link was broken, this one’s for you. We’ve added a content audit to the email composer so this will flag any missing links, any empty CTA’s images without alt text before their campaign goes out. So it really helps you catch those mistakes early and protect your brand and keep it looking polished. And finally, one that I love we’ve completely revamped inbox previews so you can now see exactly how your campaign will be displayed across more than a hundred inboxes and devices. Whether it’s mobile, tablet, desktop, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, whatever it is, you’ll be able to test your campaign across. Plus you can now see how your emails look in both dark and light mode, so there’ll be no surprises when your campaigns land in your guest inboxes. So we’re excited for you to dive in and check these out if you’re a customer.

Anisha Yadav [00:21:39]: That is so exciting and a great recap of all the tools and features that are available for our customers. My favorite for the holiday season is going to be the countdown timer and I’ll show you why. But I think moving on to the next section of top performing tactics. So this was really well received in our previous webinar that we did, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, make sure you log into the first session as well. So what we’ve done here is kind of summarize data driven recommendations on what really performed for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday last year. And we’re kind of sharing the top tactics that you can implement this year as well. And some of these are kind of already covered in our session in terms of creating that urgency, making the offers exclusive et Cetera. So let’s dive in to the tactics. So the first one here speaks about high exclusivity. So what does that mean? Using words like early access, rewarding loyal guests, special invites and you can see the examples on the right. So making sure that the offer stands out as an exclusive one for your repeat guests by giving them an early access, making sure that you kind of know about the spends from the previous days and using that language in the copy of the email and and the subject line really helps create that urgency. The next one speaks about urgency which again connects to the countdown timer. So making sure that you’re using the language in your subject line that has that element of urgency from a timestamp perspective that it’s a 24 to 48 to 72 hour offer. There’s this is the last chance it’s ending soon. So really driving that call to action to convert that guest to booking that stay, say at your property or at your restaurant, at your spa, and making sure that’s reflected in the subject line itself. Next one speaks about leveraging social proof. So like Freya mentioned, we have a lot of examples that we featured in our inspirational page. So if you go on revinate.com/inspirations you can kind of see how customers are actually activating this social proof or the user generated content using that in their copies in their subject line to really making sure that they stand out as they compare with a very competitive market that they’re in. So great examples here on the subject lines on the right as well. So be the awards. So the USA Today, Conde Nas, Travel Leisure, just using those words in your subject line would really help you drive that conversion through your emails and experiences. So we spoke a lot about this last time and we will be covering more in our third webinar as well. So again making sure that it’s not about the rooms but really selling that experience that you offer on property, be it the food and beverage outlets, the spa, golf, really looking at the location where you’re based as well and what activities are happening for the holiday season in these cities and using that as part of your packaging and healthy and free in the new year is one of the examples. All you can spa offer. So using emojis as well and again calling out the icons on the right. So it’s not just about emails but also your voice channel. So we see a lot of our reservation sales teams using an outbound strategy to convert experiences for guests who may have already booked the rooms, but upselling them on all of the other amenities that are located at the property and just summarizing the key takeaways. Freya, I’ll let you do this.

Freya Craig [00:24:56]: Thank you. Quick summary of what we covered today and some key takeaways. So 1. Build your deliverability before the holidays. Now is the time to get started. 2. Don’t forget to use your guest data and preferences to segment and personalize all your campaigns for maximum ROI and optimize your content for engagement and mobile. And be sure to test it out with our new inbox previews if you’re a customer. And then don’t forget about your post holiday nurture strategies that will really help you drive the maximum amount of ROI.

Anisha Yadav [00:25:26]: This season in and like Freya mentioned, everything and more is located on our revinate.com/bfcm landing page. So that’s where you can find our first webinar. You can also find an upcoming session that’s going to be hosted on November 12th where we’re going deeper into an free revenue and really going beyond rooms and what ideas we have on that front. A lot of campaign inspiration, success stories and a lot of tools and guides to really support you through this holiday season. And you can find all of that on the Black Friday Cyber Monday landing page and another shout to our Direct Booking Mastery certification. So if you haven’t already, go check it out. You can see the URL on the slide here. But again, six strategies key to hospitality. We’re running on the fourth one right now for this month which is focused on upsells and cross sell optimization. So there are two more left. So make sure that you complete the certification and you can showcase that on your LinkedIn as well. So great opportunity to kind of upscale yourself. So with that, let’s have a look at our questions. I see a question in the chat, Freya, I think this is speaking to the ideal time. Like based on our experience, what’s the ideal time to start planning for Black Friday Cyber Mondays? I think you kind of touched on it with your timeline slides. So I think the sooner you start the better. We’ve seen that October is actually when we’re seeing a lot of hotels start that teaser campaign for Black Friday Cyber Monday and that kind of lets you build that cadence and build up your volume. Like Melissa mentioned, making sure that you’re not waiting to send all your campaigns during the four peak days of the year, but build that volume and gradually increase that to your most engaged, most recent stars during the Black Friday Cyber Monday timeframe. So really making sure that you start early is the message here. Anything else to add, Freya or Melissa.

Melissa Hsu [00:27:17]: I was just going to say that last year at NAVIGATE we had AutoCamp present on their Black Friday Cyber Monday tactics and what I really appreciated is and this ties back to Anisha, what you were saying around experiences and highlighting experiences. What AutoCamp did is and I’m sure there are marketing folks can speak better to this, but they essentially compared an experience which is staying at the AutoCamp properties and creating those memories against spending on electronics. So the earlier you set that into the guests minds I think the better because they’re thinking about how they’re going to spend their income and really placing that experiences versus Goods electronics in front of them ahead of time is a good way to just set them up to start thinking about getting a room purchasing experience from you.

Anisha Yadav [00:28:03]: That’s exactly right. And I think we have covered this case study actually much detail on our website. So make sure you check out our customer Success Story section to learn how Autocamp went about that and we hope to see you on our third and last series of the Black Friday Cyber Monday webinar. So make sure you check out the registration link and sign up for it today.

Karen Stephens [00:28:28]: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast until next time, keep innovating.