With the proliferation of new media, email marketing is an integral part of a holistic marketing strategy. There are various best practices covered in tons of blogs on the internet on how to effectively draft an email marketing campaign. We shall touch upon some of them in this blog. For hotels, we believe it is equally important to measure the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to get the most out of your email marketing campaign.

A good email marketing software should provide you with the following KPIs:
 

Delivery rate

This measures the total number of delivered emails after you have sent them. This metric is an important indicator of the quality of your database. Email service providers usually track this metric, which impacts your spam score.
Calculation: (Total emails delivered/Total emails sent)*100
 

Bounce rate

The percentage of emails that bounced due to two main reasons — soft bounce and hard bounce.
Soft bounce: Soft bounce consists of all delivery issues that occur for a temporary period, such as the recipients’ inboxes being full.
Hard bounce: Hard bounce is when emails are returned permanently, because of an invalid email ID or blocking of your emails.
Calculation: 1 - Delivery Rate
 

Open rate

The open rate measures the percentage of emails opened by recipients
Calculation: (Total emails opened/(Total emails sent - Total emails bounced))*100
 

Clickthrough rate

Clickthrough rate is one of the most important metrics that displays the percentage of guests who have clicked on one or more links in the email.
Calculation: (Total clicks or total unique clicks/Total number of emails delivered)*100
 

Conversion rate

The percentage of people who have completed a desired action such as filling up the lead form or making a reservation on the booking engine reflects the conversion rate of an email.
Calculation: (Total form fills and bookings/Total emails delivered)*100
 

Some best practices

• If you find that your open rate is low, try editing your subject line to make it more eye-catching.
• If your clickthrough rate and conversion rate is low, ensure that your call-to-action (CTA) buttons are prominently displayed, and have the right messaging. For instance, if your CTA button reads ‘Get 20% Off on Advanced Bookings’, then ensure that the landing page to which it leads has the same copy. Most of the principles on how to design optimal landing pages works for emails as well.
• Always send your email from a subdomain and not the main domain. If recipients begin unsubscribing or marking your emails as spam, then your main domain would be considered a spam account. Find out more about your domain name.
• Your email ID should ideally be of a person’s, as it helps build trust.
• Provide a link for the user to unsubscribe from your email list.

 

Simplotel Guest Connect

We believe it is important for hotels to have full instrumentation over their email marketing campaigns. Simplotel Guest Connect will do just that! It'll provide all the above KPIs and take care of your email marketing needs from A to Z! Hotels can convert their website offers into an email template with a single-click. Simplotel Guest Connect will also be integrated with your property management systems (PMSes) to trigger bookable upsell mailers. The best part: Our emails will work seamlessly across all devices.