 February 2010 - Jay Schwedelson,
Corporate
Vice President of Worldata, focused on the newest trends and lastest
developments in prospecting, in his presentation ‘Critical Email
Prospecting
Strategies for 2010,’ at the Email
Evolution
Conference 2010 in Miami Beach, Florida. Below are some quick tips
your
hotel can use to improve your email marketing campaigns:• Test your e-mail creative
on a mobile device to make sure it displays correctly. • Keep your e-mail campaign
on a server so that people can access the message at a later date. • Don’t use recipients’ names
in the subject lines because they can be picked up by spammers. • Include the offer deadline
date in the subject line. This can increase open rates by 39% (i.e.
offer ends
Jan 31st). • Analyze why recipients
unsubscribe – why they leave is just as important as why they arrive.
Send a
follow-up email with a short survey asking why they unsubscribed. • The top reasons people
unsubscribe to a mailing list is because they receive too many emails
from a
sender (38%), or the emails are not relevant to them (23%). • Include links that allow
recipients to share your email with their own social network. People
who use
Facebook or Twitter at least once a week are 38% more likely to open a 3rd
party email promotion, and people who use LinkedIn at least once a week
are 37%
more likely to open a 3rd party email promotion. • Send
your e-mail at least 2 weeks prior to the event
date. • Send
a reminder email 2-3 days prior to event. •
Never send an email after 4 pm. Experiment with
sending emails at 8 am. • Include an offer in your
subject line. Some offers that work well are Free Shipping, Invitation
Only,
Discount on Next Purchase, Gift with Next Purchase, or Exclusive Secret
Sale. • When you analyze the
metrics on your open rate you may not be seeing the whole picture. Open
rates
are tracked only when the recipient enables the email images. Many
recipients
don’t enable the images, so even though they have opened your email, it
won’t
be tracked as an ‘open.’ • Use tools to help you
manage your overall campaign. Below are some free tools you can start
using
right away. Quantcast.com can
help you
find your audience. They offer a measurement service that allow you to
create
demographic, geographic, and affinity-based audience profiles. Compete.com allows you to learn about
your
competitors’ online marketing strategies. You can see their keywords,
traffic
metrics, and links. Browsershots.org generates
screenshots of
how your website will appear with different resolutions and across
various web
browsers. Popuri.us is a tool that allows you to
see the
link popularity of any site based on its ranking, social bookmarks, and
subscribers. Strive to improve your email
campaigns in 2010 and increase your ROI with progressive email tactics.
Work to
build a solid database and make sure you segment your e-mail campaigns
and
avoid one-size-fits-all mailings. Email campaigns are a very effective
way for
hotels to connect with their audience and generate new and repeat
business. What’s
the Link Between E-Mail Marketing and Social Media?  If you would like to learn more about how these advanced email marketing strategies can increase your revenue, please call us at 978-465-5955 or send an email to [email protected].
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