In fact, the numbers paint a very pretty picture. From an 80 DAYS study of independent hotel groups’ email marketing in 2023, we found that:

Email traffic attracts a lower-than-average bounce rate of just 32%, compared to 39% across a group hotel website. This would of course suggest higher engagement levels.
This is further illustrated by email traffic driving a higher number of pages viewed per session, as well as longer dwell times.
But the killer stat is that email traffic generally converts higher than average website traffic – in some instances by as much as 2.5X

1. Killer copy

It’s tempting to get hung up on choosing exactly the right image to accompany your email campaign – and while that’s important, don’t downplay the impact of strong creative copy on influencing the purchasing decision. And we’re not just talking snappy subject lines, but the preview text, the body copy and CTA (Calls to Action) too.

Stop and question; what is the purpose of your email and the copy that you’re trying to craft?

Generally speaking, copy falls under three different purposes:

To persuade: where you want your audience to do something
To inform: where you want your audience to know something
To entertain: where you want your audience to feel something

Of course, you might want to weave elements of all three within your copy – but giving thought to the ‘why’ behind your writing can help you create far more compelling messaging.

Another good rule-of-thumb is to lead with value; what will the recipient get from reading yet another email in their already bulging inboxes?

And give it the brutal 5-second test; can your email get the main point across in under 5 seconds? No? Back to the drawing board.

Often, it’s far easier to write for a more specific audience or segment as you can talk more confidently to their unique needs and wants. Conveniently, our friends at For-Sight have some fantastic advice on how to segment your audiences.

2. Consider the bigger picture

Another common pitfall is only treating email marketing as a ‘quick and dirty’ tactic to drive last minute room sales. Yes, it can certainly help with that, but keep it front-of-mind when you’re planning larger campaigns too.

First off, it’s a far more visual medium than other channels like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) – allowing you to more easily convey that ‘big idea’ from a multi-channel campaign.

And of course, you can take inspiration from other channels to create a more compelling email campaign. Social-infusion can really help to drive engagement with your email campaigns by adding an extra layer of authenticity. For example, could you use a guest’s snap as your lead image? With their permission of course!

Finally, don’t forget the importance of a clean, logical, user journey within your campaigns. You work hard to attract the ‘click’, so spend time on ensuring that the landing page you link to is going to help ‘finish the job’ and convert the guest. Try to avoid the trap of not knowing where to link to and defaulting to your website’s homepage. A guest will likely just get confused trying to find a logical next step and quickly depart.

3. Know your baseline

Our final tip is probably our most obvious. You can’t improve upon something if you’re not measuring your baseline performance to begin with.

Make sure you’re tagging your email campaigns correctly (or your email marketing tool or CRM is doing this for you) so that you can easily evaluate campaign performance in tools like Google Analytics. Check out Google’s Campaign URL Builder as a good place to start.

Of course, you might be lucky and have a comprehensive reporting suite within your CRM, but knowing how your email traffic performs after the click, when they land on your website, is still vital in understanding where you can make gains as you begin to test new ideas.

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This article originally appeared on the 80 DAYS blog here and is reproduced here with their permission.