The Ultimate Guide To A Successful Email Campaign
Email marketing is a great tool for keeping your customers informed about what’s going on, and inspiring new customers to jump onboard. But it can be hard to know what to put in your email campaigns and when to click “send”.
Here is a guide to what a successful email campaign looks like, with 5 key tips for planning, writing and sending an email marketing campaign.
What a successful email campaign looks like
First, let’s take a look at some of the KPIs that signify a successful campaign, from open rate to conversions. You should be able to measure all of these in the platform you use for email marketing.
Open rate: this measures the percentage of people who actually open your email. It will give you an idea of how well your subject line is performing (we go into the ideal subject line further down). To compare your work and see how it measures up, the average open rate for the hospitality industry is 20.2%.
Click-through rate: this is the percentage of people who click links within your email. You can use this to discover who in your audience is engaging with your brand and content. The average click-through rate for the hospitality industry is 1.4%.
Unsubscribe rate: self-explanatory – how many people hit unsubscribe after receiving your email. There are many reasons people may unsubscribe, most commonly because they feel they are receiving too many emails. We go into timing and frequency below. The average unsubscribe rate for the hospitality industry is 0.2%.
Bounce rate: this measures how many of the emails you sent in a campaign did not successfully reach their recipients. There are two types: soft and hard bounces. Soft bounces happen when there is an issue with the recipient’s mailbox. Hard bounces happen when you are trying to target an invalid or non-existent email address. For the hospitality industry, the average bounce rate is 0.93%.
Forward rate: another metric you may want to consider is the number of times your email has been forwarded – this will give you an indication of how far your reach is and how popular the content of your email is.
Conversion rate: this comes down to the main purpose of most email campaigns – whether the recipients click through and make a booking, a purchase, or some other point of conversion.
Types of email
Next, let’s look at the kind of email you could be sending to your database. There are many types out there, but we’ve whittled it down to some of the main categories that apply well to the hospitality industry in particular:
Regular newsletters: your weekly or monthly email, keeping your customers informed and inspired to keep coming back to your business.
Updates: for when you want to inform your customers about a change at your business – perhaps a change in opening hours, your menu, your spaces/dining areas, etc.
Promotional specials: an email that is used to describe and promote an offer, ideally with a call-to-action that links to a landing page where people can take the next steps to redeem that offer.
Event invitation: an email for inviting people to an event that showcases why that event is worth coming to.
5 Tips for sending the perfect email campaign
Get them to click
With email marketing, everything starts with the subject line, so it’s important that your subject line grabs and holds attention. The end goal of every subject line is to get the recipient to open the email.
There are a number of ways to craft the ideal subject line. As a general rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to keep the subject line between 6 and 8 words, or aim for something that fits in the subject line space in someone’s inbox folder.
Here are a few types of subject line that have been tried and tested and are known to work well:
Make it personal: according to HubSpot, emails that include the first name of the recipient in their subject line have a higher click-through rate than those that don’t.
Give them a list: for example ‘Five foodie things to do this Easter’. Always make the list an odd number. For a bit of flair, give the reader one extra in the body of the email.
Don’t give it all away: give your recipient a hint as to what the email will contain, but leave them hanging so they click to find out more. For example ‘Not just a night for the ladies!’ or ‘You don’t want to miss this!’ or even something a little more specific like ‘Chef from World’s Best Restaurant in Sydney for 2 nights only’ where people want to know who the chef is.
Brand association: if you’re advertising something that involves other well-known brands, put that in the subject line. This will elevate your own brand and what you are selling. For example, ‘Gourmet Traveler wine dinner plus Winter Reds’.
Ask a question: for example ‘What cut of meat do you like?’ or ‘Is it your turn to book dinner?’
Give them a gift: things like “You’re a winner!”, ‘Something special for you and your team’, ‘Drinks are on me!’
The body of the email
The body of the email
First and foremost, make sure that you centre your copy in the body of your email around ‘what’s in it for me?’ – aka why does your email matter to the recipient? Use this to inform the way you write. Don’t just tell them what is happening or what’s on offer, tell them why they want it. One way to ensure that you do this is to mention “you” in the first paragraph.
Another tip is to divide what you have written into sections under clear, short headings, and be sure to add clear calls to action (CTAs), perhaps in the shape of buttons in standout colours with CTAs like “book now” or “find out more” written on them.
Aim to Inform, Inspire and Involve your readers. Inform being to pass on valuable, need-to-know information about your business, inspire – to get your customers to want to engage with this information – and involve – to make your customers feel like they are part of what you are doing, or to literally get them involved in an offer or event.
Use good visuals
Complement the text in your email campaign with eye-catching photographs or designs that also inform, inspire and involve your audience. This may take the form of photos from a recent event, images of your space, your latest Instagram posts or header designs and banners.
Neither too few nor too many
Frequency is another factor to consider when you are designing the perfect email marketing campaign. We would recommend sending emails no more than every two weeks, but ideally monthly to maximise open rates.
The number one reason people unsubscribe from email lists is that the emails are too frequent. Sending emails too often can also cause recipients to disengage, and open rates or click-through rates will drop.
There is no real number for how often you should email your database, but you can figure out what works for your list by trialing different frequencies. One important rule of thumb is to never send emails just for the sake of it. Make sure there is something in it for them, whether that be an important update or an offer they can’t refuse. Make your emails something that customers look forward to.
Send them consistently
Finally, consistency – if you commit to sending an email out fortnightly, on Thursday at 3pm, stay with that. This obviously excludes once-off announcements or updates and refers more to the regular newsletters you may choose to send to your database.
This is a useful rule to stick to because it gives your readers consistency too – they know roughly when they will hear from you, it’s not too frequent, and if you get your subject line and content right they will enjoy what you have to say.
