Hospitality Marketing Blog Has Moved!!!

Our Blog offering marketing advice and insights for small luxury hotels as moved.

Find us and solid marketing information at Hospitality Marketing Blog . com.

See you there.

Safe Travels – Madigan Pratt

 

Email – Double Opt-In or Don’t Bother

What happens when you don’t use a double opt-in process? Presidential candidate Barack Obama sure found out the hard way.  Pranksters signed up prominent anti-spammers to Mr. Obama’s email list and included derogatory first names.

Personalized emails that included these rather rude first names were then sent by the Obama campaign to these unfortunate individuals.

When setting up an email marketing program for small luxury hotels we always recommend using a double opt-in process for capturing email addresses.  This follows industry best practices.

Double opt-in increases the quality of your database and building relationships with customers and prospects for small luxury hotels is more about quality than it is about quantity.

Share your thoughts on double opt-in.   Safe travels – Madigan Pratt

 

The Web – Give Them What They Want

Forrester Research in a recent study among 5,000 online consumers reports on what web content and functionality people want most.

Here are the top four items mentioned:

1. User ratings/reviews – 64%
2. Special offers/coupons – 61%
3. Product or price comparison tools – 59%
4. Customer testimonials – 49%

How can small luxury hotels take advantage of this research. Even with a small marketing budget – the truth is you can.

Every small luxury hotel should be putting special offers up on the web. So #2 above should be taken care of – no sweat.

So let’s take a look at numbers 1, 3 and 4. All three of these consumer desires can be easily taken care of by including a TripAdvisor RSS feed somewhere on your site. One hotel that has done this very effectively is Nisbet Plantation on Nevis in the Caribbean. This is the only hotel we know of to place TripAdvisor reviews right on it’s home page.

In one simple step it is offering consumers user ratings/reviews, a pricing comparison and customer testimonials. Audacious? Maybe. But while many hotels shy away from TripAdvisor, Nisbet has embraced it and at the same time offers potential guests what they want most ina web experience.

The result? In TripAdvisor’s 2008 Traveler’s Choice Awards, Nisbet was ranked as the best luxury hotel in all the Caribbean and Latin America and the 6th best luxury hotel in the world.

If you have a TripAdvisor story you’d like to share, add a comment. Need help managing Travel 2.0 let me know. Safe travels – Madigan Pratt

 

Learning From Super Bowl Ads

Super Bowl ads are unique. These multi-million dollar production extravaganzas are so popular there are now web sites dedicated to them. People who normally use their DVD Recorders to Zap TV ads are actually flocking to sites to watch commercials. It is an amazing phenomenon.

As a small luxury hotelier, what can you learn from this? Simple – if your marketing messages are interesting enough, people will look forward to receiving them.

We subscribe to a host of email newsletters from small luxury hotels and an unusually large percentage of them are really not very interesting.

Many look nice, but just like spending a gazillion dollars producing a Super Bowl ad, good art direction is not the key to success. All contain information about the hotel, but the majority are written from the hotel’s perspective and fail to genuinely connect with consumers.

Successful Super Bowl ads connect with the consumer, make them laugh or perhaps bring tears to their eyes. Small luxury hotels need to create an emotional connection with past and potential guests. When you do, people will look forward to hearing from you and your marketing program will be much more effective.

What do you think?

 

Small Luxury Hotels Profit With Email

You’re a small luxury hotel with an equally small marketing budget. Where do you put your money?

The answer – spend it where it provides the greatest return on investment. So where’s that?

Most small luxury hotels don’t have good marketing ROI figures. Here’s some  figures from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) that might help. According to the DMA, on average, marketers should expect $45.65 in return for every dollar they spend on email marketing.

This is an average and includes retailers selling inexpensive items. Using your customer database and expert email marketing practices your hotel should generate significantly higher ROI. Best practices means avoiding “The 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing.”

Below are DMA figures for 2007 & 2008 ROI on email and for 2007 for Non-Email Related Internet Marketing. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind receiving $48+ for every dollar I invested in marketing. Sure beats the stock market!

 

7 Deadly Sins – Top Hotel Marketing Article for 2007

I just heard my article, “The 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing for Luxury Hotels” was among the Top 50 Most Read Hospitality Marketing Articles for 2007 according to HotelMarketing.com.  I am obviously pleased – not so much for the honor – but to learn so many luxury hotel marketers are interested in improving their email programs

The bottom line is: as more hotels follow email and direct marketing best practices when developing their campaigns the more likely email will become the “killer app” it should.  Email will create stronger customer relationships, loyalty and sales.

HotelMarketing.com – the online travel, hospitality industry and Internet news web site has been publishing relevant articles for hotel marketers since 1997.  Its daily e-newsletter is sent to 37,000 hotel marketing executives and contains recently published articles.  Every December HotelMarketing.com announces the list of that year’s Top 50 Most Read Hotel Marketing Articles.

Read the article and please share your thoughts with me and others.

 

7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing for Luxury Hotels

When email first bounded onto the scene hospitality marketers called it the “killer app”. Email would revolutionize marketing, allow luxury hotels to economically reach out and touch each customer and prospect, create a dialogue, build relationships and ultimately provide a steady stream of loyal guests immune from competitive pressure. It would level the playing field allowing smaller independent hotels to effectively compete with the Goliath chain hotels.

Unfortunately far too many small luxury hotels have never seen email marketing live up to its true potential. Failing to effectively tap into the full power of email has all too often meant it is relegated to “just another way” to try to fill last minute rooms.

Small luxury properties are renown for providing superior, personalized experience. They should extend that same personal experience in their email marketing program to further deepen their relationship with customers and prospects to achieve a strong competitive advantage. They can utilize email to achieve superior service delivery before and after a guest’s stay.

As a marketing company specializing in luxury hotels we monitor far more hotel email newsletters than we care to admit. Some are very good however the majority suffer from one or more of the 7 deadly sins described below. In an effort to understand why email marketing has failed to live up to its initial potential we analyzed competitive newsletters to identify where some hoteliers are falling short.

We present the findings as The Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing for Luxury Hotels – sins that undermine the effectiveness of email and reduce revenue. Sins that can easily be avoided.

 More…