Crafting an email that stands out in a noisy inbox is an art, and as a hotel owner, you’ll need an email marketing strategy that boosts your open rates and motivates your subscribers to take the desired action.
What better way to grab your customers’ attention than with a thrilling game of chance? By adding an element of fun and competition to your promotional emails, you can capture your audience’s attention and motivate them to click through to your website.
In this article, we’ll explore how hotels can leverage gamification to boost email open rates and share some tips for successful email marketing for hotels.
What Is the Best Email Marketing Software for Hotels?
Email marketing is a crucial aspect of digital marketing for hotels. It helps hoteliers stay connected with their guests and drive bookings, significantly building brand loyalty and enhancing customer experience. To get the most out of email marketing, hotels need to ensure that their email campaigns are well-crafted, targeted, and personalized. This means understanding their guests’ preferences, interests, and behaviors and tailoring the content and messaging accordingly. It also means using segmentation and automation to send the right message to the right audience at the right time. Let’s take a look at the best email marketing software solutions that offer effective email marketing for the hotel industry:
1. Mailchimp: Mailchimp is a popular email marketing software that offers a variety of features to help hotels create and manage email campaigns. With Mailchimp, hotels can easily create newsletters, promotional emails, and other types of marketing messages and then send them to their subscribers. Mailchimp also provides detailed reports on the performance of email campaigns, making it easy for hotels to track their success.
2. Constant Contact: Constant Contact is another popular email marketing software for hotels. Constant Contact offers a variety of features that allow hotels to create and send professional-looking emails to their subscribers. The software also provides real-time tracking and reporting, so hotels can see how their campaigns are performing and make adjustments as needed.
3. Campaign Monitor: Campaign Monitor is a powerful email marketing software that is designed to help hotels create and send beautiful, engaging emails to their subscribers. With Campaign Monitor, hotels can create personalized emails, automate their campaigns, and track their performance in real-time. The software also offers various integrations with other tools, making it easy for hotels to connect their email marketing efforts with their other marketing channels.
How Gamification Boosts Email Marketing for Hotels:
Gamification is a marketing strategy that applies game elements to non-game situations to make them more fun and engaging. The goal is to encourage participation and interaction with a brand or community.
Gamification often takes the form of challenges, rewards, and friendly competition. Applied effectively, gamification creates a sense of anticipation that can enhance the overall customer experience and build brand loyalty.
Gamified email marketing promotions are an effective way to engage guests and drive bookings for hotels. It can help hotels collect valuable guest data and insights that can be used to improve future campaigns and better target their audience.
What Are the Benefits of Gamified Email Marketing for Hotels?
- Increased Engagement: Gamification is the secret ingredient that spices up your emails with fun and interactive elements, making them more attention-grabbing for your audience. People are more inclined to engage with entertaining content that offers a break from the usual monotony of regular emails.
- Enhanced User Experience: Games add fun and excitement to online interactions. When games of chance are effectively incorporated into email marketing for hotels, they have the power to make your business stand out and leave a memorable impression on your customers.
- Encourages Desired Actions: Gamification is a powerful tool to nudge your audience in the direction of particular actions or behaviors. Whether you’re encouraging them to fill out a survey, make a purchase, or share an email with friends, games can inspire users to accomplish these tasks.
- Collecting Valuable Data: Gamification allows you to include incentives for users to share information. For example, tracking how users navigate through a game or respond to different challenges can provide valuable information about their preferences and decision-making processes. Providing tangible rewards also encourages users to share more details about themselves willingly. This creates a win-win situation where users enjoy the experience, and where you gain valuable data.
- Mobile Optimization: Gamified features generally work great on mobile devices, ensuring that your emails are accessible across various platforms. People tend to check their emails on their mobile devices, so it’s essential to optimize your emails for mobile.
- Measurable Results: The success of gamified email campaigns can be easily measured through metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and user participation. This allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your gamification strategy and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns.
How to Use Gamification in Email Marketing for Hotels
- Set Clear Objectives: Define the goals you want to achieve through gamification. Whether it’s increasing bookings, improving customer loyalty, or driving social media engagement, having clear objectives will guide your gamification strategy.
- Keep It Interactive: According to NeverBounce, 81% of marketers prefer interactive content over static ones. Interactive elements engage different parts of our brains, making the experience more captivating. Incorporating motion images in emails extends the time subscribers spend interacting with your email. However, relying on email gamification exclusively can lead to diminishing returns. Maintaining an element of anticipation is crucial to keep recipients engaged.
- Clarity is Key: Customer satisfaction is key to driving higher sales, and email marketing gamification can help achieve this. The formula is simple: customer satisfaction equals engagement and reward, all of which are essential for the desired results. However, if the game or task is too complicated, your email subscribers may skip it without completing it. People don’t want to waste their time trying to figure out what you want from them. The goal should be to make your email recipients feel good about themselves. To do this, provide a clear outline of the game’s objectives, including a brief backstory and a precise description of what you want people to do.
- Visual Appeal Matters: The role of images in email marketing is debated. While some believe that too many images can slow down load times, others argue that high-quality visuals are crucial for standing out. However, in gamification, visual appeal is essential, and incorporating GIFs and dynamic elements can boost open rates and revenue significantly.
- Incentivize Engagement with Rewards: One of the most potent motivators for subscribers is the promise of a reward. Communicate the rewards your audience can expect, whether it’s a straightforward revelation or a tantalizing hint to pique their curiosity. For businesses in the hospitality industry, offering vouchers for restaurants or hotels can motivate participation and translate into increased sales.
Boost Your Email Marketing Campaigns with These Five Fun Game Ideas
Successful email marketing for hotels requires a blend of creativity, engagement, and strategy. Incorporating gamification into your campaigns can significantly enhance user interaction and boost your overall success. Here are five game ideas that can add an element of fun to your email marketing strategy and increase your open rates:
1. Spin-the-wheel:
Hotel marketers can use the spin-the-wheel game to boost email open rates by offering various prizes or discounts to customers. For example, hotels can offer a free night stay, a discount voucher, or a complimentary breakfast to the customers who spin the wheel. This game will create excitement among the customers, and they will be more likely to open the email to see what they can win. BeeLiked offers software that smoothly handles all elements of your promotions. You can monitor every aspect and obtain a detailed report in real-time on the effectiveness of your campaigns.
2. Grabber
The grabber game is a fun and interactive way to engage customers and promote hotel services. Hotel marketers can create a grabber game where customers can click on a moving object within the email to reveal a hidden offer, discount, or exclusive content. This game will encourage the customers to interact with the email and increase the chances of them booking a stay at the hotel. BeeLiked provides a mobile-responsive and completely customizable solution. You have the flexibility to decide on the number of outcomes and prizes and use their Grabber feature to create online games easily. You can also personalize the winning messages and automate emails to the entrants based on their results. Moreover, you have the option to integrate with coupon providers or upload your own codes.
4. Pop-the-balloon
The pop-the-balloon game is an exciting way to encourage customers to open your email! You can create a pop-the-balloon game where customers can click on the balloon within the email to reveal a hidden offer or discount.
3. Mystery Box
The mystery box game is a great way to create a sense of curiosity among customers and boost email open rates. You can create a mystery box game where customers click on a box within the email to reveal a surprise offer. This game will create a sense of anticipation among your audience, and they will be more likely to open the email to see what surprise offer they can get.
5. Unwrap the Gift
The unwrap the gift game is another excellent way to create excitement and anticipation among customers and boost email open rates. Hotel marketers can create an unwrap-the-gift game where customers can click on a box within the email to reveal a hidden offer or discount. This game creates a sense of curiosity among the customers, and they will be more likely to open the email to see what they can win. BeeLiked’s solution is adaptable and can work on any device. You can decide how many boxes of prizes you want to include, personalize the winner’s message, and automatically send emails to participants according to their results.
Boost Your Email Open Rates With BeeLiked!
Ready to start using gamified email marketing for hotels you manage? BeeLiked’s gamified promotions allow developers to integrate automated promotions into existing systems and apps using our secure one-use InviteLink technology. You can control when and who gets to enter your promotion, programmatically insert text or imagery, and integrate your promotion data with your internal systems. Get started with BeeLiked today!
