5 Steps to Follow to Increase Bookings from Email Marketing

Email newsletters and promotional emails are used by companies across industries. That’s not surprising since they don’t only give your customers helpful information. They also help increase brand awareness and loyalty. 

Overall, email marketing generates an ROI of 3,800%.

However, you must be strategic in your email marketing campaigns for them to yield meaningful results. So in this article, you’ll learn five steps to follow to increase bookings from email. marketing.
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Let’s get started!

1. Know Your Target Audience

The golden rule of any email marketing strategy is knowing your target audience. When you know your target audience, you’ll know how to approach them. You’ll address their pain points and cater to their needs, helping you build strong client relationships.

You can define your target audience by analyzing your customer base. Look at their age, geographical location, gender, occupation, and more. Running a survey will allow you to collect this data from your customers.

Then create an audience persona, or a fictional representation of your ideal audience that incorporates this data. You may consider creating multiple personas if you find specific groups of people have common characteristics.

So, let’s say you run a recreational center that has a spa, a kids’ fun club, and a horse racing course. You may consider creating three audience personas–those that have shown an interest in your spa, those that have shown an interest in your kids’ club, and those that seem to prefer the horse racing course. These personas will guide you when creating email content.

2. Determine a Strategy to Build Your Email List

Let’s say you already know your audience. The next step is to develop an email list. There are several ways you can build your email list. Here are some of them:

• Add a pop-up message to your website - A well designed website can drive sign-ups, sales and engagement of all kinds. Pop-ups asking for customer sign-ups are a key way to build your email list.  The pop-ups can appear at carefully planned moments across your   website, for instance, when your visitor is just about to leave.  
• Use social media ads - Advertising your email list through social media helps you get in front of people who are more likely to sign up. You get to choose and zero in on your target audience, so, in the end, you bring in quality leads. Make sure you add a signup button to your ad.
• Embed sign-up buttons in your social media accounts - Instagram and Facebook allow you to add a Signup button to your profiles.

You can choose a strategy depending on what you know about your target audience. For instance, if you see they frequent your social media accounts, you might opt for the first or third strategy. 

You can also go for more than one strategy, depending on your availability of resources.

3. Develop a Compelling Offer

For the strategies mentioned above, you'll need a compelling offer to get people to sign up for your email list in the first place. These offers can come in several forms, such as:

• Exclusive content (recipe book, for instance)
• Discounts (10% off the next hotel booking)

Whichever offer you choose, you have to make sure it’s something that will get people to sign up for your email list in the first place. In other words, it should answer What's in it for me (WIIFM), and be of value to them.

You also have to make sure your offer is aligned closely to your services. This will help ensure that people who sign up for your email list can be converted into paying customers. 

Let’s say you’re a salon based in New York and, to build your email list, you offer potential subscribers an Amazon voucher. Since the Amazon voucher can be used online regardless of a person’s geographical location, many are more likely to sign up for your email list. 

But even if you send these new subscribers your marketing emails to hopefully get them to book your services, not all of them will become your paying customers. After all, some might be based all the way in Asia or somewhere else far from New York. Why seek your services when there’s a salon that’s far closer to them? In other words, in this scenario, you’ll have wasted your email marketing efforts.

Now let’s assume you offer a 10% discount on your new subscriber’s next haircut instead. The people who will sign up for your email list are more likely people who are already based in New York or at least near New York. So, if you send them your marketing emails, the chances of them booking your services are high since your salon is near them.

Plus, they can only take up the 10% discount if they have their hair cut in your salon, and will still have to shell out some money for the rest of that service. That’s still revenue generated for you.

Once you have your strategy to build your email list and your compelling offer, all you have to do is put them together. Use your audience personas as a guide when creating copy to build your email list.

4. Create Valuable and Engaging Email Content

Let’s say you’ve built your email list. It’s time to create email content that will drive more bookings for you. 

Your first email should welcome the subscriber to your community. Personalize your email, like Four Seasons does when it talks to its new subscriber on a first-name basis. This will make your subscriber feel valued:

Notice that the welcome email above was also signed by the hotel’s president of worldwide hotel operations. This is the hotel’s strategy to further endear itself to the subscriber. In the subscriber’s mind, a top hotel official took the time to welcome them to the email list despite their busy schedule.

After sending that first email, you will need to send more to your potential customers to nurture the relationship. Make sure these aren’t all transactional business emails. You want to give your new subscriber time to get to know your brand first before you ask them to book an appointment or a slot.

There are different types of emails you can send for this:

• Birthday emails
• Announcement of the newest salon services, hotel amenities, etc…
• Customer testimonials
• Announcement of company-organized events

You can also send valuable tips related to the services you offer. For instance, if you’re a hair salon, tips on hair care like the ones below will do:

If you got these excerpts from your own blog, make sure you include a link to that post in your email. This way, you maximize the use of your email by also getting your subscriber to your site. The more time they spend interacting with your brand, the higher the chances they’ll book your services. Also, don’t forget to optimize content pieces like this on your site so they can appear in search engine results pages given the right search query.

Once you’ve nurtured the relationship enough, you can start sending emails about your services. This is where you can include your Book Appointment or Book Now CTA. You can throw in a discount to get them to finally make those direct bookings.

Whichever email content you send, make sure the copy aligns with what your audience personas tell you. Also, write a clear email subject line. It’s best to keep it only up to 60 characters long to make sure it fits on all screen sizes. Let the customer know what they’ll get when they click to read your email.

As a final tip, optimize your emails to make them easy to read on mobile. You should also  automate your email marketing efforts. There are email marketing tools that can help you schedule your emails. If your store is on Shopify, make sure the email marketing software you choose integrates with the platform.

5. Monitor and Analyze Results

Monitoring metrics is essential for all campaigns. It helps you know whether your efforts are yielding any results. 

So, if you want to increase bookings from email marketing, check your email open rate, conversion rate, and average click-through rate. You can do this using email marketing software. Knowing this data can help you determine which email campaigns are functioning and which are not.

You should keep an eye on the growth of your email list. An effective email marketing campaign will result in growth. If you notice your email address list shrinking, it shows that old customers are unsubscribing faster than new subscribers are joining. A high unsubscribe rate means that they don’t find your email marketing content beneficial.

Analyze your spam complaints and email bouncers. How many email subscribers have flagged your emails as spam? It may be time to verify emails and clean your email list. Is the engagement going down? If so, then you might need to make adjustments to your campaign to make it more effective. If not, then you’re on the right track; keep going.

Another metric to analyze is your bounce rate. This bounce rate is the percentage of people who click on your email and get to your site, but leave anyway without taking action. A high bounce rate is a sign that your email and landing page content do not align. 

Overall, monitoring the effectiveness of your email campaigns is a vital marketing tip to gain more bookings from email marketing. You can adjust aspects of your email marketing campaigns based on your findings.

Conclusion

Email marketing is critical to business success. You can use it to build and nurture relationships with potential customers. Ultimately, you can increase sales.

However, the key to the best results is to perform email marketing the right way. You learned five key strategies to apply to your email communications and campaigns.

The first step is to know your target audience. You’ll then need to determine how to build your email list and create compelling offers. Once you have your list, create your engaging email content. The final step in your email strategy is to analyze and monitor your results. 

If you follow these tips, you’ll increase bookings from email marketing with no difficulty. Good luck!