Email Marketing Strategies, Part 1
Email marketing is one of the most popular (and often most successful) strategies for attracting customers. They can be highly personalized, content-rich, and targeted to different segments with relative ease. For vacation rental managers, email marketing is especially important to attract new guests, encourage previous guests to return, and communicate with homeowners.
But what makes a good email? In this blog, we’ll break down the features of a successful vacation rental management business email, and share tips on how to make them even more clickable.
The Basics of a Successful Email
There are a few key elements that set the foundation for a good email:
- Beautiful design. Draw users in with high-resolution images and a professional design. For guests, this will include beautiful images of properties and locations. For homeowners, this might look like reports and other financial statements.
- Concise, relevant content. Keep any content short and action-oriented.
- A clear call to action (CTA). Make sure users know where they’re going and the action they’re expected to take.
But this is just the beginning. Use the following tips to make your emails even more compelling.
Personalize Your Greetings and Sign-Offs
Personalizing emails with the first name of the receiver, both in the body of the email and (when appropriate) in the subject line of an email, can help catch a user’s eye. It also adds an air of friendliness and can help build rapport with your customers.
But personalization goes further than using the receiver’s name. It also includes creating a “sender.” This doesn’t have to be a real person on your team, merely a character who represents you and the brand—for example, Miriam, LiveRez Account Manager.
Your sending email should reflect this, as well—for example, [email protected]. Emails that feel like they come from real people, even if they’re automated, can help them feel more genuine and legitimate.
Write Catchy Subject Lines
The subject line is arguably the most important part of the entire email because it’s the hook that drives people to open an email in the first place. Here are a few things to consider:
- Keep them short. The best practice is to stay under 60 characters or less than nine words. This can feel challenging, of course, when you have to work with words like “vacation rentals” or “vacation rental management” (trust us, we know!).
- Make subject lines mobile-friendly. Remember that about 50% of emails are viewed on a smartphone or other mobile device.
- Enhance with emojis. Think of emojis like salt—when used sparingly and strategically, they can enhance your message and entice people to click. Overuse can turn people off, however. (Also, the more emojis you use, the more likely your emails will be sent to a spam folder.)
- Choose a grammar rule, and stick with it. If that means no periods after a subject line, then stay consistent. And remember: more than one exclamation point is always too many.
- Make sure you’re pre-text is readable. If you use pre-text (that’s the little lead-in copy that shows up in the preview of an email in an inbox), make sure it’s also short, action-driven, and can be easily read in various preview settings.
Use a CRM Tool to Automate Email Sends
Your email marketing strategy should revolve around one tenant: reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. A customer relationship management tool (or CRM for short) can help make these decisions more easily. A CRM is software that keeps track of where customers are in the sales pipeline. One particularly helpful feature is the ability to automate email sends based on a customer’s current journey. Your team can build specific nurture streams based on segments, level of engagement, NPS score, and other such metrics to reach customers exactly where they are at the moment.
LiveRez’s CRM tool, LiveComms, can help save you time and improve your customer service by providing relevant information to customers based on their specific journey. Reach out to one of our experts to learn more>>
