Email is a powerful tool for engaging with your guests to keep your brand front of mind, drive repeat visitation, and ultimately boost revenue. In this article, we step through email marketing best practices and how ROLLER’s venue management solution helps you maximize returns from your marketing efforts.
How can venue operators make the most of their email communications?
Integrate your platforms
Before you get started with email marketing, ensure your venue management platform is connected to your email marketing tool so that you can automatically pull through your guest contact information to send your email campaigns. ROLLER integrates with industry-leading marketing platforms like Campaign Monitor, allowing you to leverage your guest data to send personalized guest communications (without relying on manual data exports!).
Segmentation drives personalization
Leverage your guests’ demographic and purchase data to create targeted, personalized messages. This increases the likelihood of a guest opening and clicking on your email and fosters a genuine connection between your brand and your audience. It also translates into higher revenue for your venue – segmented campaigns increase email revenue by 760%!
ROLLER helps you group your audience into segments that you can automatically export to marketing platforms like Campaign Monitor. You can segment based on visit date, products purchased, lifetime spend, membership status, and more. Here are just a few examples of segmented email campaigns you could run:
- Segment your guests by postcode to offer targeted promotions for guests in local or regional areas.
- Send VIP discounts to your most loyal guests by segmenting high-spending guests or guests who rated you well on the Guest Experience Score survey.
- Send exclusive birthday offers to guests who have a birthday in the coming month.
- Incentivize your guests to renew their membership at a discounted rate by targeting guests who have a membership up for renewal in the next three months.
Understanding our customers better and leveraging data has enabled us to confidently implement price increases and increase spend per customer.
David Lim
Bounce Inc Franchise Owner
Stand out in the inbox
Your guests’ inboxes are likely flooded with promotional emails, so you can’t get lost in the crowd. Make sure your subject line and pre-header text are catchy and compelling. Whether leading with a special discount or using your guests' first name, your first impression is critical to creating a lasting impression.
You should also ensure it’s easy for your guests to identify who is sending them the email, especially with the rapid rise of spam emails. Address your email from your venue, and avoid sending your emails from a free domain (for example, a gmail or hotmail email address) to ensure guests know they can trust the email and avoid your email getting flagged as spam.
If you’re sending a booking confirmation or another automated notification email from ROLLER, the email will automatically be addressed from your venue so that guests can easily recognize the name in their inbox.
Compelling content
Your content needs to make an impact to maximize email revenue. There are several ways to ensure your content is compelling enough to encourage guests to click through and make a booking at your venue.
Exciting promotions
When crafting your email, think about what value your guests receive from your campaign. This could be something as simple as sharing exciting news about upcoming events at your venue, to ensure you’re front of mind the next time your guest needs to book a party. Or it could be an exclusive discount to encourage your guest to visit again.
In ROLLER, you can quickly build custom discount codes to drive engagement with your email marketing campaigns. You can create a dollar value discount, a percentage discount, or a 2-for-1 discount to be redeemed for online purchases or when guests purchase a ticket at your venue.
Short and sharp
Avoid an overwhelming block of text in your email, and ensure it’s as short as possible. Break up text with images, videos, and other eye-catching visual elements to make your content easier to consume and engage with.
Tone of voice
Use a tone of voice aligned with your brand to ensure guests have a consistent experience across all interactions with your venue. Embrace a conversational tone, as you could alienate your readers if your email is too formal. Avoid using too much jargon or lingo – your email still needs to be easy to read.
Accessibility
Your content also needs to be accessible to be impactful. Ensure that colors, font sizes, and images are easy to consume, and add alt text to your images to ensure that guests using screen readers can absorb the email in full.
Actionable CTAs
You want your email to be opened and read, but for venue operators, it’s critical that your guests click through to make a booking.
First, ensure your Call-To-Actions (CTAs) are prominently displayed in your email. Insert eye-catching, action-oriented buttons that stand out from the rest of the email content, e.g., ‘Purchase Now’ or ‘Upgrade Today!’.
Secondly, ensure that your CTA buttons link directly to your online checkout – this will reduce the number of clicks for guests and maximize bookings. If it’s hard for your guests to locate where to book tickets on your website, they’ll likely abandon their efforts, and you’ll lose potential revenue.
What's more, if your email campaign is advertising a certain product or package, it needs to be simple for guests to book that specific product. With ROLLER, you can link directly to a specific product in the online checkout to increase ROI. For example, suppose you’re trying to encourage guests to upgrade to a membership. You could link directly from your email to the membership package that you’re promoting to reduce the time to purchase for guests, making them more likely to convert.
Of course, you also want to ensure that guests don’t abandon their booking part way through the checkout flow. ROLLER’s modern online booking functionality takes all the friction out of online bookings so guests can select, purchase, and pay in just a few clicks. ROLLER customers see lower cart abandonment rates as a result.
Mobile optimization
Unsurprisingly, most guests view emails on their mobile devices, so optimizing your content for smaller screens is non-negotiable. A responsive mobile design ensures a seamless and visually appealing experience, maximizing the impact of your campaigns.
Most email marketing tools will allow you to preview and test your campaign on mobile devices so you can check everything looks great before pressing send.
Test frequency, timing, and content
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing. Before locking your strategy in stone, test what resonates best with your guests.
Email marketing tools will help you run A/B tests to compare content, subject lines, and time and day of sending to help you optimize your campaigns for ROI. It’s also worthwhile testing the frequency of emails to ensure you stay front of mind but aren’t frustrating guests with too many emails.
Monitor performance
Ensure you’re continually improving your email marketing by closely monitoring results. In addition to the email metrics of open and click-through rate, you also want to monitor your online checkout conversion rate, i.e., of all the people that open your checkout, how many people click through to make a purchase?
You can integrate ROLLER with Google Analytics to track this online conversion rate, ensuring you have a clear view of return on investment and can optimize your campaigns to boost revenue.
Automated email notifications
Email is not just a great medium for marketing and promotional content; it’s also the perfect way to send important service-related emails to your guests. ROLLER automatically emails your guests after they make a booking, renew or cancel their membership, sign a digital waiver, receive a gift card, and more. This prompts guests to redeem their membership or gift card entitlements and ensures you’re not wasting time and money on no-show guests or guests arriving without a signed waiver.
You can use ROLLER’s pre-built email templates for these notifications or customize the text, content, and style to suit your business. You can even add modules to promote special offers or events, serving as another way to advertise your business. Remember the best practices we’ve covered in this article when customizing your ROLLER email notifications!
Read this next: How to Write a Booking Confirmation That Gets Opened
Maximize return on marketing investment with ROLLER
By incorporating these best practices into your strategy, you can build and execute campaigns that resonate with your audience, maximize bookings, and contribute to the overall success of your venue.
To learn how ROLLER can help you maximize bookings and revenue, and deliver an exceptional guest experience, get a demo today.
