Hotel Marketing Trends for 2016 – Part III

11. Tailormade Emails

Get personal with emails! Personalizing email content can lift conversions rates by as much as 12% [Choi, 2015]. People act twice as fast if they are asked to do something and their name appears on it.

12. The New E-Commerce Channel? – Instagram

Instagram, with its heavy focus on visuals and 400 million + users, can be a very strong platform for Hotels. Hotels today are creating “selfie stations” and brand hashtags – how will you use Instagram to connect in 2016?.

13. User Generated Content

Your online reputation is key to success. There are a gazillion tools currently out there to leverage UGC, and missing out on this train is not an option in 2016. Respond to reviews, run contests on Twitter and Instagram as much as you can. Use your current guests to drive future bookings.

14. Booking Retargeting

Making a retargeting part of the booking funnel gives you a second chance to capture a guest’s interest. Strategies such as on-site, off-site and email retargeting are escalating in popularity, used by hotels to increase direct revenue and deflect traffic OTA’s.

15. Holistic Marketing Budgets

Traditional marketing budgets are no longer effective: it’s all about performance nowadays. If your cost per acquisition on one channel is less than other booking channels, like OTA’s, why restrict your budget and risk losing business at a lower cost?.

16. Landing Pages

Marketing landing pages can directly improve E-Commerce conversion rates for Hotels. They provide a single focus point for each campaign in a way a Homepage can’t – usage of them will only increase in 2016.

Bruno Santos
Account Manager | HDS – Hotel Digital Strategy
bruno@hoteldigitalstrategy.com