An integral part of any email marketing strategy is the knowledge of exactly who your customers are, what they are most interested in and when they would like to hear from you.
Unfortunately, continuing along the path of ‘blast and send’, using generic content without careful consideration of whom you are speaking, can cause damage to your online reputation and in turn your brand. So how can you tailor your content for subscribers?
Creating a persona can provide a great way of gaining an insight into the people you are speaking to and how you should be communicating with them.
A persona created for marketing purposes is a fictional character representing the most important characteristics of your customers both past, present and prospective. By creating this it will help you to define what the main areas are that you should be focusing on within your emails.
Why not start by thinking about the demographics – this will include age, gender, educational background, their average income, their geographic location and what their employment status is.
Then move on to points such as what their lifestyle choices are, their main interests, what motivates them to book and why they would be interested in the services, facilities and attractions on offer within your hotel or close by. Most importantly, consider what you already know. Dealing with your customers on a day to day basis provides you with the opportunity to get to know them on a more personal basis and that in turn can provide some of the best insight into what they would like from your emails.
This is not to say that each hotel requires only one persona – customers differ in many ways and so the likelihood is that you will need to create different campaigns to cater for your varying personas.
A luxury hotel, situated in the city, with facilities including a spa, restaurant, conference centre and gym already know that the majority of their customers are:
From this we can see that there are 3 personas that will need to be created to cater for the main sections of the audience. As an example we will just focus on one of these:
Moving on from this, there is also the opportunity to begin sending emails triggered by information attached to your subscribers, such as anniversary dates and their favourite time of year to visit.
Completing a persona will allow your team to keep content consistent and your marketing messages targeted and clear. By taking the time to carefully consider your target audience you will find your campaigns become more engaging, relevant and ultimately more successful in the future.
