Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 8 Episode 25. This is a recap of my recording where I talked about email marketing.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamp
01:30 What this talk is all about
05:50 Email statistics
06:40 How to send emails correctly
10:10 GDPR and Email Marketing
11:30 Email Marketing Tools
12:50 Write your marketing email well
14:10 Boostly emails
14:50 Consistency is the key
15:30 The best time to send an email
Whilst you’re here
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Visual – YouTube
Audio – Boostly Podcast
Transcript from the Episode
This is going to be all about email marketing. I recently read a study of consumer study, the main takeaway from it and it was recently released by fuel travel and the big takeaway from it was is that you have to be proactive in messaging your future guests because whilst we are still in amongst this pandemic, and we don't know when restrictions are going to get lowered, and when we don't know when trouble is going to be. We've all still got bookings that are still active and still there in our calendar. I can see it for you know, for the Grainary where I'm at right now and I know that many of our clients do have them they're still on unknown as whether they can accept it or not. Or Guess what, so is the guest. And the main takeaway from this study was to make sure you could be proactive in communicating with your guests, and email is the best way of doing.
So tonight's video that we're going to watch is going to talk about email marketing, it tells about the power of it. And most importantly, it's going to give you stats, it's going to show you some cool things. And it will give you a bit more of an insight of why it should be one of the main key marketing channels that you should be looking at not only for right now, which is April 2020. But for May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December 2021 2022.
Today, I'm going to be talking about GDPR and email marketing. How GDPR can actually increase your direct bookings and why you should you be paying attention to email marketing,
Email statistics
I have got these stats off the actual internet. This is actually a proper survey. I didn't just make them up. So 4.3 billion email users by 2020 to 330 3 billion daily emails being sent by 2022. For every one pound you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of 32 pounds. I believe that email is still King with algorithms, social media algorithms becoming even harder to get your business in front of your, your audience, with pay per click Google ads and all of that becoming even more expensive.
I think email has will forever will be the best form of marketing every single one of you do. I believe that the reason why so many people don't do it is because there's a stigma around it where it is scammy spammy and some people don't do it.
How to do email marketing correctly
So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you how to send emails correctly. I'm going to talk to you about the perfect time in the day to send an email. I'm going to talk to you about the GDPR spring cleaning as I called it, and how you can turn lookers into bookers and everybody in this room you are going to get packed off With an email template that I've used, my Boostly members have used and so many other people have used, you can put it into practice, you can put into practice literally at your lunch break, and you can have direct bookings by the time that you leave today, which is, which is nice.
GDPR and Email Marketing
GDPR was brought in last year, which are basically something that needed to have, you know, we've all had spammy junky emails come into our inbox from companies that have bought our email addresses so it needed to happen but at the same time, the word and and and the way it was put together was very scary for small business owners. They're made to feel like you could no longer get involved in email marketing.
So I like to think of GDPR as not as a bad thing as such. I like to think of it as something that needed to happen and I like to call it a spring, the spring clean. I've got it, obviously Say this, because legal reasons, you know, I this is my opinion, alright, this is not I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a GDPR lawyer. So please don't use it as, as the gospel, please do get legal advice if you want to go on everything that I'm saying with this, but GDPR is coming and it just means now that we are no longer if you're doing this in the past just import your guestbook into something like MailChimp and just send out emails, you've got to actually get content, whoever you're going to send an email to, but you can send them an email in the future.
Email Marketing Tools
There are some amazing tools, some free tools out there, that means that you can do so and get the content, the one that I use, and the one that I encourage all Boostly members to use is called MailChimp, and it's free. And again, you get all the tools and the tactics where they can give you a signup form that has got the consent forms already built-in.
If you haven't got consent from your guests or people that have signed up to, you can send them emails and it hasn't been done so in the past 12 months, then you're gonna have to start again. But now is the best time to start. Like I said in the original slides, so many people have email and so many people are active on email.
And the trick about email marketing compared to anything else is that when you get permission to send somebody an email, you're giving them a one on one interaction into their inbox. So there's no distraction. So it's not like a social media post where there's so many other things going on. It's a one on one communication that they're giving you a chance to get into that inbox, the stat here 49% of customers like to hear from you.
This is what people are saying like this that was done in 2017 of consumers said they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis. The reasons why people get so bogged down with emails is because they think of their own inbox and they think how it's clogged with salesy type emails, and all the things.
Write your email well
So what I'm going to show you is How to create an email that will actually get read and engaged with no GDPR. We've all got email lists, we've got people where we've got one email, or we've got 20,000 emails. The reason why I call it the GDPR spring clean is that you have to on a quarterly basis to clean your emails because people will sign up to your email list people will engage with first day, but the first week, and then they'll just stop opening your emails.
Now, there is no point and this goes for all manner of marketing, social media email, there's no point having 100,000 email accounts for you to send an email and only 1000 people open them, Gmail, Yahoo, all these big email clients, they will much prefer your email account. If you've got a list of 100 but every time that you send an email out of that hundred, say 50 people open it or engage in it, you've got actual systems and setups in place where when you send an email You can see who's opened it, who's clicked it, but most importantly, who hasn't. And what I do on my email account is every month, I go in, and I find out of all the emails I've sent, who hasn't opened any who hasn't engaged in any, and I just don't subscribe.
Boostly email marketing
One of the reasons why that the Boostly email list is so engaged, it's the 61% engagement. And it's again, it's another reason why the Hospitality Community Facebook group is 3750 members, but it's got an engagement rate of 92%. Because what I do every month, every three months, I go in and anybody who hasn't paid within six, six months, we just remove them from the group, because again, it keeps them keeps the group engaged keeps the numbers high so that more people will see what we're doing.
Consistency is the key
You have to be consistent. People start doing emails, they start sending bits and bobs out after the first month, they'll send something or two months in they'll send something and they they don't get the results that they want. And they sto. Big time of the year that I have my mass unsubscribing from emails that I sign up to is Black Friday. Because, again, all of these companies decide on Black Friday sales and Christmas sales that they're going to bombard you with sales in effect, taking the time on a weekly or a monthly basis to keep in touch and share value and share information about what's going on.
I wouldn't mind so much if I send a sales email, but consistency is definitely key.
The best time to send an email
With things like MailChimp and Active Campaign, not only does it tell you how many people are opening your emails, but it also tells you what time they're opening your emails, on what days they're opening your emails and what devices and where we are in the world.
People always ask when is the best time for me to send an email and the response normally is in things like these well think about who your customers are, think about your customer avatar. If you're more geared up for the leisure industry and got a lot of leisure as a guest, then think about your customer avatar breaking down like, what would they be doing on a day to day basis? Those of you that are geared up for more corporate industry, you've got corporate emails on your list. You know what time of the day would they be looking to use their emails, I know from working in an office background, that's Thursday 3pm you know, after the about the lunch and you're just chilling out, that'd be a time when you want to check your email.
So start to think about your customer avatar, your ideal customer and look at your stats go off your finger, so look when people are opening them, and then again, go off that.
One thing that I always do on every email, whether it's for clients or the family business, is at the end of every email, we have some form of mention of a booking or to check availability somewhere on our website, and again with the mail systems that are out there, MailChimp, etc. Every time you send an email, not only can it tell you who's opened it, but it can tell you who has clicked on an email, or where they've got some whether they've gone to your booking engine, whether they've gone to your website, we're going to have checked availability.
And again, it's something that takes us five minutes to do. But when we send out an email, we've got a mention of check availability, etc, we go and check who's opened it and who's clicked. The beauty of this is that even though we sent an email out to 3000 people, we've had, say, 1000 people have opened this 30 people that we've seen clicked through onto our booking page, and it's instead of just trying to do the shotgun approach, you can just really narrow it down and find the potential guests to get in touch with.
Go to boostly.co.uk to get the email template that I've used many times and it works really, really well. I'll let you read the email and put it into your own words you just copy, paste and send And let me know your results.
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