This fundamentally changes the way we think about email. Trust, perceived value and relevance become increasingly important. Your email recipients will be proactively selecting a few people that get priority over everyone else – and everyone else may have a much smaller chance of being heard.

There’s a trend here. Not only did Google introduce this a little over a month ago to Gmail, those of us using Google Apps recently got access to it, and Hotmail and Yahoo have similar programs under development.

Let me ask you this: What will it take for my emails to be part of your priority inbox?

Seriously – I’d like your thoughts on this. I’ll do whatever it takes to publish information you find so incredibly valuable that you’ll add me to priority inbox.

Also think: What will it take for your emails to be part of my priority inbox? And those of your audience?

All of us who send email need to be thinking constantly about how to get our recipients to mark the messages as important.

If people are going to give you their email address, they want to feel safe about it.

I wanted to do this by making my “No spam, ever” policy very clear – so I wrote the privacy policy in plain English. (Legalese doesn’t make people feel as safe.)

And then I included a link to preview the sample weekly email.

People appreciate when you take away the smoke and mirrors. Make it very clear what the offer is, what people will get, and response rates will jump.

Could you try something like this on your email signup form?

Furthermore, people travel for different reasons. Business travel-themed messages become irrelevant when the recipient is planning their vacation.

Instead, use personas when planning your email (and the rest of your marketing).

The guide contains quick and tested ideas on how you can get better results from your email marketing. It’s the result of a 3-hour brainstorming session between myself and some of the best email marketing professionals in the hotel industry. We cover topics such as:

• The role and importance of email in today’s web
• Steps to take before sending out an email campaign
• Planning an effective email campaign
• Criteria for selecting a good email partner (if you want one)
• List building tips and how to quickly collect email addresses from people that want to hear from you
• How to encourage front office staff to collect emails
• How to integrate email with your website
• How to integrate email with social media
• Tips for creating highly relevant offers through segmenting your database
• Ideas for creating email content
• Automating your email system for higher profitability and better service
• Numbers you should watch – and testing ideas to improve performance
• Plus: lots of samples, checklists, and insider’s tips

Learn more about this guide, or order your copy here

Images and headlines should match the email creative. Aim for a seamless experience for the recipient.

Design the page layout to focus the visitor’s attention. You may try:

• Increasing the font size
• Eliminate multiple columns and navigation
• Include a very clear next step

If you want to get really fancy, do a two-step landing page sequence to segment your audience and offer – like Howard Johnson did here:

But don’t let complexity scare you into inaction. If you’re currently sending email traffic to a generic page, experiment with a basic web page that mirrors the offer.

Email works best when it is part of an integrated campaign. And building email campaign-specific website landing pages is the first thing you should do to integrate.

For more on this topic, read 10 Ways to Improve Your Landing Pages

Learn more ways to improve email conversion rates in the Savvy Hotelier’s Guide to Email Marketing

For example, Amway Grand Plaza Hotel recently sent me the email below:

Creating a “neighbors” rate for residents of their 616 Grand Rapids, Michigan area code may be a good idea – but they should have known I live in San Francisco, making this offer irrelevant to me. (And I’m not just picking on Amway Grand Plaza – I’ve received many similar emails from other hotels)

Failing to segment their audience probably alienated a lot of people on their list.

How could they have obtained my home location?

• From my guest record (if I stayed with them, which I have not)
• When I signed up for their list, on the opt-in form
• In a survey sent sometime during our email relationship

Take a look at this email I received today from Sirius Radio – they’re asking my listening preferences, so they can send relevant messages in the future:

I like this, and would like to see more hotels using this tactic.

Find practical tips on “how” to properly segment your database in the Savvy Hotelier’s Guide to Email Marketing

“Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”
- Sun Tzu

The same is true with email marketing: campaigns usually succeed or fail before the messages are even put together. Improve your chances for success by taking these steps before sending out any email…

Step #1 – Know your audience

Ask yourself “Who will be reading this?”

Who are you sending to? Is each recipient quite similar, or are they split into distinct groups?

Let’s say you have…

1. People that have made a reservation with you three seasons in a row
2. People who stayed with you once
3. People who never stayed at your property at all

You should probably send different messages to each of these groups.

Step #2 – Know why people buy from you

Once you know your audience very well, it becomes much easier to determine why someone would book a reservation at your property.

Maybe you talk with your guests directly, or maybe you’ve done a survey to ask them why they stay with you.

(If you haven’t done either of those, now is the time to begin.)

Knowing why someone stays at your hotel is essential for crafting your messages. If you can understand what’s important to them, you know which hot buttons to push to incite action.

Step #3 – Find out what’s going on in the marketing department

See what they’re currently promoting. Publish messages that fit in with these promotions.

If you can, try to find out which type of promotions have worked well in other channels for the hotel.

For example, if they’ve tried coupons or discount codes – and received a good response from that – use the same strategy in your email. If you’ve received a good direct mail response from for a particular offer, there’s a good chance it will work well in email.

Email is just another communications channel, so build on what’s going on elsewhere.

Continuity is the goal. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If you have something that works well elsewhere, bring that to your email campaign.

Learn how you can virtually guarantee email marketing success in the Savvy Hotelier’s Guide to Email Marketing

Datran finds email the top sales performer

A Datran Media survey of CMOs found that email was by far the strongest performer last year:

Social media use does not replace email

This research from Merkle indicates people who are very active in social media tend to check their email far more often:

ShareThis finds people prefer to share via email

ShareThis is a very useful little widget that lets people share webpages with others. Social media should be best for this, right? Well, that’s not what they found:

Email is still very important. Get insider tips in the Savvy Hotelier’s Guide to Email Marketing

Why email?

With so many digital marketing options available, why focus on email?

Because it just may be the single most profitable marketing tool we have.

A few months ago, Omniture did a survey of marketing executives to rate the relative effectiveness of digital-marketing media. 78% said email marketing was their top performer.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, each dollar spent on email brings in an average of $45 in sales. The return on investment is unmatched.

As marketing professionals, we are held accountable for the results we bring in. And since email is the top sales performer for so many hospitality organizations, it’s a channel we should master.

This chart shows my daily blog traffic over the past few weeks. Traffic spikes each Monday, when my weekly email summary goes out:

Could you try something like this for your blog?

It doesn’t have to be time consuming. I use MailChimp to automatically package my posts in a one-email-per week format. (I tried Feedburner, but felt daily updates would be too overwhelming…)