If you’re in the hospitality industry, you know just how important it is to communicate well with your guests. It’s not just what you send in your email, though. Often, thinking about when you send emails to your guests is just as critical.
Why does timing matter? Well, far from being a minor detail, it can have real consequences for your open rates, engagement, and the overall experience your guests have with you. Let’s take a closer look at why getting the timing of your emails right is so important.
Why Timing Is (Almost) Everything
Higher Open Rates
Sending emails at the wrong times can mean they get lost in a cluttered inbox, ignored, or worse, even annoy your guests. When you send an email at the perfect time, on the other hand, it’s more likely to be opened, read, and acted upon.
For example, an email sent early in the morning when most people are checking their inboxes over a cup of coffee might have a better chance of catching your reader’s attention versus one sent at 2 pm when they’re already busy with their day.
Increased Engagement
If you send emails when your guests are busy or distracted, chances are they will quickly scan through the content and forget about it. When they receive an email at a more convenient time, though, they’re more likely to read through it and engage with the content.
Whether you want them to click on a link, make a booking, complete a survey, or just read the information you’ve sent – getting the timing right can make all the difference in how they respond.
Enhanced Guest Experience
While you don’t want to spam your guests with constant emails and risk annoying them, it’s also important that you don’t just accept their booking and then effectively ghost them. If you don’t keep in touch, guests can feel disconnected from your brand. At worst, they might lose confidence in their booking if they don’t hear from you.
Checking in on future guests with some well-timed communication shows that you care about their guest experience and can help them feel more prepared and excited about their upcoming visit.
Improved Conversion Rates
Email marketing can be a great way of connecting with guests, but the right timing can impact the results you get. For example, if a promotional offer for a last-minute weekend getaway lands in a guest’s inbox early on a Friday afternoon, they might be tempted. They’re likely to be wrapping up their work and starting to think about their plans for the weekend.
On the other hand, the same email sent first thing on a Monday morning could get quickly dismissed. Your guests might be busy with work tasks, playing catch-up from the weekend, and simply not in the right mindset to consider booking a break.
Tailoring Email Timing to Your Audience
The best times to email your guests can vary depending on who you are targeting. For example, busy corporate guests booking business trips will have different needs compared to leisure travelers planning a family vacation. This approach is similar to these account based marketing examples where personalized engagement is key to effectiveness.
Before you get into the details of when to email your guests, you’ll want to split them out depending on certain identifying factors.
Demographics
Things like age, location, and lifestyle can all influence the time guests will be most engaged with receiving emails. For example, younger travelers are more likely to check their emails frequently throughout the day, whereas middle-aged guests with work and family responsibilities might be more responsive in the evenings.
Additionally, you’ll need to consider things like local time differences for international travelers to make sure your emails land at a convenient time for them.
Travel Patterns
Consider the reason for your guest’s visit and how it might affect when they want to receive emails from you. For example, business travelers will likely want to organize trips during working hours, while leisure travelers are more inclined to plan their trips during their free time in the evenings or on weekends.
Booking Behavior
Look at the previous booking behavior of guests for clues on how they tend to plan their trips. Guests who tend to book and plan their trips well in advance are more likely to appreciate early notifications about upcoming promotions and seasonal offers, for example. On the other hand, last-minute bookers might respond better to time-sensitive offers or last-minute deals.
Analyzing Email Engagement Data
If you’re already regularly sending emails to guests, you’ll have a whole host of existing information that you can also use to guide your email strategy. Use email tracking tools to take a look at your past campaigns and any regular emails you send to guests, like check-in information or customer surveys.
By looking at stats like open rates, click-through rates, and booking conversions, you can see which emails are getting the best results. You can then identify any patterns with when you send emails to different audiences and how they perform.
Here’s how to break this down:
- Identify High-Performing Campaigns: Check which of your email campaigns had the highest engagement rates.
- Look at Sending Times: Note the times and days these emails were sent.
- Segment by Audience: Break down the data by different guest segments to see if certain groups respond better at specific times.
For example, if you spot that emails sent to business travelers on Tuesday mornings get a higher open rate, you can time your future emails to this audience accordingly.
Timing for Different Types of Emails
Let’s look at some common types of emails you likely send regularly and the optimal time for sending them.
Booking Confirmations
When to Send: Immediately after a booking.
Why: Don’t leave guests guessing about their booking. Send confirmation emails straight away to confirm their reservation has been made, along with any further details they might need.
Pre-Arrival Information
When to Send: 3-5 days before the arrival date, around mid-morning.
Why: If you send pre-arrival information too far ahead of your guest’s booking, they might lose or forget important details like self check-in instructions.
You also want to avoid sending it too last minute, as this could make guests anxious. The ideal time for sending pre-arrival information is a few days before their visit, giving them plenty of time to read your email and ask any questions they might have ahead of their visit.
Post-Stay Follow-Up
When to Send: 3-5 days after check-out, in the early afternoon.
Why: Give your guests a couple of days to return from their travels and settle back into their routine before sending follow-up emails. Asking for feedback on the day they check out can overwhelm guests and doesn’t allow time for them to reflect on their stay.
Equally, leaving it too long might cause them to forget about their visit. For those all-important positive reviews, you want to catch guests when they’re still fresh from the excitement of their trip and can remember all the things they enjoyed about their stay with you.
Promotional Offers
When to Send: Mid-week, around 10 AM.
Why: If you’re sending marketing emails, you want to aim for the times when your target audience is most engaged with emails.
If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have a good idea of when these optimal times are. As a general guide, statistics show the best time for sending promotional offers is mid-week, late morning, when engagement rates tend to be highest.
Experimentation and A/B Testing
As with any marketing activity, finding the best time to send emails to your guests can take a bit of trial and error. One way to experiment with the timings of your emails without overhauling your whole schedule is by using A/B testing.
Here’s how it works:
- Formulate Hypotheses: Based on what you already know, come up with a theory about the best times to send your emails. This should be a statement that you essentially set out to prove. For example, “Sending emails about last-minute deals on Thursday afternoons at 3 pm will get higher open and click-through rates.”
- Segment Your Audience: Split up your email list into two or more different segments. All of your segments should include a similar demographic to keep your results as accurate as possible. For example, if you’re targeting young, child-free couples with weekend getaways, you’d make sure both your groups are made up of this specific demographic. You don’t want to mix in business travelers who are unlikely to engage and could skew your results.
- A/B Test Different Times: Send the exact same email content but at different times to your different segments.
- Analyze Results: Compare the open rates, click-through rates, and conversions for each segment.
For example, you might find that your last-minute weekend getaway offer gets higher engagement when sent on Thursday afternoons compared to earlier in the day, or on a different weekday.
This shows that people are starting to think about their weekend plans around this time, making it the best time to tempt them with offers and deals.
