Email marketing workshop

Background

Hospitality Update was developed to extend the opportunity for Hotelympia exhibitors and visitors to communicate with each other beyond the timelines of the show dates. Exhibitors spend significant amounts to communicate with the visitors. Costs include the floor space, stand design and build, pre show promotion and staff time at the show. Visitors also spend significant amounts of time attending, including pre show research of who they want to see as well as time to travel. Hotelympia is an established event in the hospitality and catering sector attracting circa 1,000 exhibitors and 50,000 visitors. It is successful on the basic principle of B2B media in that it brings together buyers and sellers of products and services that are relevant to each other.

Hospitality Update is an established and successful email newsletter and website. Advertisers communicate their sales and marketing messages through the newsletter, which is delivered to 55,000 subscribers twice a month. In any newsletter there are typically 5-10 stories from advertisers arranged in 3 sections, Products, Offers and Events. Readers choose to open or not and then can quickly scan the stories to see if there is something they are interested in. The stories have a short headline an image and intro paragraph set out to encourage those interested to click on a link. The link then takes them to the full story within the relevant section of Hospitality Update with contact details of the advertiser. Alternatively the link can take them to the relevant section of the advertiser’s website.

The reports advertisers receive show them exactly how many people opened the newsletter and saw their advert. It also shows how many clicked on their link to learn more. If the advertiser uses web analytics they can then see what pages, how many pages and how much time each visitor spent on their site. So a return on investment calculation can be applied to the cost of the advertisement.

Hospitality Update is being re launched at Hotelympia next year and this workshop will help define the new product specification. Three workshops are being held today, the other two covering search marketing and web design and build. The combined results will be published and distributed to all today’s delegates. Following the results being published the re development will be applied and Hospitality Update will be re launched at the show.

Email marketing workshop

Agenda

  • All delegates are encouraged to actively contribute; there are no rights or wrongs and the more ideas the better.
  • We will focus on recipients of the newsletter a profile of which will be available in the workshop.
  • All ideas on how advertisers can apply the right message to visitors will also be covered.
  • Data Schema, what do we need and how are we going to use it/capture it?
  • Email creative, reflecting the sender’s brand
  • HTML/text/web
  • Subject lines that stand out in the inbox – Does what it says on the tin – or – catchy – dynamically personalised – John’s September News, offers and events?
  • Content – How much, how little
  • Links – How many
  • Style – synchronising message to recipients needs – perceived or empirical?
  • Balanced information exchange
  • Frequency
  • Link email stats to web analytics – wider picture

At the end of the workshop you will also be able to take the principles learned and apply them to your own business.

please email emailmarketing@digital-relevance.com or call 01344 706001.