Apart from your advertising spend, your greatest opportunities to reach potential returning Guests are through personalized correspondence. Some properties choose to contract with external marketing vendors for that purpose. SMS offers an affordable and fully automated solution, the Secure Data Extract (SDE) Export, that can support those operations. But, for those who wish to minimize the expense and manage these efforts in-house, you have a variety of options for producing highly professional results:
- SMS|Host fully supports the use of HTML templates for eMail. When combined with the dozens of data fields that can be used in locate condition expressions to generate batched mail, you have a very powerful tool for creating an entire library of personalized correspondence to Guests, Members and Owners, as well as your City Ledger accounts. When used in this manner, you have the option of including attachments in your batches. Additionally, all generated eMail is recorded in your letter history.
- Some properties are more comfortable creating a collection of MS Word documents, then processing bulk eMails through the Word-Merge process with MS Excel. SMS|Host offers a couple of easy ways to produce those address lists. Both versions of the Mailing List program (R-R-3-P - Brief and Comprehensive) offer Departure Date as a fourth filter for Reservation records in addition to Arrival, Booking or Stay dates, rounding out your options for creating post-Departure thank-you notes and return offers. Most importantly, Users can designate the output as fixed-length or comma delimited text files that are Excel-friendly.
- Alternatively, SMS licenses a Data Marketing Extract with forty fields of information on Guests and their Reservations that lends itself to more nuanced targeting based on prior stays. It, too, offers several output format options. If you would like to explore this further, please speak with your Account Manager for details.
- For those properties that are looking to actively manage their external marketing with Guest-cycle touchpoints, newsletters and targeted sub-markets, all backed up with professional designs and campaign-level reporting and analytics, an easy and very affordable alternative is to use a service such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact which will comfortably integrate with your mailing list production from SMS|Host. Track subscriber open and click rates, comfortable in the knowledge that your message is automatically optimized for all mobile platforms.
With 35+ years of feature development, the depth of functionality in your SMS|Host system can seem almost limitless but you should always check with your Account Manager if you’re not sure it can do what you need. You may be surprised to discover you already have the solution.
In the next post, we'll look at the most powerful resource available to every SMS|Host user.
Written by Rick Downing, Senior Product Manager, SMS|Host
Posted 9/28/2021
