Successful hotels and hotel chains are marked out but an ability to provide consistency in service to guests at all points where there is interaction. This is only achieved through strong brand values, a commitment to training but also in providing the right tools to staff to be able to do their job.

In my experience, one area where this consistency is not always apparent is in the email communications that hotels send to clients and prospects.

Why does brand consistency matter?

Brand consistency matters because if hotels and venues can provide a consistent tone of voice, brand colours, imagery choice and do it time after time and do it across the website, hotel reseller site and crucially one to one emails, then those messages build up in customers’ minds over the course of time.

These consistent messages mutually reinforce each other at a subconscious level, making it much more likely that customers will remember the brand when it comes time to buy and use the brand. In short it helps the emails that we send convert.

To quote one report by the National Hotel Advisors: “Hilton’s price per key is a testament to the consistent and strong quality levels the brand maintains, which allows for a higher sale price per room.” However due to the nature of the tools we give sales people it is difficult for them to send consistent, excellent and yet personalised emails and proposals to prospects, especially when selling more expensive packages like conferences or block bookings. Can we do a better job?

Is email the Wild West of brand consistency?

How common is the following experience? Marketing creates at considerable expense some wonderful imagery, photography and videos of your properties. They make a beautiful website and of course, the images are provided to sales for their use in proposal and prospecting emails. And how are they used? They are either attached to the email, lost in a brochure or presented out of context in an image gallery.

What’s worse is depending on how they are attached they could be killing the deliverability of the email. Or to get around this the salesperson includes links back to videos with often strange looking URLs that make a very ugly email and do not encourage confidence in the recipient to open them. In either case, what is a key point in enhancing the brand proposition is either lost or worse than that actually damaged by either an email that cannot be delivered or that looks extremely poor.

So how do we send a great email every time?

I started UpMail because I realised that the standard editors like Outlook and GMail were simply not the right tools people involved in hotel sales should be using for these super-critical emails. Hotel sales teams needed, in my opinion, the ability to weave the content that converts alongside personalised messaging and to be able to do this as quickly or more quickly than writing an email from scratch in a standard email editor. This is how a brand is effectively and appropriately embedded. This is the ability to create consistent, on-brand emails in seconds for 1 to 1 communications and at the most critical junctures of the sales cycle. That’s UpMail.

UpMail integrates with Outlook or Gmail so the salesperson need only click a tab when they are ready to impress the prospect. UpMail can suggest multiple pre-written texts for different scenarios and of course approved and suggested imagery. The salesperson can edit and append additional personal text as desired and create truly impressive emails and proposals.

I’ll write another time about how we can appropriately, subtly but effectively add in upsell and cross-sell options. But trust me you can and you can in a way that sells. If this would make sense for your hotel brand I would love to show you in more detail.

Based in London, UpMail is an email tool for hotel salespeople to increase one-to-one email communications, productivity and sales conversion rates. UpMail customers include Jurys Inn, Iberostar, citizenM, and many more.