How to split a hotel newsletter into groups

Most hotel and villa newsletters go to the whole list, every time. It is the easy option: one email, one button, done. The cost is quiet. The family villa offer lands with the guest who came alone to surf. The Friday dinner reaches someone on the other side of the world. Nobody complains. They just stop opening, and a few press unsubscribe.

Splitting your list into groups fixes most of that, and it does not take a marketing team. You need a handful of groups you will actually use, built from things your list already knows.

Start with what your list already knows

Before you invent anything, look at the columns you already have. Almost every list holds some of these:

• Who opened or clicked, and when. The single most useful thing you know about a reader.
• Country, if your sign-up form or booking system asked for it.
• The date someone joined, so you can tell new readers from old ones.
• Tags someone added along the way, like "past guest", "press" or "wedding enquiry".
• Where they signed up: the website form, the guest wifi, an event, a spreadsheet from the front desk.

If a column is not there, do not plan around it. Check your export first. Many lists have no country at all, and almost none hold a guest's age.

Five groups worth making first

1. Opened or clicked in the last three months. These are your readers. Send them the most, and send them first.
2. Past guests. People who stayed with you read a hotel's news differently from people who only signed up on the website.
3. By country, if you have it. Useful for offers timed to a country's school holidays or a new flight route.
4. Joined in the last month. A short welcome works better than dropping them into the middle of your usual newsletter.
5. Quiet for a year or more. Not a group to delete, a group to treat gently: fewer emails, and only the best ones.

Match the email to the group

Write the email first, then ask who it is really for. A rooftop dinner on Friday is for people nearby and people who read you lately. A low season family offer is for past guests who came with children, if your tags say so. A new spa menu might be for everyone who has opened anything this year.

Say the group out loud the way you would to a colleague: "opened something in the last three months, lives in Australia". If you can say it, you can build it.

When sending to everyone is still right

Groups are not a rule against the whole list. Send to everyone when the news really is for everyone: a reopening, a new property, a renovation, a change to how guests book. Your regular newsletter, if people signed up for exactly that, can go to all of them too. What changes is that it stops being the only option.

Check the number before you send

A group can quietly come out much smaller or bigger than you expect. Forty people is a private email, not a campaign. Twelve thousand might mean a filter did nothing. Look at the count before anything goes out, and widen or narrow until it matches what you meant.

Keep it to a handful

Thirty groups nobody maintains are worse than five you use every week. Start with the five above, name them in plain words, and add a new one only when an email needs it.

In Vivre you type the group the way you would say it, and the number of people in it shows up before you write a word. See how it works.