How To Get 3,000+ Downloads From One Hotel Newsletter…

When it comes to hotels, your local market offers you a year-round pool of potential custom to dip into.

All too often though, hotels are regarded as places for tourists/those visiting from afar.

To counteract this, it’s all about community building.

If you get the people local to your venue regularly dining with you or using your spa and leisure facilities, you can bring in revenue all year-round that nicely supplements the overnight guests who’ve travelled to be with you.

The power of community building then, can’t be underestimated.

We recently helped one of our hotel clients generate a ton of engagement with their local market, generating 3,000+ downloads from one newsletter…

Here’s how.

Balmer Lawn Hotel & Spa is a 4-star property in the heart of the New Forest. Despite being rurally located, there’s a significant local community on their doorstep spread across several settlements throughout the surrounding national park.

With most being beyond walking distance though, and without much passing foot traffic, we needed to tempt them in.

So, we launched ‘Balmer’s Little Black Book of Offers’, which contains ‘exclusive’ discounts for their local market, centring on F&B and spa offers, such as 25% off the food bill, two for one on cocktails, two for one spa days, upgraded afternoon teas, free room hire for events and so on – with offers varying every month, and with certain parameters involved to make them all economically viable.

Shouting about it via social channels to raise initial awareness, we then sent it to the Balmer Lawn database via newsletter (which our copy team wrote and design team designed).

This saw a 40.2% open rate (double the average of 20.39% from 2022), and a 6.4% click through rate (against a 2022 average of 1.4%).

A downloadable PDF accessible via the newsletter saw 3,228 downloads.

We also boosted some of the social posts and – with just a £70 budget – generated 790 link clicks, reached 13,264, saw 26,610 impressions, resulting in 135 brand new sign-ups for the Balmer Lawn database.

And to back up this online awareness campaign, we’ve also arranged for leaflets to be dropped to nearby postcodes starting from the 1st Feb.

The early signs are very promising then – and Balmer Lawn has already noticed a clear upturn in locally-based F&B bookings.

Want us to help you build your hotel community? Get in touch and we’ll talk you through it!