Most hospitality businesses have an email list. Few of them have an email programme.
There is a difference. A list is a spreadsheet of contacts you occasionally remember to send something to. A programme is a structured, segmented, revenue-driving channel that works consistently in the background of your business whether you are thinking about it or not.
We spent four years turning one into the other for a prominent WA resort property. Here is what that looked like.
Where it started
When we came on board, the email marketing was what you would expect from a property that had grown fast and never had a dedicated marketing team to keep pace with it.
One undifferentiated list. No segmentation. No send logic. No consistency. Open rates were low. Click rates were lower. The channel had no real identity, no rhythm, and no commercial structure underneath it.
The database itself had potential. The strategy around it did not.
What we built
The Architecture
The first job was not writing a single email. It was building the framework that would make every future email smarter.
We segmented the database into four audience groups, each with their own content logic, send timing, and commercial objective:
- Monthly Updates — the broadest segment, general audience engagement and brand presence
- Food and Beverage — diners, restaurant guests, and F&B loyalists with specific offers and experiences
- Functions — corporate and events bookers where the commercial stakes are higher and the lead times are longer
- Accommodation — stay bookers, with messaging calibrated around rooms, packages, and yield management
Each segment received content built for them, not a one-size-fits-all newsletter repackaged and resent.
The Send Logic
Once we had the four segments, we staggered the send schedule across the month. One segment per week, sequenced deliberately. This was not just an operational convenience. It was a decision rooted in deliverability, audience psychology, and resource quality.
When you send to your entire database at once, you spread your best content thin, you risk your sender reputation, and you lose the ability to test, learn, and improve between sends. When you stagger, each send gets proper attention. The content is purpose-built. The timing can be calibrated to when that specific audience is most receptive. And if something underperforms, you know exactly why and where.
This is the kind of infrastructure decision that does not show up in any single campaign result, but compounds over time into a database that trusts you.
The Numbers
Industry benchmark for open rates in the hospitality sector sits around 20-25%. Respectable is 30%. Above 40% is exceptional.
Across four segments, tracked monthly over two financial years, our open rates looked like this:
| Segment | Average Open Rate | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Updates | 37.8% | 39% |
| Food and Beverage | 43.7% | 42% |
| Functions | 34.1% | 42% |
| Accommodation | 41.9% | 45% |
The F&B segment exceeded its target. Accommodation and Monthly Updates tracked close to benchmark. Functions, which carries the longest and most complex sales cycle of any hospitality segment, still consistently outperformed industry standard by a significant margin.
Click rates, which are the harder metric because they require the reader to take action, averaged across all segments at 2.9% against a target of 3.7%.
The Revenue Picture
In 2024 alone, email marketing drove 17,658 sessions to the resort’s website — up 43.2 percent on the previous year. Those sessions generated $13,764 in directly tracked online revenue.
That figure is the conservative floor. It captures only transactions completed online in the same session. It does not account for guests who received an email, called to book, or walked in later that week. It does not capture the functions enquiries submitted through the contact form, the gift card purchases made offline, or the F&B bookings made by phone after reading about a wine dinner or Sunday brunch. Email was the prompt. The full revenue outcome is larger than any single attribution model can measure.
What the data does confirm is that our email marketing was the third largest traffic channel on the entire website, ahead of paid social, ahead of Google Ads, and growing at nearly twice the rate of any other organic channel year on year.
What four years does that four weeks cannot
The results above are one part of the story. The other part is what sustained, structured execution does to a channel over time.
By year four, this database knew what to expect from the resort. The audience had been trained, gradually and respectfully, to open emails because the emails were worth opening. Trust had been built at volume. Segments were cleaner. Unsubscribes were low. Engagement was consistent.
That does not happen by accident. It happens because someone made the right structural decisions at the start and stuck to them.
Why this matters for your business
If you are in hospitality, tourism, or any experience-led sector, your email database is one of the only audiences you actually own. Your social following is rented. Your organic reach is at the mercy of an algorithm. Your email list is yours.
Most businesses treat it like a last resort. Send something when you need to fill a table, push a slow week, or hit an end-of-month target. Their contacts disengage. Their open rates drop. The channel becomes less valuable the more they ignore it.
The properties that get this right treat email marketing as a programme, not a panic button. They build architecture first. They segment with intention. They send with consistency. And they measure everything, not to report on it, but to improve on it.
That is what we do.
