EDM Campaign Guidelines

What we need from you, and what to expect once your campaign is booked

An EDM (Electronic Direct Mail) lets you reach the Hospitality Net subscriber base with your own message, your own design, and your own call to action. This page covers what we need from you to get your campaign live, the rules your email must follow, and how the proof-and-approval process works.

About EDM Campaigns

An EDM is a one-off email sent from Hospitality Net to our subscriber list, carrying your message, your branding, and your destination links. The list contains over 20,000 verified hospitality professionals: hoteliers, executives, technology leaders, consultants, and industry suppliers across the global hospitality sector.

Slots are limited. Hospitality Net sends one EDM per week, so the channel is genuinely scarce, and that scarcity is part of what makes it work. Subscribers do not see a flood of promotional email from us, which keeps open rates high.

Common use cases include product announcements, webinar and event invitations, research reports, e-books, surveys, and educational program launches. If you are unsure whether your message fits the channel, ask before booking.

What to Submit

Once your EDM is booked, send us the following so we can build your campaign:

Preferred send date and time: including the time zone (for example: October 13, 2 PM CET)
Subject line: the email's subject as it should appear in the inbox
Email body, HTML version: the full HTML for the email, ready to send
Email body, text version: a plain-text equivalent for clients that do not render HTML

Both HTML and text versions are required. The text version is a fallback for accessibility and deliverability, and most professional email clients expect it.

Test Your Email Before Sending It to Us

Email clients render HTML differently. What looks good in Gmail may break in Outlook, and what looks good on desktop may collapse on mobile. Before sending us your final HTML, test it across the major clients and devices.

A few tools that work well:

PutsMail: a free tool that lets you send test emails to multiple addresses at once
Litmus: paid, with rendered previews across dozens of email clients and devices
Email on Acid: paid, with similar previews plus accessibility and deliverability checks

The free option is enough for most campaigns. The paid tools are worth it if you send email regularly. Either way, send the email to yourself first, view it in at least three different clients, and confirm everything renders the way you intended.

The cleaner the HTML you send us, the smoother the proof-and-approval cycle.

Required Footer (CAN-SPAM Compliance)

Every EDM sent through Hospitality Net must include a compliance footer with our subscriber permission notice, an email preferences link, an unsubscribe link, and our postal address. This is a legal requirement under the CAN-SPAM Act and equivalent regulations in other jurisdictions.

Include this block at the end of your HTML version:

<div>This email is sent to you with permission as part of your Hospitality Net registration.</div>

<div><a href="{{EmailPreferenceCenter}}" title="update">Click here</a> to update your email preferences or <a href="{{Unsubscribe}}" title="unsubscribe">click here</a> if you wish to unsubscribe.</div>

<div>Hospitality Net &ndash; Boschcour 54, Maastricht, 6221JR &ndash; The Netherlands</div>

And this block at the end of your text version:

=====================================================================
This email is sent to you with permission as part of your
Hospitality Net registration.

Update your email preferences: {{EmailPreferenceCenter}}
Unsubscribe: {{Unsubscribe}}

Hospitality Net – Boschcour 54, Maastricht, 6221JR – The Netherlands

The {{EmailPreferenceCenter}} and {{Unsubscribe}} placeholders are merge tags. Hospitality Net replaces them with personalized links at send time, so each recipient gets working links tied to their own subscription. Leave them exactly as shown.

Proof and Approval

Once we have your campaign assembled, we send you two test emails before anything goes live:

HTML Proof: your full campaign rendered as the HTML email, with the subject line you submitted
Text Proof: the plain-text version of the same campaign

Review both. Check the subject line, the body content, the links, the merge tags, and the way it renders on your own devices. If anything needs to change, send your edits and we will issue a fresh proof.

Once you approve both proofs, we schedule the campaign for the send date and time you requested. Approvals are final at the point of scheduling, so check carefully.

UTM Tracking and Performance

Hospitality Net does not provide open, click, or delivery reporting for EDM campaigns. Performance measurement is handled on your side through UTM parameters in your destination links.

Add UTM tags to every link in your email so the resulting traffic shows up cleanly in your analytics. A typical format works well: ?utm_source=hospitalitynet&utm_medium=edm&utm_campaign=<campaign-name>. Use a consistent campaign name across all links in the same email so you can analyze the campaign as a whole.