Own BFCM: The ultimate holiday preparation guide | a Revinate webinar

A great Black Friday offer means little if it never reaches the right guest. In this webinar from our Hotel Moment Deep Dive series, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Sara Green, Scaled Accounts Manager at Revinate, to explore how hotels can turn Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns into one of the year’s strongest revenue opportunities.

Bailey and Sara unpack why email deliverability starts well before campaign launch, how smarter guest segmentation can make offers more relevant, and why sending to your entire database is no longer the answer. They also explore Revinate’s secret shopper findings, including why 92% of unbooked calls captured no caller information, and how reservations teams can turn missed opportunities into future bookings.

Winning BFCM isn’t about reaching more people. It’s about reaching the right guests, delivering the right message, and making sure no lead slips through the cracks.

Meet your host

Karen Stephens

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships. Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

As the host of The Hotel Moment podcast, she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading our global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Watch the video

Transcript

(00:00:00) Bailey Yeats: Hello everyone. Welcome to our Black Friday Cyber Monday webinar for 2026. We are very excited to be talking to you today about what we’ve put together for the ultimate holiday preparation guide. Today I’m joined by my colleague Sara Green. Sara can do a little introduction here, but before we get into introductions, let’s talk a little bit about what is on the agenda for the day. So we’re going to try and respect your guys’ time as much as possible. We’re going to try and pack it into 30 minutes because we know you’re busy and we want you to get started with this Black Friday Cyber Monday work as soon as possible because time’s ticking and it’s coming. Hey, Sara, this is getting close.

(00:00:47) Sara Green: Time’s ticking.

(00:00:48) Bailey Yeats: Time’s ticking. We’re just under a month away now, so yeah, we’re ready to do this. So how we’re going to do it today is to talk about email deliverability. Of course, that’s a huge topic when it comes to Black Friday Cyber Monday. We’re going to talk about some revenue-generating offers and how to plan that. We’ll discuss your voice leads and what you can do with that huge influx of calls that happens throughout the month of November. We’ll also discuss automated lead nurture and then at the very end, we will help you get inspired with some of our favorite campaigns from the 2025 Black Friday Cyber Monday season. We had some really remarkable emails that we’re able to showcase from our wonderful customers. So I look forward to letting you know a little bit about that. My name is Bailey Yeats and I’m a marketing program manager here at Revinate. I was previously on our education team. So you may or may not recognize me from there. I spent a lot of time helping our customers get to know how to use Revinate’s products and prior to that I was a customer of Revinate. So I’ve been in the Revinate world for a little while now and excited to be working with Sara on this webinar. Sara, tell us about you. Although I’m sure lots of people have already heard from you.

(00:02:00) Sara Green: Thank you, Bailey. Yes. I’m Sara Green, work on the account management team here at Revinate and goodness. Oh my gosh, I think tomorrow is my six-year anniversary. This is perfect timing. So six years now with Revinate. Before that 16 years on property working with y’all, working alongside of everybody. So hospitality is 100% my passion, my comfort zone. And I say that not just, just to say like I know everything, but I get it. Hospitality is hospitality and everything we’re going to be talking about today will apply to everybody. Although we know everybody has different seasons, handle things differently, ultimately, at the end of the day, we want to see success from you and we’re here to help you, help you do that. But so excited to be here with Bailey and again, just working alongside of you guys again.

(00:02:55) Bailey Yeats: Yay. So, as a reminder, I didn’t put a slide in here about this, but we’ll just say it out loud just so you guys know that we are. First of all, we’re going to be sending you a recording of this. So if you miss parts of it or if you have to step away for a second, no big deal, you’re going to get a recording so you can go back and look at everything or listen to everything that we’re discussing. Secondly, if you do have any questions while we’re presenting today, by all means, we welcome them. Sara and I are happy to answer any questions you have. Just pop them in the chat box and we will be in there to give you answers. And if we don’t have an answer, we promise you we will get you one. So let’s talk about 2025 last year for our voice channel. So customers who use reservation sales through Revinate or RezForce, these are the stats and I was absolutely amazed at the amount of work that these hotel teams put in throughout that Black Friday week. So you can see it’s broken down there on the side for what the day of the week is, how many inbound calls were delivered to the hotels during that time, as well as the booking count and then the booking amount. So this is specifically through the channel. You can see the impact was huge, you know, just over. Well, not just over, quite a bit. Over $34 million in voice booking. So really, really important. We’re going to highlight some of the important factors that you need to consider when you are considering your voice channel throughout the month of November. And always, really, you know, it’s. It’s not just Black Friday when we see these peak seasons. There are different times throughout the year that you’re going to see peak season. But specifically this was for 2025, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And then when it comes to the marketing results, you can see our customers launched a ton of campaigns. You know, they sent over 114 million emails. That’s incredible. That is. To a lot of guests and a lot of rich guest profiles were connected. That’s so incredible. You know, the revenue that was generated between the dates of November 28 to December 2 was over 72 million. That’s big numbers. Right. And we want to make sure that you see the importance because everybody’s going to be participating worldwide, whether they are a country that celebrates, call it celebrating Black Friday or not, they want in on the action. And so, and I would too if I was a hotelier. So I think it’s imperative to say that this applies globally and it’s important that everyone be in. Anything to add there, Sara?

(00:05:47) Sara Green: No, I think it was, I was going to actually call it out when I started talking about deliverability. The fact that you said it’s not only—like this does not only apply to Black Friday Cyber Monday, it’s kind of all year, but because there’s so much demand from everywhere and everyone over this time, it’s just essential to kind of really, really understand deliverability, what you’re doing, what you’ve done throughout the year, kind of where you are. So good call out, good call out there.

(00:06:16) Bailey Yeats: And that’s a great lead in to our tips for success. So Sara, if you want to start us off with some deliverability.

(00:06:24) Sara Green: Love it. Yeah. And just as we mentioned, you know, as we head into the high volume season of Black Friday Cyber Monday, you know, we want to make sure that all of your holiday campaigns launch smoothly. They drive the maximum, you know, results and engagement that you’re looking for. And just really to kind of help you navigate just your peak sending times without any issues whatsoever. Here’s just a few, you know, fun scheduling best practices and just system updates for us, just from a Revinate perspective, just to keep on your radar and then perfect. All right, so first and foremost, we always recommend you to kind of keep in the back of your head the three-day rule. So finalize and schedule early. We strongly recommend finalizing and scheduling your Black Friday Cyber Monday campaigns at least three days in advance. There’s peak sending times during this holiday weekend and really it just kind of comes down to the fact that there’s high network activity across the board. As Bailey mentioned, it’s not just hospitality, it’s everywhere. Everybody is sending Black Friday Cyber Monday emails. Check your emails over this weekend, you know it for a fact how many emails you’ll get over this weekend. So getting your campaigns set early ensures they’re locked in and then ready to go just seamlessly and then your audience is engaged at the very highest. So we are from the Revinate side. We’re temporarily suspending or disabling the Send Now from November 25th through December 2nd. Please note that the Send Now button will be—so you will see this in-app that from Wednesday, November 25 through Tuesday, December 1, that all campaigns must be scheduled at least one hour in advance. So you can send, you can kind of schedule them over these times, but you cannot select schedule now. You do have to schedule this at least one hour in advance. And then just really kind of like a FYI, stopping or modifying these scheduled campaigns, just if you had to stop something and then edit something last minute, you’ll just need to really make sure that you do this at least one hour before it’s scheduled to go out or, or we won’t be able to make any edits there.

(00:08:46) Bailey Yeats: Yeah. And something I just wanted, I’m not sure if everyone saw in the marketing stats from 2025 because there is a point here, you know, scheduling them at least three days in advance. Of course we want to make sure you do that so they’re prepared to go during peak times. But when we talk about peak times, the top day that everyone—hoteliers—were sending campaigns was exactly on Black Friday. So we’re not going to say not to send yours on Black Friday, but consider that their inboxes, your guests’ inboxes, are being bombarded the most on Black Friday. So let’s consider how you could maybe, you know, adjust around that.

(00:09:27) Sara Green: Agree. And you know, thanks for calling that out. I know when we were looking at this yesterday, I definitely wanted to recommend, you know, I think from a Revinate perspective, it’s always nice to, you know, help customers think outside the box. You know, I am asked all the time, like, what can we do to kind of stand out? I think everybody wants to know that, like, how can we get the most opens, get the most engagement, make the most money? Because at the end of the day, right, it’s a numbers game. And so start sending emails out early. Like, and I know we’re, we’re probably like well within that. Whenever this is, whenever you guys are watching this, start thinking about, okay, can we kind of send out a sneak peek for Black Friday Cyber Monday. We saw some really great results last year and the year before, but last year, more importantly, we saw some amazing results when folks are starting to kind of send out these Black Friday Cyber Monday emails at the beginning of November. Because as Bailey just said, you’re getting hundreds and hundreds of emails on Friday just from, from like a personal email box perspective. So just put yourself in your guests’ shoes. You’re going to be one of those emails. So how can you stand out to just be a little different from everybody? So, yeah, good call out and then so perfectly. So. Thank you, Bailey. With inbox competition at its highest during Black Friday, you know, how you can manage to send things out and get ahead of it really has a direct impact on your inbox placement. So our role is really to help you kind of plan ahead so you can, you know, get your message out there and avoid the noise of this peak weekend. So we obviously want to protect deliverability and sender reputation. Checking segment sizes, this always comes up. So take a look at those segment sizes. And if you’re, there’s, there’s a couple of different ways that you can approach this. You can, you know, create the, the big segment and then send this in batches, which I’d highly recommend. Or if you also, I mean, our biggest recommendation would then be if you wanted to kind of come up with a couple of different audiences, maybe tweak the content, tweak subject line, call to action per audience. So if it’s maybe one focusing on families, maybe one focusing on local backyard, past guest, or if you wanted to start using data in integrations, again, everybody in your database got in there some way, so how can you then retarget them? So then you’re creating smaller segments and then you’re not blasting it out to 100,000 people and then most likely not delivering to probably 80% of that send. So again, segment sizes, batching, overlap rules, you know, are you excluding previous recipients from receiving the next one? If you are using the smaller segments, definitely make sure that you’re keeping this in, in the back of your mind and then aligning automated campaigns with your Black Friday Cyber Monday offers. So don’t forget that your automated drip campaigns, you know, don’t forget about them, they’re still going out. So can you tweak those around the time just to, you know, make sure that you’re calling out and pushing this promotion with the automated campaigns as well? And then keeping in mind, I think so many of our customers, I’ve seen this, they forget that they’re adding the frequency caps. And then when they send out their Black Friday Cyber Monday campaigns, they’re like, why didn’t this deliver? Well, because you have it in two emails per week or per 14 days. And so they didn’t, they didn’t meet the requirements. So make sure within settings, within marketing that you are auditing and then checking your frequency caps. Did I miss anything, Bailey? Anything?

(00:13:18) Bailey Yeats: No. I think that that frequency cap one is so important because it’s something that I would neglect to think about because it is in your settings and you just set it up and you’re like, well, I’m, I’m good to go, I’m ready with whatever. And then Black Friday comes along and, you know, people might not be receiving your campaign. So great call out, Sara. Really, really.

(00:13:38) Sara Green: All right, so, yeah, we want to ramp up gradually. So we want to encourage everybody to increase sender frequency just in weeks leading up. So this is perfect timing to start doing that. Regardless of the fact if you are going to think about sending out maybe an early like kind of, hey, you guys are getting this early. Take a look at our promo for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Even if you didn’t want to go down that route, not a problem, really consider starting to send out these larger sends or sending just a bit more just to kind of warm everything up. Gradually ramping strengthens your sender reputation and reduces the sudden risk of volume spikes, which our email sending folks might think you are a spammer. So, yeah, go ahead and just ramp up gradually. And then again, we mentioned sending out early just to beat the inbox rush and it’s really, again, just think about it from your own personal email account on Black Friday, how many emails are you actually deleting because you’re just inundated? So sending out early just really means that there’s a higher chance that customers are actually going to open and see your email. Segmentation will always, always be our best practice. Utilizing the segment builder is key. And then within the segment builder, obviously guests can qualify for multiple segments. So then if you are building these smarter segments and then sending out, you know, typically or, you know, essentially like the same campaign, but maybe the hero pic is a little bit different because you’re wanting to maybe focus on families or focus on seasons or anything, really just make sure that you’re excluding folks who’ve received, you know, the previous campaign. You know, just so you’re kind of, you know, sending smart, sending smart and then monitoring that engagement. Obviously if performance dips, you know, it could just signal deliverability issues. So just reaching out to support and then if you’re doing this early, you’re going to get ahead of that before the Cyber Monday or any issues on the actual day. So it’s also just a really good way to check to see if you’re seeing maybe lower open rates, higher bounce rates, which typically kind of tell us that there is some sort of deliverability issue and then high risk segments. So discourage sending to low engagement or older contacts during this time because if they’re not opening it outside of Black Friday Cyber Monday, they’re most definitely not going to open this email as well. So really, really getting in and utilizing the engagement filters, I think we, or we are going to go over that. This is just essential. You know, you only want to send to folks who are engaged. Anything else, Bailey?

(00:16:12) Bailey Yeats: No, I think you covered it. I mean the reality is we’re trying to please the ESPs, the email service providers. That’s the people that we, we want to please, make sure that, that you’re doing the right things so that they let you into the inbox. And once you’re in the inbox, we’re going to talk about email design a little bit. But that is just as equally important because if you get in, it has to look good, but you got to get in first. So making sure that you have that, that really good sender reputation and your deliverability is high, that’s, that’s always really good. So next we’re going to talk a little bit about—they kind of already touched on this, but list hygiene. So we do have this golden rule that we, that we always recommend and always have, always will, that you never purchase a list. I mean you have to have permission to email these people that, you know, you can’t force someone to want to stay at your hotel. So you buying a list or something like that is never, is never good and it will get you into lots of trouble with, with compliance issues. So we, we always try and scare people away from that. And then of course, you know, you have the option to use a double opt-in whenever possible. So if that’s something that you want to do, we always encourage it, please, by all means, go for it. There are a couple of filters that we have on the product that will really help you to ensure that you’re talking to people who have been recently engaged, as Sara said. So you know the stay recency, some of the top performing campaigns that we found that we’re going to show you, they actually said, you know, they have to have stayed or you know, opened our emails or were engaged within the last two years. Well, you could even do a, sorry, that’s an engagement recency. You could even do a stay recency where you’re saying they’ve stayed within the last two years. Well, we know for sure that they had a good stay and to one-up that maybe you say they stayed within the last two years and on the Revinate survey that they took, they gave you a high NPS. Now we know that they were a happy guest that stayed. Right. And that’s even an even better way to get them in, excluding OTA domains. We all know that OTA domains expire after the guest has stayed. And so if you try to send to someone who has an OTA email address, the likelihood of that email bouncing is very, very high. And if your emails are bouncing over and over, over, that’s also going to get you into some email service provider jail. So make sure that you are excluding OTA domains and if you need help with any of that sort of, you know, those tasks. Where do I find this checkbox? How do I exclude the OTAs? You have access to the Revinate help desk if you’re a Revinate customer. And you’ll be able to just type that in and it will give you step-by-step instructions that can help support you. And then as Sara said, we don’t want to be sending to people with future reservations. If I send you an offer for 25% off your next stay and you’ve already booked your next stay, for sure you’re going to call me and say, you know, I no longer want that other reservation. I’d like this new reservation. So be careful with, with making sure you’ve checked that little box that we offer you to say no future reservations. So here is the in-product locations where you’ll find those features. So under the segment section there is the additional options where you can check that first box which is your, your recency for engagement, meaning you know, have they ever opened or maybe never received, meaning they’re new to your list in the last year or two years, that would be a really good option for you. And then the next one is a, an engagement filter. So have they opened a specific campaign? Right. So a really good example of this, Sara, that I love to see is people who opened or clicked on last year’s Black Friday campaign, maybe targeting them and your messaging can be based around we see that you loved what we did for Black Friday last year. It’s back, you know, some kind of language like that. And that’s going to help you with that filter to be able to segment down your guest database a little bit more. Okay. And then when it gets into actually building these segments—so those that are customers here, you know that this is what our segment tool looks like and it’s got a ton of different ways to build segments. Now one of the things that I used to talk about a lot while I was in training is you don’t have to recreate the wheel. Okay. So you could say to somebody, I have family travelers here and I have non-family travelers here. So people who have had guests with children on the reservation versus people who haven’t, you know, the kids, the family’s segment, they get kids eating ice cream by the pool, whereas the other segment gets, you know, people drinking daiquiris by the pool or whatever, whatever the opposite is. The message can be the same. You’re just flipping out the, the image, maybe a little bit of language. Sara, I’ll let you take this one. Since you’re working, you’re working directly with people building segments every day.

(00:21:26) Sara Green: No, and this is, I mean this is, I think what makes Revinate Core so powerful. You know, obviously we’ve got your PMS feeding into this. We’ve got contact lists and then other, other API integrations. So most recently data in and then obviously other partnership APIs that we can pull in. So it all pulls into this database. And I think so many folks are like, what do I do with it? Like, great, I have 60,000 people that I can email, but what do I do with it? And I think it’s just important to understand what each tab represents and how you can filter this to send the right email to the right person at the right time. So when we talk about driving real success during Black Friday Cyber Monday, the biggest mistake I think people make is really just looking at their database as just one, one large, one large audience. You know, you’re sending that one broad batch and blast email. So I said in the beginning of the year that 2026, our rule should be relevance over reach. And that is still the case. So we no longer—and Bailey, I always use this, you always say gone are the days of spray and pray. So you cannot send to your entire database anymore. So to stand out, you know, kind of cut through the noise and convert this high-value content that you really want folks to see and open, click and buy. You have to, I’m going to say it again, understand how to send the right email to the right person at the right time. And then again you’re like, how do I do that? So it’s all about understanding the data and how you can do that. So we’ve got demographics and value. So under demographics this is going to come from probably all sources. So who are we? Where are they located? Total, total nights, total stays, lifetime value. We’ve got stay patterns. So then if we wanted to take a look at like stay information, we’ve got booking source, booking channel, rate codes. Channel’s going to be big too, especially with OTAs. So if you wanted to even send something to folks who booked OTA versus folks who booked directly, you can do that as well. It’s all about how you’re kind of breaking down your, your database and then portfolio view. So if you are in a group account and you do have multi-property marketing, you can do the same thing from the group level too. You know, you can send out your email from the group account and from that group account you can choose whether you wanted to target guests from all properties or just maybe certain locations, like maybe coast versus mountains versus central, maybe international, maybe all-inclusive. Again, you can get very granular with these property groups as well. And then when you align all of the data with, you know, with these specific offers, engagement and conversion rates, they’ll skyrocket. So then you’re able to, you know, run your annual sends, you know, drive local market, drive that backyard market, and then even target loyalty programs and VIPs. So maybe guests who have stayed 10 or more times. And Bailey, I loved that you called out the engagement piece. While it’s not a part of the segment builder, you can also specifically target a send to people who have opened or even clicked on last year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday. You know, maybe giving them like the first chance to book an even higher discount or like a, you know, even better deal because they engaged last year. You know, it is obviously all about engagement. Perfect. And then, you know, the best part is that you don’t have to do this manually because when we receive a new reservation and somebody will qualify for, you know, a super specific segment that you’ve already created, they automatically, they update automatically. They’re dynamic. So once you build a segment, it stays dynamic, which is fantastic. You’re not having to go back, refresh, reattach. As new guests meet the qualifications that you’ve already built within each segment, they’re automatically added. So you build it once, you can leave. And if that segment’s attached to any campaigns, even automated, it will still, still update. And obviously the PMS integration is real time. So you know, as guests are making reservations, canceling or whatever the, whatever the case may be, they’re also updating within your segments as well. So really kind of combining smart segmentation, which will always be a best practice of Revinate, real-time PMS data or any other data in integration data, automated triggers and disciplined scheduling. You transition from just sending these simple holiday messages to running just the automated revenue engine this season that I think we all need to start seeing. So just making sure segments are clean and making sure that you have your plan. Like what are you going to be doing? You want to you know create all of these segments and as Bailey said, you know, update maybe the messaging just a bit to just call out that it is a family special or it is like a couple special or repeat visit, anything. So yeah. Anything else, Bailey?

(00:26:42) Bailey Yeats: No, I think that’s great. And like I, like I said at the beginning of that section, like, you don’t have to recreate the wheel. You know, like, don’t make it, don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. And just think about the low-hanging fruit: they booked last year, they are a family, they stayed in the past. You know, these are some really easy wins that you can really write some beautiful copy and some language to. So—

(00:27:07) Sara Green: Love it. And yeah, this I thought was, was great. So you know your lead nurture. How are you getting these leads? You know, obviously voice. So an unbooked phone lead, you have to keep in mind that unbooked phone leads, that is still gold. I mean these folks already called you and then, you know, same thing with folks coming to your website and signing up. You know, these folks came to your website, they signed up, they interacted, they wanted something at some time. So remember that unbooked leads, they’re not lost leads at all. Anyone who interacted during Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign and maybe didn’t finalize something, you’ll know the reason because it’s not booked. We save those not-booked reasons, you know, through, through our voice channel. It sets you up really for that post-holiday data activation that you can then follow up with and then maybe retarget for gosh, Q1, Q2 next year or even next Black Friday Cyber Monday. So with these automated campaigns already going out—and I know I kind of skipped over shopping cart abandonment—we have seen amazing conversion with, with an outbound call to these shopping cart abandonment leads. So after that first initial email goes out, there’s a follow-up. So in between day one and two an agent will reach out, follow up. And we’ve seen insane conversion from that approach. So obviously adding voice channel in there and just using those not-booked leads as well for future targeting is, we’ve seen huge success with.

(00:28:41) Bailey Yeats: Yeah, and I think that it’s really important, too, to look at the big picture here with, with Black Friday Cyber Monday. The reality is you’re going to get a lot of calls. You’re going to send a lot of emails, you’re going to get a lot of people, you know, entering your database through your, your shopping cart abandonment integration. And the reality is they’re not all going to book, right? But what you do have is this really beautiful data that you can then take forth and use in the future, like Sara said. So you’re building this database for yourself and you’re building these really nice rich guest profiles with information from guests that are, you know, like I said, they’re coming through on your, on your booking engine or better yet, they’re coming through on your phone system. And when they come through on your phone system, actually I’m just going to go ahead with the slide because we’re going to talk about that next when they come through on the phone system. This is something that I really had my eyes opened to when I, when I started digging into this because we actually ran a report this year, or we published a report this year. It was a secret shop call report. And what our team did is we went out and shopped luxury and upper-scale hotels that do not use, use a system like a premium system like reservation sales through Revinate. And what we found was that 92% of those calls, we called 308, we made 308 calls. And of the calls, 92% of them that went, they all went unbooked, did not ask for any information about the caller. So they hung up the phone without ever getting the caller’s details, meaning they were never able to actually then retarget that lead. So 92%, that’s huge, Sara.

(00:30:35) Sara Green: Huge. Huge.

(00:30:37) Bailey Yeats: And so if you think about it, you know, a lot of the time who’s answering those calls? If you don’t have a premium software, it’s your front desk agents. Well, let’s not forget that Black Friday is also Thanksgiving in the U.S. People are traveling, lobbies are busy, front desk agents are not answering phone calls. They’re not, they don’t have the time to ask for your information. And so making sure that you have, you know, a reservations team with trained agents to ask for that sort of data early on in the call is very, very important because like I said in the last slide, right, we, we don’t necessarily get to have everybody book, not everybody’s going to say yes, but you might have a really good chance of collecting data from all of those, those guests that do call and they’re high-intent callers, Sara. Right. Because most people are not just randomly picking up the phone and making a call, they’re doing their research first. And that is something that has shifted drastically with the, you know, AI-informed travelers. So most people, whether it be travel or however you are looking and shopping, you’re looking online first, right? You’re putting into your LLMs, your ChatGPT, and your client saying, this is where I want to go. This is what I want to do. Here’s who’s going to be traveling. And so by the time they make that phone call to your property, they don’t need you to tell them about what your square footage of your rooms are, because they probably know more about your hotel than you do. They’ve done their research. Right? And so now what we really want to encourage agents to be doing is to be selling the experience of staying at the hotel or at your property. Because that next little point about, you know, 56.6% of calls featured zero discovery questions. That’s almost half of the calls had no discovery questions. Right. Or more than half. And so that means that people were just picking up. Hello, my name is. Thanks for calling. No, we don’t have rooms, or yes, we do have rooms. What do you want for a rate? What do you want kind of room type do you want? And then they hang up. That’s it. They’re not asking them why they’re traveling, who they’re traveling with, and what experiences they want to have. And then the last one is, you know, callers don’t leave voicemails. They leave and they call your competitor. So they’re definitely not going to be waiting around on Black Friday for you to give them a call back. So, you know, making sure that you have a team that is prepared, prepared to handle that call surge because there will be a surge for Black Friday week and for many of the other seasons. Right. We know that in the summertime, there’s a huge surge of calls in North America. So making sure you have a team in place. And if you don’t have a team in place, consider using live agents like RezForce through Revinate. They can handle your calls for you. The RezForce agents, they learn about your property, they are trained, they’re skilled, and they have super high conversion rates. And, you know, the reality of having somebody to be able to answer your calls after your team has left for the day is really, really—we seen here that, you know, 26% of the calls we made actually went to a voicemail loop after hours. So if they had a team in place to cover those calls, that would, that would be really good. So with that, Sara, we are going to go into—and we did not make our 30 minutes. We are slightly over. But that’s okay. We’re going to go.

(00:34:06) Sara Green: I know. Now we have fun examples which everybody likes.

(00:34:09) Bailey Yeats: Right?

(00:34:09) Sara Green: We do too.

(00:34:09) Bailey Yeats: This is the exciting, really exciting stuff, right. So let’s kick it off with a few from last year. So this first one by the group, Benchmark Resorts and Hotels, just a really exceptional job of getting it done. Right. They’ve, they’ve got this cool GIF at the top. They’ve got a call-to-action button above the fold that is very straightforward. Book now, and then I love this countdown timer. Now you can see that it’s at zero because it has passed now. But it was counting down the time until their sale was over. So that is really cool. They had a huge open rate with this. Almost 70%, 69.4%. That’s big. And the click-through rate, way above what our average is. Their total revenue for portfolio wide was just over 406,000. So this is a really cool email and big congrats to this team for doing such an exceptional job. And you can see, Sara, that they did use the segmentation that we suggest. You know, they included people who opened their initial Black Friday email and people who had stayed within the last three years and did not have a coming stay.

(00:35:19) Sara Green: Love it.

(00:35:20) Bailey Yeats: The next one is Hammock Beach. Now you’ll see a trend from a lot of the successful campaigns from last year and that is that a lot of them use GIFs and a lot of them use countdown timers, and for good reason. They did really, really well. So Hammock Beach did a fantastic job with this one. Also engaging guests who have stayed within the last—or sorry, who have engaged with their emails within the last two years and had no upcoming stay. Big open rate. Nice click-through rate and some really good revenue generated. I like their banner. It’s my favorite part of where it’s flashing back and forth. Yeah, I think that’s really neat. And if you’re unsure how to add a GIF or a countdown timer into your campaigns and you are a Revinate customer, just make sure you go onto the help desk and you can literally just type in countdown timer. It’ll show you what to do. And then adding a GIF in, it will also give you some direction there. This one is HarbourView. Sara, I’ll let you take this one.

(00:36:18) Sara Green: Love it, love it. So HarbourView Inn as well. We have another GIF with the amazing overlay of 25% off. So they’ve targeted unbooked demand and it really kind of protected their, their list health and, you know, pushed for that direct booking revenue. And so instead of blasting everybody in their account, they only focused on folks without an upcoming stay. And as you can see, it generated 358 room nights, almost $130,000 in room, in room revenue without potentially discounting any reservations that they already had on the books. So obviously, you know, pushing that 25% off in the GIF up top, very clean. And then the storytelling behind it. So combining just the high-value perks of, you know, free valet parking. Who doesn’t want free valet parking? Curated visual grid of Charleston waterfront which makes me want to book immediately. Just really reminded everybody of why they should be rebooking or, you know, taking a look at going back to HarbourView.

(00:37:30) Bailey Yeats: Yeah, one thing I want to add to this one, sorry Sara. That I really like. You can’t really see, it’s quite small. But you’ll see, see it when we, when we send this out to you. It says book by and travel by. And so they had that little, they created that little extra urgency by saying like this is when you need to book it by and this is when you need to travel by. And what’s nice about the travel by part is that you know, you can, you can get people in before your high season starts again in the, in the spring and summer, maybe you have this booking window that you want. You kind of get to dictate when they get to have these deals, especially when they’re such a sweet deal like that.

(00:38:06) Sara Green: Love it, love it. And pretty much same thing, you know, with, with this campaign, 25% off again, no upcoming stay. And obviously with a 42 point, 48.2% open rate and generating, you know, 82,000 some dollars, they’ve really kind of positioned themselves, you know, for that prime inbox placement.

(00:38:33) Bailey Yeats: Yeah, I think the design on this one is really cool too. I really, I think it’s quite pretty. And you can do, you can do so much with the, with the composer. I just, I appreciate that so much.

(00:38:44) Sara Green: It’s simple too. I mean just simple, clear. And then I love again the countdown timer. You can’t, you can’t beat it. So this one AB testing drives massive open rates in crowded inboxes. So obviously you can within Revinate Marketing Pro, are able to then differentiate your test sizes for A/B testing and then also select if you wanted A/B testing to have a separate subject line or content. So totally up to you. Content can just be a picture. So if you wanted to play around even with a picture. Um, so Saddlebrook tested two subject lines. So they, they went with the subject line and I love that because even just something as simple as do you think we should use 25% off or should we use room starting at 400? What speaks better to my customer can just be as simple as that. And then as you can see with a 58.1% open rate and 5.5% click-through rate, I mean no wonder this was a success. They did suppress OTA email addresses which I would always, always, always recommend. And then they did target folks who have opened and engaged in the last two years which is always very smart as well as excluded future stays.

(00:40:06) Bailey Yeats: Yeah, great work to all, all these players from last year. Hey, yeah.

(00:40:13) Sara Green: And then here are a couple more. These are just, these are campaigns that we, that have done really well and we really liked how they used. So this is geotargeting and what they, what Alisal Ranch did is they reached locals within 120 miles of the property without an upcoming stay. And then there’s two resends. So the resend went to unopened and then the second send went to opened but not clicked which generated more than 180 room nights booked by their local guests. And I think like somewhere like Alisal who has such a loyal following and kind of, I’m sure just they’re a part of the community, you can do this. So when youre considering your initial sends, think of the resending strategy as well and timing of that and who you’re going to target, is it people who opened, people who didn’t open. So you can definitely come up with your own strategy around even engagement. And those resends, I’d never resend to the entire segment size again because I think that would maybe scream spamming. But with resends, think of how you can be strategic with you know, sending based on their engagement or lack thereof of the first.

(00:41:25) Bailey Yeats: Yeah.

(00:41:27) Sara Green: Ooh, love this one. So AutoCamp did such, I mean look at these stats. This is all I’m gonna say. This is portfolio wide and this campaign was fantastic because they, they sent it from their parent account. And then I mentioned a couple of slides ago that with a group marketing account you can then select if you wanted to send from the entire portfolio or just specify a couple of properties. And what AutoCamp did is they sent it to all properties but really had a push for cross-selling to sister properties. And this success was just unbelievable. So well done.

(00:42:01) Bailey Yeats: This, the design of this email, Sara, I just have to say, like, the more I look at this, the more, the more I love it so much. Like their subject line, you know, has a tree over a video game controller. Their code is nature. You know, they’ve got. Everything is so well aligned and you can look at the emojis that are flashing. It’s so well aligned. And I think that, you know, once you click into the book your stay button when they get there, then it’s also well aligned. I really think they did such an exceptional job with it.

(00:42:31) Sara Green: I agree, I agree.

(00:42:33) Bailey Yeats: So I think there’s a few more here, Sara, but everybody’s going to get access to this, so we’ll just take a quick look through. You can see some of the different designs from all over the world here and we’ll make sure to get this out to everybody who, who’s here and to anybody who’s watching the recording later on. But thank you to all of our amazing customers that let us share these inspirations. I think it’s, it’s always so exciting. I remember working in the industry and always asking for inspirations because, you know, it helps, it helps you be a better marketer in your role. For sure.

(00:43:09) Sara Green: It is. And I agree with that. And I think some folks might say, oh, you’re just going to copy. And it’s like, no, like, sometimes just seeing what others are doing will generate your own ideas. Because again, every hotel is different. You know, depending on where you’re located, country, continent, even in the same city, things are always different. Like, different community feels, different amenities, different everything. So I agree with that. Just seeing, seeing other inspirations is always, always helpful.

(00:43:39) Bailey Yeats: It’s inspiring. There you go. Okay, so lastly, we have some resources here for you. We did put together our—every year we put together a hub for you, a Black Friday Cyber Monday hub, and that also now includes Travel Tuesday. See how it’s expanding more and more and more every year. We do have this hub for you. Please go ahead and check out revinate.com/bfcm and you will see the hub there. This will eventually show up there as a recording as well, so you can access it from there too. And like I said, if there’s ever anything else that you need, do not hesitate to reach out to our help desk, out to our education team, our support team, your account manager. Make sure that you, you know, lean on the support that you have and help you get through this Black Friday Cyber Monday. Thank you so much for joining me, Sara. Thank you for being here, everybody. And good luck to you all. We wish you all the well vibes through the holiday season.

(00:44:40) Sara Green: Yes. Thank you, everybody.

(00:44:42) Bailey Yeats: Thanks, everyone.

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