9 Conditional Content Email Examples for Recovering Abandoned Bookings

January 14, 2023

Introduction

If you’re spending too much time crafting personalized emails for your guests, you’re going to love the power of conditional content email blocks. This powerful tool allows you to display different content in your emails based on certain conditions, such as the recipient’s past behavior or preferences.

With conditional content, you can send highly tailored and relevant messages to your guests without having to spend hours manually creating individual emails. But the benefits of conditional content go beyond just saving you time.

As we know, booking hesitation is high in the hospitality industry, with conversion rates hovering just below 2%. By using conditional content in your booking abandonment emails, you can target specific guests with tailored offers and incentives that are designed to entice them to complete their bookings.

Conditional content blocks allow for an automation to step in and increase email personalization, helping you achieve higher booking completion rates, lower booking abandonment, and ultimately boost your hotel’s revenue.

In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of conditional content and provide some examples of how it can be used in booking abandonment emails. Whether you’re new to conditional content or looking for some fresh ideas, this post has you covered.

How Conditional Content Email Blocks Work in RezRecover

Conditional content blocks for emails are a way of displaying different content to the recipient of an email depending on certain conditions. Using RezRecover’s Booking Engine Data Sync (BEDS) allows you to collect information about your recipients’ interests and booking data and determine which content block to display in the email.

Using this feature, you can easily personalize your messaging for each email recipient by leveraging information like booking details, reservation history and more. For example, if a recipient has previously abandoned a booking for a garden-view suite, you could offer them a discounted room upgrade to a city or ocean view suite to entice travelers to book.

BEDS automatically pulls data from your booking engine in real-time, providing the following information:

Property Name
Room Image
Booking Total
Arrival Date
Departure Date
Number of Nights
Special Offers

When to Use Conditional Content

Hotel marketers should use conditional content blocks in their emails when they want to display different content to the recipient based on certain conditions, such as the dates of the recipient’s booking. This can help to increase the relevance and personalization of your emails, ultimately leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

For example, if you have seasonal banners that you would like to automatically display in your emails, you can use conditional content blocks to match the dates of the recipient’s booking with the appropriate banner. This means that the recipient would see a banner for a winter promotion if they abandoned a stay during the winter season, and a banner for a summer promotion if they abandoned a stay during the summer season.

Using conditional content blocks in this way ensures that your emails are always as relevant as possible, and can help to increase the likelihood that the recipient will complete their booking. It can also save your marketing team time and effort, as they do not have to manually create separate emails for each season.

Some other ways we’ve seen brands implement conditional content include:

Offering coupons after high-value abandoned bookings;
Offering upgrades based on room types abandoned;
Updating logos and branding to reflect properties abandoned for multi-brand groups (e.g., Marriott/SPG).

How to Set-Up Conditional Content Blocks

You must have a RezRecover account in order to use conditional content blocks. There are 2 ways to pass the conditions and the content to CartStack:

The CartStack code can scrape your booking page or URL for the data items as the customer navigates the checkout. (This would require the data that’s being passed to be stored on a unique ID in the HTML on your page or present in the URL.)
You can pass us the data items via our API when you decide the conditions are met. This will not require you to be on a CartStack Pro plan and our API docs are here.

To Get started, email us at support@cartstack.com with the conditions you would like to use. We’ll be able to further guide you on the next steps from there and once the conditions have been set, a video conference will need to be scheduled with support to review the new email designs!

Conditional Content Email Examples for Abandoned Booking Recovery

1. Seasonal Banners

A conditional content block can be used to insert seasonal banners into booking recovery emails in order to make them more engaging and relevant to the recipient. For example, during the holiday season, your hotel might use a conditional content block to automatically insert a banner featuring festive imagery or a message about holiday promotions into booking recovery emails.

This can help to create a sense of excitement and encourage your guests to complete their booking and take advantage of the promotions. Similarly, during the Black Friday shopping event, your hotel can use a conditional content block to insert a banner promoting special deals and discounts into their booking recovery emails. This can help to increase the appeal of the emails and encourage more people to complete their bookings.

2. Promotions & Offers Based on Room Type Abandoned

A conditional content block can be used to pull information about the type of room abandoned by a hotel guest and use that information to tailor an email to their specific needs. For example, if a guest abandons a booking for a family suite, the email could include information about group activities and discounts for families.

This personalized information could help encourage the guest to complete their booking and choose the family suite over other options. The email could also include links to more information about the activities and discounts, allowing the guest to easily learn more and take advantage of the offers.

3. Promotions & Offers Based on Abandoned Booking Total

In the case of a hotel reservation, a conditional content block could be used to create promotions for users based on the total cost of their booking.

For example, if a user’s booking is worth more than $2000, the promotion could offer a 20% discount on the total cost of their reservation. If the booking is worth less than $2000, the promotion could offer a 10% discount instead.

This allows your hotel to offer different promotions to users based on the value of their bookings, potentially encouraging them to book more expensive rooms.

4. Upgrades Based on Season / Date Range Abandoned

You can also use conditional content formatting in your abandoned booking emails to customize email content based on the season of the abandoned booking. This is done by using BEDS data to customize your emails based on the date range of the booking.

For example, an email for an abandoned summer booking could include information about summer activities and events at the hotel, as well as special summer deals. By using this technique, you can provide a personalized and relevant experience for travelers, which can encourage them to book.

Offering deals based on the season and seasonal events can also incentivize travelers to book by showing them they are getting a special offer that is only available at that time. This can create a sense of urgency and encourage travelers to book sooner.

5. Remove Offers & Promotions for Popular Dates (Busy Season) or Rooms (Popular Room)

Conditional content is not only useful if you want to offer a discount to encourage abandoners to complete their bookings, but also want to remove any discount codes from emails during periods when rooms are likely to sell out at full price.

For example, you could use a conditional content block to automatically include a discount code in booking recovery emails unless the booking date falls within a date range or season that is known to sell out at full price. In this case, the conditional content block would automatically exclude the discount code from the email, allowing your hotel to maximize its revenue while still offering promotions to encourage bookings.

6. Branded Emails Based on Property Abandoned

For large hotel chains, conditional content blocks can be particularly useful. If you have nine different brands under one umbrella brand name, then you could easily swap out branding in your recovery campaign based on which property was abandoned.

When someone abandons their cart on one of these properties, you can use conditional content blocks to replace the parent company logo and colors with that of whichever property was abandoned. This removes any confusion that might arise should guests receive an email branded with the logo and colors of another associated brand.

7. Update Language of Copy Based on GeoLocation

If your hotel is looking to appeal to international travelers, you can add conditional content blocks that update the language of the copy to match the geolocation of the abandoner.

By using a conditional content block, you can automatically detect the country that the abandoner is visiting from and update the language of the email copy to match. This can help to make the emails more relevant and engaging to the recipient, increasing the chances that they will complete their booking.

8. Present High-Value Abandoned Bookings with Financing Options

Conditional content blocks can also be used to display financing information to high-value booking abandoners. If you do not already offer financing to your guest, you can do so through the main provider for hotel financing – Uplift.

In order to remove barriers to booking and make it easier for guests to complete their reservations, you should consider including financing information in every booking recovery email you send out. By using a conditional content block, you can automatically display this information to high-value abandoners, allowing them to easily learn more about financing options and complete their bookings.

9. Offer a Guarantee for Rainy-Season Abandoners

Concern for bad weather is a common reason travelers may abandon their bookings or wait to complete a booking on a later date. However, conditional content blocks can be used to insert rainy-day guarantees from a partner service like Sensible Weather.

Consider your guests are seeking a sunny escape from the winter conditions back home. If there is any chance of poor weather at your destination, they may exit the booking process in order to research a competitor in a location with better weather.

Including a weather guarantee from Sensible Weather is insurance that, if it rains out a day or two of their stay, they will get the money back that they spent on those dates. This can be a helpful addition to a recovery campaign, as it addresses the concern of bad weather and may encourage the customer to come back and complete their booking.

Conclusion

The use of conditional content can greatly benefit hotel marketers seeking to decrease booking abandonment. By personalizing emails and showing relevant offers to each individual customer, hotels can increase their conversion rates and reduce the time and effort involved in sending emails. If you’re a hotel marketer and want to see the benefits of conditional content for yourself, sign up for a free trial of RezRecover today to easily implement and manage your conditional content strategy.We hope that this blog post has given you some inspiration for how to use conditional content in your own campaigns! We’re always happy to answer any questions that come up along the way, so feel free to contact us at any time if we can help out in any way.