Optimising your survey invitation emails

Getting more guests to open and click on your Survey Invitation emails

Getting more opens and clicks on your survey invite email is one of the ways you can increase your response rate and subsequently get more feedback from your guests. If you have a TripAdvisor integration in place, this could even result in more reviews being published to TripAdvisor.  

The type of guests that visit your property, the time of the year and simply the way your emails are worded can all affect your open and click rate. Some of it is out of your control, but there are a few tried and tested tactics for increasing open and click rates:

Getting more guests to open your emails 

First of all, you need to make sure that your invites are being sent to the right email addresses – take a look at this handy poster for tips. If possible, you should tell your guests in person that you will be asking for their feedback, perhaps mention it as they are checking out.

Once a guest has left, the next thing they see from you regarding feedback will probably be the subject line of your Survey Invitation email. The subject line can often mean the difference between your guest opening your feedback request email or not. All accounts are set up with a standard subject line that includes the name of your property: 

Standard Subject Line: Langdon Hotel Guest Feedback
(For the purpose of this article, we will use Langdon Hotel as an example)

This subject line is fine, but a more impactful and engaging subject line definitely encourages guests to click on your email more often. Find something that suits the tone of your brand and is relatable to your guests. 

Here are some examples:

• How was your stay at Langdon Hotel?
• Got feedback about Langdon Hotel? We'd love to hear it!
• Tell us how your visit to Langdon Hotel was?
• Did you enjoy your stay at Langdon Hotel?

Get more people to click on the link to your survey

Know your guest’s name 

Try to ensure that your guests’ first names are captured on your Property Management System or your Guest Uploads whenever possible, and use them in the greeting of your email. 

If no name has been captured, your emails automatically start with “Dear Guest”. However, when guests' names are captured correctly and stored in the GuestRevu system, emails are addressed to them by name, allowing you to continue to connect with your guests on a more personal level.

Use an embedded question 

An embedded question is when you add one of the questions from your survey (usually the word of mouth/NPS score) right into the body of the email invitation that is sent to guests (see the image below). This interactive element can help increase the response rate to your surveys, and it makes your email look way more interesting! Find out more about embedded questions here.

Customise the body of your email 

Our standard template does the trick, but customising the email so that it fits with the tone of your brand and is in keeping with the experience your guest has just had at your hotel will always work better when it comes to enticing guests to actually click on a link and leave their honest feedback. 

You can also use this part of your email to encourage guests to leave a TripAdvisor review, see examples below for suggestions.

Standard Template: 

Thank you for staying with us at Langdon Hotel – we hope that you had a great time!

Please let us know what you thought of your experience by filling out this quick online survey.

We want to make sure all of our guests have the best experience possible, and your honest feedback helps us do this, so we really do appreciate it.

Get more Tripadvisor reviews: 

We just wanted to say thank you very much for staying with us at Langdon Hotel. We really hope that you enjoyed your time with us.

We'd love to hear what you thought of our service and facilities. It's insights like yours that enable us to improve our offering by helping us to better understand how well we did, or didn't, do in any particular area. Our brief customer feedback survey also enables you to quickly and easily complete a TripAdvisor review.

Please click here to complete our brief guest feedback survey.

We hope you had a good stay with us and that we'll see you again soon.

Something more on-brand:

We just wanted to say thank you for choosing Langdon Hotel for your much deserved break, we really hope you loved staying here as much as we loved having you.

To always ensure that our service and facilities maintain our high standard, your feedback is invaluable and we would really appreciate your thoughts on your stay. If you like, you can also quickly and easily submit a review to TripAdvisor directly from the survey.

Please click here to complete our brief guest feedback survey.

We do hope to see you again soon and look forward to receiving your feedback.

Sign off sincerely

After your guest has opened their email and read the content, they will get to your sign off. All accounts sign off with a standard signature:

Warm regards,

Management and Staff

Langdon Hotel

We highly recommend changing this to the general manager or owner's name. This, once again, makes the experience a far more personal one for your guest, and gives the impression that their feedback will reach a real person with the necessary influence to make any changes the guest suggests. A better signature would read, for example:

Yours Sincerely,

John Doe

General Manager, Langdon Hotel

Speak your guest’s language

Depending on what information about your guest is stored in GuestRevu, you may be able to automatically send guests appropriate translations of your emails. Read this article to find out more about language options in GuestRevu, or contact the support team if you would like to implement this.

How to make these changes

You can click here to learn how to change your email templates and the wording on your own. If you would prefer some assistance, you can log a support ticket and our support team is happy to help. 

Please feel free to use any of these suggestions in your own emails