Email marketing plays an important role at Airbnb. We are sending bilion of emails at scale.
Here is a central location to find everything you need to understand the strategy and tools Airbnb has used over the years.
Interviews
Overall, we always look at 2 KPIs: quality score 1 — (Unsubscribes / Responders) to measure engagement quality with the email and search with dates as it shows a clear intention for a user who’s interested to travel.
Email is the channel that helps us facilitate the conversation between the hosts and the guests who would like to travel. With transactional email we notify both hosts and guests when they have a new message and bring them back to the platform.
Email Monday interview of George DiGuido, former head of Email marketing in 2013
Airbnb created a tool that allowed subscribers to send holiday greetings to hosts they had stayed with or guests they had accommodated in 2012. The campaign did not have a sales-oriented call-to-action, but it was one of the best campaigns of the year in terms of revenue.
Email Marketing: Airbnb nets 600 bookings with non-promotional email in 2013
Email Review
Airbnb does a great job of keeping these emails very pointed so that the user is never uncertain what they are being called on to do.
At the end of the year, Airbnb sends a summary roundup email, allowing you to reminisce about your past trips. Their use of dynamic content for cities and nights makes it feel personalized, relevant, and resets the funnel back to “inspire,” encouraging users to think about where they want to go next.
Litmus Review How Airbnb Uses Email to Build Brand Trust in 2016
This is no shot in the dark. They didn’t send it to their entire list. They sent it to me and only me as a result of my behavior. Now that is personalization.
They want to make sure they get to me before I go and book a hotel, for example. So it’s a really powerful email. They just do so many things right in terms of copywriting, design, responsiveness. It’s really – they do a great job with it.
Hats off to Airbnb for their welcome email, I can’t wait to see what they’ll send to my inbox next!
Video presentation
User Engagement at Airbnb, by Rebecca Rosenfelt in 2016
Airbnb Growth PM Rebecca Rosenfelt – Productizing Email for Explosive Growth in 2016
Other
Airbnb Experimenting Reporting Framework also used for email experiments
Visualize datasets, and create interactive dashboards with Superset
All Airbnb emails on Really good emails
We have solved problems you are probably facing currently, so if you have a more specific question, feel free to get in touch with me.