Boost your Travel Industry Revenue with Emails
Travel and tourism is among the fastest-growing sectors as bookings hit around $1.6 trillion in 2017 for the US. The reason behind this surge is its strong global economy. Every year, numerous new travelers make it to the global traveler pool from emerging as well as developed markets. To stand strong in such an uber-competitive industry, it is imperative to work on your marketing strategy and stand out.
If you are an email marketer, you can rejoice (a bit) because email remains the most powerful channel when it comes to ROI.
Here are some email marketing tips that would help you boost your travel industry revenue.
Segment your list
Build your email list organically with a double opt-in method and once you have a quality list of subscribers, you should delve deeper into it. Try to know the audience and segment the list based on demographics, destinations previously visited, and places they look forward to visiting. This will help you tighten up your travel email marketing and send more relevant emails.
Personalize your emails
Travel companies should personalize the emails based on the interests expressed by the subscriber. You can incorporate subject line personalization so that the subscriber gets more inclined on hearing from you. Personalized emails obviously give a human touch to emails and pique the reader’s attention instantly.
Here is an example by Travelocity. Notice the use of emoji in the subject line and the informative pre-header text saying ‘View your recommendations’.
Moreover, you can also implement the principles of artificial intelligence and create more engaging emails for the subscriber.
Take a look at the example by Airbnb triggered with the help of AI-powered tools.
Create a sense of urgency with limited-time offers
A new kind of instinct detected in people these days is the ‘Fear of Missing Out’, also known as FOMO. This inner prompting compels the subscriber to make spontaneous purchases. You can include a countdown in the emails to create a sense of urgency and promote your limited-time offer.
Butlin’s sends out a beautiful email to highlight their discount offer valid for a short period of time. They have made the perfect use of countdown and mentioned the reasons to book early. In addition, they have also claimed ‘lowest price guarantee’ and offered to refund the difference if the traveler finds a cheaper option before they arrive at the destination.
Now, that is something interesting!
Notice the footer whether they ask the subscribers to add their email address to the address book and get whitelisted. That’s one of the best practices for email marketing.
Share an alternative means of communication
Many users might not be comfortable with communicating through emails as it could be time-consuming. To cater to such subscribers, you should offer an alternative means of communication like contact number or links to social media profiles.
Carnival Cruise Line provides the contact number and also allows the prospect to contact a travel agent in addition to the social media profiles. They have correctly incorporated social media and email in their email marketing strategy.
Design responsive emails
Most of your subscribers are accessing their emails through mobile devices. Therefore, your emails ought to be responsive to ensure flawless rendering on small screens. If your emails do not render well and the subscriber is unable to read the message, the conversion rate will be hampered and so will be your ROI. Create 600px wide emails so that the subscriber will be able to see your email as expected, regardless of the device and screen size.
Add rich media to your emails
Visual marketing has gained huge momentum in the past few years. Rich media ties well with travel industry emails as it creates a visual impact and engages the subscriber better. Rich media mainly includes static images, GIFs, cinemagraphs, and videos.
It encourages more subscribers to interact with your emails by making them more interesting to read. Moreover, they effectively convey the purpose of the email.
Here are a few examples.
Carnival Cruise Line includes a pretty header image to launch their brand-new ship named Mardi Gras. The image is supported with a brief copy that reflects a tone of excitement, followed by relevant CTA. The animated shine effect adds to the email’s visual attractiveness.
Eurostar sends out a GIF that emulates happiness and promotes their discount offer. However, they have missed out on proper segmentation and the email would not be comprehendible for readers in the US or Asian countries.
Hawaiian Airlines goes a step ahead and tries cinemagraphs in their email. It emits strong vibes of relaxation by the blue-green shades and the image of passengers laying back on the flight seats. Have a look.
Leverage email marketing during holiday season
Summer break and Christmas holidays are the best times to leverage email marketing if you are in travel industry. You are likely to have better open rates, click-through rates, and conversions if you do it right during this period.
See how Carnival Cruise Line promotes their winter break offers. The header image, with the red Santa hats, gives the Christmassy feel, thereby enticing the reader to click through and convert.
Focus on content as much as design
Although travel emails are all about inspiring wanderlust in the subscriber with tempting visuals, the importance of content cannot be overlooked. Journy makes the best use of content and visuals in their emails, as presented in the example below.
Automate your email campaigns
Automation plays a very important role if you want your email marketing strategy to succeed. Starting from the welcome emails to re-engagement emails, plan an automation strategy so that you can send triggered emails to all your subscribers based on their activity on your website.
Always test your emails
Before hitting the send button, you should make sure that you test the emails for rendering, personalization, and any other errors. Other than that, A/B test your email campaigns to understand what is working and what is not, for your email campaigns. Create two or more variants of the same email campaign and send it to a significant number of subscribers. Based on the metrics, you can judge what kind of emails resonate the best with your subscriber. This will eventually help you create better emails that convert.
Final Thoughts
Travel industry is growing at an unimaginable pace and if you want to stay ahead in competition, you should execute email marketing right away as it is simple, affordable, and effective.
Do let us know how you are using email marketing for your travel business. We would love to hear from you in the comments below.
Author Bio:
Chris Donald is the Director of InboxGroup, A professional email marketing agency that specializes in providing advanced email marketing solutions from production to deployment. He has worked directly with Fortune 500 companies, retail giants, nonprofits, SMBs and government bodies in all facets of their email marketing services and marketing automation programs since almost 2 decades. He enjoys sharing his distinctive thoughts and insights into email marketing best practices at his blog.
About the Author
Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.
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