The travel industry is one of the best places to fully make the most of email marketing campaigns. Offering aspirational content on travel is a far stretch from trying to interest people in fixing pipes, so you can really get creative with your promotional emails.
However, creativity can only get you so far. Without a solid, data-driven email marketing strategy, you'll have a bunch of emails that are never to be seen by anyone, much less clicked on. By directing your creativity through digital marketing tools, you can streamline your internal processes and make your customer journey not just easy, but a pleasure.
That's why we'll be running through 7 tips for email marketing for travel agents that will help you build strong relationships and increase conversion rates.
1. CRM: The bedrock of your email marketing
The first strategy on our list is to acquire and populate a super customer relationship management (CRM) system. This is a database where you store all the valuable information and records of all your clients, from first and last names to email addresses, telephone numbers, and social media handles.
Every email marketing strategy for travel businesses will advise you to populate your CRM with as much detail as possible. You can use sign-up forms on your website and social media posts to get the basics and use follow-up forms to get a deeper understanding of their interests. If you find yourself struggling for customers, incentivize leads with special offers to join your newsletter.
Once you've got your leads, all their interactions will be saved within the system. This means that every holiday booked, every link clicked, and every interaction contributes to creating a clearer picture of every client in this email marketing software.
Email marketing in the travel companies also relies heavily on segregating your customer database into smaller demographics. Travel promotional email examples for couples over 60 may focus more on cruises and romantic getaways, while those for young singles may feature content on beach breaks and party cities. Each lead can be put into multiple different lists based on their dream destinations, nationality, age bracket, and much more.
One of our top tips for travel email marketing campaigns is to sort your customers as they enter your database, rather than manually sorting them into groups at a later date. With your CRM set up correctly, all incoming leads can be automatically split into relevant mailing lists so you can concentrate on creating those enticing messages and create segmented campaigns.
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2. Send personalized messages as a part of email campaigns
One of the top email marketing strategies for travel agencies is to add a personal touch to your messages. It is well known that emails that are directed at specific targets, rather than thrown out to everybody on your list, perform far better. Furthermore, if your users feel your content isn't relevant to them, they're likely to see emails as junk and unsubscribe.
Here are a few easy ways to create personalized emails:
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Include first name in subject lines and email body
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Sending emails based on interest
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Waking up dormant leads with special offers.
So now, you can create four to five variations on a monthly newsletter, with some content overlapping and other sections specific to each mailing list. Include a personalization tag with each recipient's name, and you're ready to launch your emails.
As they're personalized messages, avoid overly corporate speech. In a travel business email to a client, an example subject could be "My top tips for travel in September". Creating and curating a connection with your potential customers builds trust over time and sets you apart from every other company's efforts. Therefore, send quality, personalized content often, and you'll keep the fire burning.
But it's not quite that easy! Even the best email marketing strategies for travel agencies forget this one simple trick: Make sure your emails comply with all local privacy legislation. Rules change depending on the country, but respecting unsubscriptions and relying only on information voluntarily provided are two big areas to work on.
Compliance with personalization will also help your emails arrive safely at their destination (no pun intended). If you tick all the right boxes, you'll avoid landing in the spam folder and being missed altogether.
3. Use automations to trigger marketing emails
While your newsletters should include fresh, exciting content every month, an effective email marketing strategy in the travel company also requires standardized emails that work by themselves behind the scenes so you can spend more time on the creative side.
Emails that are ideal for automation include:
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Automated welcome emails for new subscribers
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Thank you emails
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Confirmations
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Reminders (re-engagement email)
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Alerts
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Happy birthday emails
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Drip-fed promotional email campaigns
Trigger emails are a lifesaver for busy people. You simply set up an event as your trigger, and when it is met, your CRM sends out a pre-written personalized email.
For example, you can drip-feed reminders of a campaign every two days. Set them up in a customer journey workflow to relieve stress on your team and keep your customers engaged.
Confirmation emails are among the most common examples of triggered travel agency emails. You only need a brief message, such as "Hi, Sarah, here is your confirmation for booking number 0800896." All of the variable details, such as the name and booking number, are automatically lifted from your CRM to populate your email and before she knows it, Sarah has got her confirmation.
These days, the general public expects trigger emails as an assurance that everything is going to plan. Think of it like a physical ticket. Once your customer has their confirmation, they can rest easy until their holiday approaches. Such confirmations are an excellent opportunity to collect email addresses.
But triggers can come in all shapes and sizes. You can monitor user interaction with emails and give them a nudge if you feel you're losing them. Automate a message to go out after six months of no clicks and offer them a special discount to convince them to get back in the game.
4. Channel your email marketing campaigns
Content is one of the most important email marketing strategies for a travel agency as it provides that inspirational backdrop that sparks customers into action. Email marketing for tourism relies more heavily than others on solid content as the costs involved in travel are much higher than clothes, for example.
The kind of travel promotions content marketing that has been proven to work includes:
Rather than tour operators email ideas that fill a message with an entire article, consider writing a teaser that links to a longer article on your blog, videos and photo albums on social media or any of your landing pages. This is ideal for newsletters where you want to include multiple articles or interesting features but don't want to send a 5000-word email.
The copy within your email should, therefore, be short and snappy. Travel agency email examples that link to longer content could include lines like "What's New York been hiding all these years? Find out here." These encourage subscribers to interact further since it is seen as valuable content.
However, it's really hard to get people to act without giving them a call to action (CTA). Your CTA can direct your users to anything you want, whether it's a piece of content or a downloadable PDF that requires users to fill in a survey on their interests. CTAs are usually placed in subject lines to instantly attract attention.
With a powerful CRM combined with email marketing automation, you can gather data on how well your emails are performing and run A/B tests to improve your approach.
5. Go above and beyond slick text in the email marketing campaigns
Sure, your copy should be attractive, informal, and inspiring, but you can still do much better. Travel email marketing campaigns can take advantage of mouth-watering imagery and videos. With no words at all, you can create a sense of adventure and get people desperate for paradise beach travel ideas.
More than any other industry, images and videos of a travel destination can attract the eye. This can be your secret weapon in grabbing your reader's attention and getting bookings.
Just like with other areas of email marketing strategies for travel agencies, you can run tests on your emails to find out which images gain clicks. Sure, email marketers could spend time working on A/B tests, but why not gauge what works by checking out your Instagram page?
Make sure any images you embed are of the highest quality — anything less gives a "cheap" feeling. However, embedded videos can often slow your downloading speed, so it's best to link to social media and leave a thumbnail as a teaser. A snippet of text underneath gives context and meaning to your content, and you're ready to go.
But it's not just enticing destinations you should be decorating your emails with. Like in any other industry, travel email marketing campaigns can benefit hugely from branding that is clear, but that doesn't distract from the message.
Design all your emails to follow the same theme — whether they're automated trigger emails or personal correspondence with your loyal customers. It's all part of building trust with your target audience and is one of the easiest email tips for travel industry we can offer.
6. Make your emails mobile-friendly
If you haven't heard of mobile responsiveness yet, you must have been living under a rock (or on a desert island). You've probably already been working on a mobile responsive website and booking process, but designing emails for smartphones needs the same treatment.
It's one of the most important email marketing strategies for travel agencies, as a majority of users in the travel industry are turning to their mobile devices for browsing, travel bookings, and much more. For example, when you're coming up to the security desk at an airport, the last thing you want is a confirmation email that won't load properly.
Your first strategy should, therefore, be to make all your emails compatible with mobile devices.
A mobile-first mentality pushes you to craft dynamic personalized emails that increase your click-through-rate, rather than pedestrian, text-filled explanations. Make sure to analyze how fast your animations and images load, and remember that not all phones respond the same.
But it's not just the design of standard email marketing campaigns. Your CRM will tell you when your customers are traveling (hint: it's between the start date and end date of their journey).
This is a perfect opportunity to send some tailored messages during their trip as a part of your email strategy. For example, you could fire over an email with codes for city tours or authentic experiences. They simply have to scan the code and get an unexpected but very pleasant surprise.
7. Get started with the right tools!
Great! You've got a bunch of email campaign strategies for travel agencies, but how are you going to put them into practice?
Sure, you could download a CRM to store your contacts and an email designer to go with your website builder, communications center, and everything else you need. But there's a better way!
With a must-have tool like Bitrix24, you get everything you need to put your email marketing efforts with everything on one platform. No more switching back and forth, hoping your fragile integrations will hold strong. With everything fully connected on an easy-to-use interface, you can take the stress out of your tech solutions.
Your powerful CRM and analytics do all the hard work behind the scenes so your customers can enjoy their trip with no worries. As you monitor their behavior, you can modify what you offer to provide the best experience possible.
Get started with email templates and customize them to fit your brand and offering. As time goes on, you'll create a backlog of your very own templates that are ready to go at a moment's notice (when automations aren't taking care of it, of course!)
Now you might be wondering what coding languages you need to know to get the best results. Answer? None. You can do absolutely everything using a drag-and-drop tool for total ease of use.
The best part is you can get started today for free!
Powerful Email Marketing Software
Replace all your current SaaS solutions with all in one CRM and marketing automation software. Run marketing campaigns inside your Bitrix24 CRM - email marketing, ad targeting, and more.
Register Today
FAQ
What are travel email examples?
Typical travel agency email to client examples are:
What are email ideas for travel brands?
Some ideas that support email marketing strategies for travel agencies include:
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Do your market research
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Give your customers what they love
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Suggest destinations based on data
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Add testimonials from happy customers
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Offer incentives to slow movers
What are the best email marketing strategies for travel agencies?
The best email tips for travel agencies include:
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Collate data on consumer behavior
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Personalize your communications
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Automate emails for fast response times
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Offer engaging guides and tips — not just sales
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Take advantage of engaging images
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Design mobile-first emails
