FREE EBOOK The Complete Guide To Optimising Your Travel Email Marketing How To Grow Your Email List, Increase Engagement and Ensure Deliverability Helping travel companies generate quality leads online.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 2 About Dot Tourism Dot Tourism helps travel companies generate quality leads online. Our set of integrated services is designed to help you be found online and win more customers. Request a free assessment with Dot Tourism below and find out how we can transform your marketing. Strategic Planning Create brand personas and develop your content plan on how best to reach them. Campaign Development Powerful website and content creation for every stage of your customers travel buying cycle. Drive Traffic Promote your content via search engines and social networks to prove your expertise. Convert Leads Engage your visitors, build trust with your brand and capture more quality leads. Grow Sales Managing your leads with nurturing and scoring shortens your sales cycle. Marketing Analysis Immediately and accurately measure the ROI for all your marketing activity. Get Started Visit: /getstarted/
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 3 Contents Introduction... 4 How to Grow Your Email List... 5 How to Integrate Email into Inbound Marketing... 11 Deliverability: What is it and How to Get it... 14 5 Savvy Ways to Segment Marketing Emails... 18 Conclusion... 21
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 4 Chapter 1 Introduction Are You Using Email Marketing Effectively? No matter what happens in the world of digital communication, there is one constant email marketing. Contrary to annual predictions that email marketing has peaked, the numbers tell a different story. A fairly recent DMA study found that 76% of marketers use more email than they were three years ago. In terms of numerically-based predictions, Forrester Research forecasts that investment in email marketing will grow to $2 billion in 2014. Knowing that email marketing will not only continue but also increase, how can it be integrated into a successful inbound marketing strategy? In this ebook we will look at the reasons for incorporating email into your inbound marketing strategy and ways to make this integration most effective. Travel Insight A 2010 study of email marketing in the travel industry revealed that companies aren t making the most of this marketing medium. According to the report by StrongMail, 70% of travel email marketers were not making use of subscriber preferences or behaviors to target offers in pre and post-stay emails. This e-book will outline some travel industry specific examples you can apply to your own campaigns to make them work more effectively.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 5 Chapter 2 How to Grow Your Email List Who you send to is of key importance Who you send to is more important than what you send. It doesn t matter if your list is 1,000 or 100,000; your email marketing is only as good as the quality of your recipient list. The reality is that we live in a world where people change jobs, get married and change names, where companies go out of business, merge and relocate, and where interests and needs change. That means that lists have natural decay. On average, marketing lists have a tendency to expire at a rate of 25% a year. So if you aren t working at cleaning your list and pursuing new prospects to join your lists, chances are the effectiveness of your email marketing will only decline. We have found that marketers grow their lists in two ways, the bad way and the good.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 6 Chapter 2 How to Grow Your Email List Growing Your Email List The Bad Way Take care buying third-party email lists While we can t say you won t build your list if you buy third-party email lists, we can say that to do so comes with a number of risks. People aren t happy when they receive emails with irrelevant ads or marketing messages from companies they have never interacted with. This sort of intrusion can create annoyance and you have to have a remarkably good offering to convert any leads. You don t ever want to negatively affect your deliverability rate. We ll cover this more later on but using a third party list can do more damage in deliverability than good if you get yourself a reputation for sending unsolicited email. Even if you do go ahead with a brought in list, you are likely to be disappointed with the results. Not only are click-through rates dramatically worse using third party lists rather than opt-in lists, but even when they convert, the quality of leads are also worse. Buying and using a third party list can undercut your company s reputation. You want to attract leads through useful, valuable content rather than pushing your message out and harassing prospective customers with ads or direct mail they never asked for. If you do use a third-party list make sure it is of a known, high quality with proven success for other purchasers. WARNING! Buying third-party lists can be bad for your email health O O O O You Can Alienate Recipients You Could Get Blacklisted Or Marked For Spam Bought Recipients Aren t As Engaged As Opt-In Recipients It can harm your company s reputation
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 7 Chapter 2 How to Grow Your Email List Growing Your Email List The Good Way If you provide value and relevance to your prospects, they will eventually convert into quality leads. The best way we know how to attract them is through inbound marketing. If you want to start generating leads through inbound marketing, launch a blog and fill it with good, useful, search-friendly content. Don t Hide Your Subscribe Box A good blog and website should act like a magnet for potential subscribers. When they get to your blog, don t assume they can intuitively find their way around. If you make it hard for them to find your subscribe box, odds are they won t sign up. To make sure your subscriber box is optimally placed try A/B testing its placement on your site. A good place to start is putting your email submission field in the top of your blog and remove any other distractions. Consider Partnerships Non-competing companies often share the same market audience. So figure out which non-competing company wants to reach the same audience as you and ask them to join you in a joint marketing campaign. Both companies will reach out to their own lists and during the promotion participants will be encouraged to opt-in to hear more from each company. The end result is that both companies will end up with new and engaged subscribers. For example, you own a luxury boutique hotel in the South of France. You are aware of a company who do high-end car hire, providing customers with luxury sports car hire. You could run a joint campaign to promote a competition consisting of an accommodation package and car hire, jointly promoting it through your usual marketing channels and sharing the resulting database.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 8 Offer an Incentive Sometimes people might need a carrot to encourage them to sign up to your mailing list. This could be in the form of a discount code or perhaps a piece of free premium content. For example, an e-book with top sights and attractions in your local area. Don t Forget To Capture Email Addresses Make sure you include a sign up option during your sales process to add new customers to your mailing list. Don t neglect customers purchasing through other means and be sure to capture email addresses at every point of contact you have, for example, at trade shows or during telephone enquiries. Just make sure you let people know how you intend to use their data and give them the opportunity to opt out. Travel Insight The travel industry is one especially suited to brand advocacy. Most people love to talk about their holidays and share their pictures with friends. Make sure you enlist your existing customers help in growing your database! A popular tactic is to run a photography competition asking your current customers to submit their best holiday photos and then run a vote for the best one. Capture their friends email address as part of your voting mechanism. Alternatively, why not give them a great offer to share via email with friends and family once they book. CHECK LIST Make sure you employ all these tactics to grow your email database P P P P Ensure your subscribe box is easily seen Make a list of potential, non-competitive partners Offer an incentive to encourage sign ups Make sure you capture email at every point of contact
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 9 Chapter 2 How to Grow Your Email List How To Reduce Unsubscribes Growing your email list is a lot like two steps forward and one step back. You are going to get unsubscribes. What s important is to try to minimize them. Here are a few tips on how to reduce your unsubscribe rate: Optimise The Unsubscribe Process The top two reasons email users unsubscribe are: 1. Too many emails (69%) 2. Content that is no longer relevant (56%) So take that knowledge and use it to your advantage. During the unsubscribe process, give them the option to receive fewer emails or emails about specific topics, you might manage to keep them on your database. They still might want to unsubscribe but use an exit survey to find out why. This is just an optional couple of questions and comment box to find out what it is that has prompted them to request removal from your email marketing. Offer them the opportunity to follow and connect via social channels instead. Conduct A Frequency Study You can sit back and wait for them to unsubscribe or you can be proactive. Survey your subscribers about how often they d like to hear from you. With that information, test what the survey results tell you with a higher and lower frequency rate. Then, analyse which frequency results in more conversions and fewer unsubscribes. If you are looking for benchmarks, according to Marketing Sherpa, the average unsubscribe rate for more than 80% of the companies they surveyed was less than three percent. If your unsubscribe rate is higher than this, you are most likely doing something wrong.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 10 Focus On Targeting Irrelevance will kill your lists. According to Marketing Sherpa s Wisdom Report in 2011, 40% of subscribers mark emails as spam because the communication was irrelevant. In the same report, those who send emails targeted through segmentation to specific audiences get 50% more click-throughs than those who don t. Analyze the data on how your subscribers behave and focus on the relevance of your emails to your segmented lists. Travel Insight It is vital that travel companies pay real heed to making sure their email communications are relevant. It is a competitive sector for email marketing and if your message doesn t hit home then you can be sure somebody else s will. For the travel industry, where you are selling a destination, make sure you pay heed to what is in the news. If a destination is being portrayed negatively then make sure you aren t making a suggestion to visit. If there is civil unrest with protests or riots are brewing your customers won t thank you for sending them an email suggesting they travel there at this point in time. Equally, if a destination is basking in being the focus of a good news story then don t hesitate to jump on the band wagon, albeit in an original way. For example, during a large sporting event such as the Olympics, if you have a travel product that is relevant to the destination then make sure you push it. Create some unique content such as a free guide to travelling between Olympic event locations. CHECKLIST Halt list loss and reduce your unsubscibe rate P P P Optimise your unsubscrible process Conduct a frequency study Focus on targeting and make your content highly relevant
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 11 Chapter 3 How to Integrate Email into Inbound Marketing Connect Your Marketing Activities Digital marketers use many different tactics to market their products search, social media, advertising to name a few. Email should not be viewed as a separate entity. It is most effective when it s integrated with the rest of your marketing. Email & Social Media Integration Numbers rarely lie. In a recent study from Aberdeen Research, 65% of the top 20% of B2B marketers who use social media for lead generation choose to integrate email with social media. The nice thing is that you can mimic the success of this group more easily than you think. Here are some tactics to get you started. Add Social Media Sharing Buttons To Your Emails If you are interested in extending the reach of your email and expand the visibility of your content and brand, try adding social media sharing and follow buttons to your emails. It s simple, easy to do and effective. Send Email Based On Social Media Insights If you use integrated marketing analytics you can determine which leads or subscribers have mentioned you on Twitter. These are highly engaged leads and deserve targeted sends. You can also see what content is popular through your social channels and use that information to pack your email full of the sort of information that you know your audience like and are happy to interact with. Grow Your Email List Through Social Media We ve found that those who engage with you on social media are excellent leads. So give them a reason to subscribe to your email list. Offer them a tantalizing call-to-action on your Facebook page and make it clear why signing up for an email subscription will benefit them.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 12 Email & Search Integration You know that link at the top of many emails that offers people a chance to view the email on their web browser? Not only does this help people who have trouble viewing the email in their inbox, it can also help with your search optimization. When you host an html version of your email on the web, you are creating an archive of that email that is accessible to search engines. Because of that, make sure your email content follows SEO best practices such as: Use your best keywords Anchor text when constructing the body of the message Ensure all images have alt-tags Include social media sharing buttons to stretch the content further. Integrated Analytics The online behavior of your customers and prospects is seamless. They go from social media to a website to opening an email to clicking through to a landing page to a download and back to Facebook. In today s world of analytics, you need to be able to see the integrated connection between all of these activities, and relying on individual analytics for each channel won t help. You need a multichannel view that helps you find out information such as: The number of people that clicked through but did not convert The number of people who converted on your website that came from social media, and, of those, the number that actually opened your last email campaign Which tactics result in more leads; PPC, organic search, email or social. One of the real benefits to integrated analytics reports is that they help you get more targeted in your email sends. With integrated marketing analytics, you can segment your mailing list and send communications based on the lead s history of downloads and pages viewed. Travel Insight Using integrated analytics can give you the opportunity to spot targeting mistakes you might be making in your email marketing. For example, you send out an email, choose your best resort picture of a couple enjoying a romantic dinner overlooking the beach and write some copy about exploring the quiet local villages. You are delighted to see that it gets lots of click throughs. Has the email been a success? Using integrated analytics you discover that none of those clicks converted. You investigate and see that the main resort picture on the website shows a pool full of happy children and the copy talks about family friendly activities. Despite the high click through rate your email is appealing to a different set of holiday makers and needs to point to a page on your website that will appeal to a matching audience.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 13 Integration With Mobile More and more people open their emails through their mobile devices, infact, that number can be as high as 50%. And once they ve opened your email on their mobile, chances are they won t reopen it on their computer. So what do you need to do to make your email strategy mobile? Start by testing your email templates to see how they look in different mobile devices. Make sure your call-to-action buttons and links can be easily clicked by readers using touch screens. Offer both plain text and HTML versions of your email. Since your images may not display, pay attention to the descriptions of your alt text under the images. Remember your email is just the beginning of the process. Don t forget to optimise for mobile the landing pages and forms your email links to. CHECKLIST Connect all your marketing activity for an inbound approach P P P P Integrate your social channels and email activity Include a search optimised version of your email online Use integrated analytics to really understand performance Make sure your email is mobile friendly
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 14 Chapter 4 Deliverability: What It Is and How To Get It Are Your Emails Being Received? Just because you sent it doesn t mean it got there. Approximately 17% of all emails don t arrive. You can blame it on a number of factors spam traps, defunct emails, firewalls to name a few. If you want to keep your deliverability rates as high as possible, you need to 1. Keep your email lists clean 2. Ensure you ve properly warmed up your IP when starting with a new email service provider 3. Follow best inbound marketing practices for email This chapter looks at how you can maximise the deliverability of your emails.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 15 Chapter 4 Deliverability: What It Is and How To Get It Understanding Your Sender Score Eighty-three percent of the time you can blame non-delivery to your sender reputation, which is defined by the Sender Score. What Is A Sender Score? A free service of return path, the Sender Score (https://www.senderscore.org/) algorithm rates the reputation of every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale from 0-100. It gathers data from more than 60 million mailboxes at big ISP. It looks at where people unsubscribe or report spam from certain email senders. It then assigns a Sender Score based on that monitoring. Like your credit report, your sender score changes. How it changes all depends on the way you send your emails and how people respond to your emails. If you constantly send them information they don t want, they will unsubscribe and that will impact your score. It s important to keep track of your Sender Score since that score often dictates how mail servers will deal with your emails. You want your Sender Score to get as close to 100 as possible. The closer it is to zero, the harder it will be for you to get your emails into someone s inbox. Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average. Your score ranks your IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking. If you use an email provider to send emails for you, it s your provider s IP address that you need to worry about, not your company s. Ask them what their Sender Score is, and ideally make sure it is above 90%. There are many email networks and ISPs that don t query your Sender Score. That should not influence your wanting to have a high Sender Score since as a free email sender reputation tool, it helps you be aware of and have the opportunity to fix any deliverability problems.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 16 Chapter 4 Deliverability: What It Is and How To Get It Do You Have A Good List So how do you know if your list is good or not? Use this flowchart to get an idea of where you stand. START Does Everybody On This List Have A Prior Relationship With Your Business? NO If the answer is no, either get rid of the list or all the people you don t have a relationship with. Without a prior relationship they won t be expecting your email. For them it will be spam and many of them will mark it as such. That, in turn, will damage your Sender Score, which will make delivery of your email harder. YES Good job. It is important that they know who you are. Do You Have An Unsubscribe List? YES NO If the answer is no, then you might be breaking the law when you send. Every company has people who have unsubscribed to their emails. These people do not want to see your emails again, and you need to respect that. Without an unsubscribe list you are also upping the odds of people reporting your email as spam. Spot on, you shouldn t be missing one. Did You Purchase, Rent, Or Lease The List From A Third Party? NO Your list is looking in good shape so far! Will The People On The List Be Expecting (Not Be Surprised) By Your Email? YES YES NO If the answer is yes, then realize that when you send emails to this list you are increasing the chances of getting flagged for spam. These lists come from many places. The better ones had people give their address to somebody else, but they are expecting email from them, not you. The worst ones harvest addresses from directories and those people on that list are definitely not expecting any type of email. YES Excellent! Almost there. Have You Emailed These Contacts Within The Last 12 Months? NO Hopefully the answer is yes. If it s not then your need to build your list using inbound marketing and names that come from opt-ins. If the answer is yes, and you have reached this section of the flow chart then your list is a good one to get started with. You you are ready to create some awesome emails filled with highly useful content that will increase your conversion rates. If the answer is no, then odds are recipients will have forgotten about you and will be surprised to get your email, but not in a good way. You are not some long lost relative or friend. When they get your email, even if they recognize your company name, they might mark it as spam.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 17 Chapter 4 Deliverability: What It Is and How To Get It What To Know About Server IP Addresses A server IP address is a series of numbers that uniquely identify the server that s sending your emails, e.g. 172.16.254.1 Every email campaign that is sent out is associated with an IP address. Your sender reputation is associated with that given IP address. Knowing this, you can either opt to have a dedicated IP address for your email sends or use a shared IP address. Here is some information that will help you make that decision. Dedicated IP A dedicated IP is just that an address that is completely unique to you. Because it s only yours, you have the sole power to influence its reputation. That s a big advantage, but there is a cost associated with that. Dedicated IPs tend to be very expensive. Furthermore, if you don t send enough emails, your IP won t even register on the Sender Score scale. While having an unknown sender score isn t necessarily a bad thing, but it is still better to have a high score registered. Shared IP When you send your emails through a provider you are sending through a Shared IP. It s called shared because it uses one IP address to send emails for multiple companies. More affordable than dedicated ones, they also have the scale of sends to actually register a sender score. The downside is that, because you are sharing, make sure you ask your email service provider about their highest and lowest sender scores on record. Warming Up Your IP Address It s an odd thought, the idea of warming up a set of numbers. But there is a reason why you want to slowly build up your total sends over time, and it has to do with spammers. Spammers move around, and quickly. They use one IP address, send out millions of emails, shut it down before it gets blacklisted, then onto the next cold IP address. Because of this, companies set up automatic blocks to limit or reject large-scale email sends coming from brand new IP addresses. So when you start with a new IP address, warm up your IP by slowly building up your total sends over time. Luckily, you only need to warm up once. After you have been sending emails from your IP address for a while, you are ready to go.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 18 Chapter 5 Five Savvy Ways to Segement Marketing Emails Make your emails Relevant For your marketing to succeed, it needs to be relevant. Sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many companies take their relevancy for granted, and as a result their marketing efforts suffer. The reason why on average 40% of email subscribers mark emails as spam, is not because they did not know who sent it, but because what was sent was irrelevant to their needs. Targeting through segmentation is one way to make your emails more relevant. Here are five great ways to create more tailored and effective emails. 1. Geographic Segmentation If you are going to segment geographically, think about how the buyer s location influences his or her purchasing decision. For example, if you are promoting a weekend break package you are going to be targeting people who live around 3 to 4 hours travel time away, while those who live further away are probably a good bet to target for longer stays. Think about the different information people need. If you are targeting international visitors, they will want to know about visas, currency, vaccination, electrical equipment etc. Domestic travellers won t be interested in this sort of information. 2. Customer Segmentation Think about the different types of customer you have. They have different goals and different interests. Targeting these specific interests can increase your click-through rates. For example, you will want to present different content to a business traveller than to a family taking a short break.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 19 3. Content Interests Determining who your customers are is often influenced by their past. So use your analytics to determine what interests your leads. Look at the content they have viewed or downloaded and segment your lists accordingly. A simple way to start is to pull a list of people who have downloaded a brochure or other marketing offers. Then using that content as an indicator of what interests them, create a targeted email or lead nurturing campaign that addresses that interest. 4. Behavior-Based Segmentation Some leads are further along the sales cycles than others, and you can often determine the level of interest they have about your products based on their activity on your website. For example, the way you would communicate with someone who has only seen a few pages on your site is different from someone who has downloaded several brochures and visited 50 pages. Your analytics should help you distinguish the browsing behavior of different website visitors. Use this information to make your communications more relevant to how far along the recipient is in his or her purchasing decision. 5. Segmentation By Brand Advocates Those who advocate your brand want to feel the love. They want to believe you understand them. So who are they? Frequent buyers Social media fans Customers who have recommended you to others Non-customers who have advocated for you online These brand advocates need to be carefully nurtured. Your emails need to acknowledge them. For example, you can do this by sending thank-yous, advanced notice on new services or products, requests for feedback, and rewards. If you recognize them and show how you appreciate them, they will continue to spread the word. When it comes to segmentation and personalisation, look at what differentiates your subscribers and leads and see how you can address those needs or interests. You can start small - even the slightest segmentation can increase your email success rates. The five suggestions above are just a starting point. As you become more involved with segmentation, you will discover more ways to target the individual characteristics of your audience.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 20 Travel Insight One of the great things about email marketing for the travel industry is that there are so many ways to segment and personalise your email marketing. Here are a few of our industry specific favourites. 1. Type of holiday If you know that a customer took a break during the school holidays with young children, it is reasonable to assume they might plan the same sort of holiday for the following year. Use this information to your advantage. For example if they took a family holiday to a campsite in Italy, target them with a camping holiday in Spain for the same time the following year. 2. Up-sell additional products If you have customers who have booked a holiday then you know when and where they are going. Use this information to upsell other products you might offer. So, for example if you are a luxury hotel chain and they are heading to your property in Buenos Aires email them with a discount extend your stay offer at a sister property near the St. Ignacio Falls. Include information about transfers between the two to make it an irresistible offer. Other popular up-sells include transfers. So a few weeks before travel send an email offering trouble free transfers. A few days before, why not contact them to see if they would like an in-room welcome package. 3. Post holiday offers Your customers may have finished their trip but they are still excellent leads. Don t forget to prompt them to leave you a review, especially if your website has its own review section. Happy customers can become powerful brand advocates as discussed above. Ask them to share their holiday pictures with you. Hopefully they had a great time, in which case they may be a great target for a repeat booking. Send them an offer with 10% off the same or similar trip the following year. 4. Holiday habits The majority of people will only book one long holiday each year but are likely to supplement it with short trips. If somebody has booked a tour or two week break with you then why not target them with some short weekend away offers. For example, as a UK tour operator, somebody has booked a two week holiday with you to the Maldives in November. You could target them in June with a message saying You still have six months until your big holiday so why not escape to Europe for a weekend while you wait...
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 21 Chapter 6 Conclusion Making Your Email Marketing Work Harder Email marketing should work to support your lead generation and conversion efforts. It should increase your sales cost effectively. In this ebook we elaborated on key ways that you can accomplish this by: Growing your email list and reducing unsubscribes. Integrating your email with the rest of your marketing efforts. Improving your deliverability and ensuring that your subscribers receive your communication. Segmentation and personalisation. These are foundational principles that will have a positive effect on your email marketing. Apply this information to your email marketing and watch those leads convert into sales.
The Complete Guide to Optimising Travel Email Marketing For Conversions Page 22 Thank You Thank you for reading this e-book. We hope you found it useful. We have plenty of other great resources and a growing library of e-books written especially for travel marketing professionals. Keep in touch Please connect with us on Social Media Download Resources Visit: http:///marketing-resources/ Read Our Blog Visit: http:///blog/ Next Steps: Request your free assessment Visit: /getstarted/ A free inbound marketing assessment from one of our experts will look at your current marketing and provide actionable advice on how you can reach your goals. Get Started