Email Marketing Success in Travel & Tourism: 5 High-Impact Strategies

In the ever-evolving landscape of travel and tourism destination marketing, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. These five key facets of email marketing will empower you to connect with your audience on a deeper level, drive engagement, and ultimately inspire travelers to choose your destination. From personalization and visual content to mobile optimization, destination website linking policies, and dynamic content, this guide is your ticket to crafting compelling email campaigns that leave a lasting impression and drive engagement. Let's dive into these five high-impact tips that will elevate your destination email marketing game.

Personalization

Personalization stands as a top trend within email marketing, especially within the dynamic realm of travel and tourism. Forward-thinking destination marketing organizations (DMOs) are harnessing customer data insights, often drawn from industry leaders like Epsilon and Zartico, to create emails that are finely tuned to individual travel inclinations, experiential interests, and spending habits. These bespoke emails go beyond the generic to offer personalized travel recommendations, tailored destination insights, thoughtfully crafted themed itineraries, and exclusive offers that align seamlessly with prevailing seasonal travel trends.

High Five Tourism Tip: Adding a contact's first and last name to their email address is a simple way to personalize communication. According to Campaign Monitor, adding the recipient's first name to the subject line can result in a 26% increase in open rates.

Visual Content

High-quality visual content plays a pivotal role in effectively promoting small to medium-sized destinations. Travel enthusiasts crave a sneak peek into what awaits them on their journeys. To capture their imagination and captivate their interest, it is imperative to craft visually stunning emails featuring meticulously curated images that bring to life the unique attributes, accommodations, and experiences of your destination.

High Five Tourism Tip: It’s all about selecting a visually stunning featured image for your newsletter. The art of choosing the perfect featured image for your newsletter lies in finding that delicate balance. It's about selecting a visually striking image that not only captures your readers' attention with a "wow" moment but also paints an authentic picture of what they can anticipate in the destination.

Mobile Optimization

In today's mobile-driven landscape, ensuring that your travel and tourism email marketing is mobile-friendly is imperative. Travelers increasingly turn to their smartphones and tablets to browse and book their business and leisure trips. Thus, it's vital to have responsive email designs that render beautifully on these devices. In fact, statistics from Emailmonday's "Top 10 email clients" (July 2018) reveal that a significant 59% of email opens took place on mobile devices, with 15% on desktop and 28% on webmail clients. This underscores the necessity of optimizing your email campaigns for mobile engagement.

High Five Tourism Tip: When optimizing for mobile devices, the length of your emails plays a crucial role. The longer a reader has to scroll, the greater the risk of losing their engagement and having them click the delete button. Therefore, it's prudent to approach your email strategy as a teaser, offering bite-sized, compelling content with strategically placed hyperlinks. This encourages the reader to explore further, seeking more in-depth, content-specific information on your website, thus enhancing the overall user experience.

Destination Website Linking Policy

Web traffic and pageviews continue to stand as primary metrics that destination marketing organizations rely upon to assess their marketing effectiveness. Incorporating a well-defined destination website linking policy into your comprehensive content development strategy is a strategic move. This policy serves to maintain reader engagement while directing them seamlessly to your destination’s official website, blog, and social media platforms. In every piece of content featured in your newsletter, it's paramount to establish connections with pertinent information available on the organization's owned platforms. Additionally, for events, prioritize listing them on the events calendar as a first step and then provide direct links for swift access to event details. This approach ensures a cohesive and effective digital marketing strategy.

High Five Tourism Tip: If a member or partner expresses curiosity about why their content, highlighting their business or event, isn't directly linked to their website, you can clarify that this decision is part of the destination marketing organization's amplification strategy. This strategy strategically utilizes the organization's broad audience and array of content platforms to enhance visibility for the partner. By aggregating content within the organization's channels, it maximizes exposure and outreach, ultimately benefiting all partners involved.

Dynamic Content

Dynamic content allows for adaptive storytelling, making it possible to tailor your messaging to the specific interests and behaviors of your audience. Imagine showcasing dynamically updated details such as current flight prices, hotel availability, exclusive seasonal offers, upcoming local events, and even real-time weather updates. This not only adds a touch of immediacy but also ensures that your email content remains highly relevant to the recipient's travel plans.

High Five Tourism Tip: Tailoring your event promotions to suit your audience can yield more effective results. For subscribers who primarily reside in the local vicinity, consider highlighting smaller, niche events with a shorter promotional window. Conversely, if your subscribers are scattered farther afield, particularly those living 50 miles or more from the destination, focusing on larger, multi-day, and unique events becomes a valuable strategy. These events should be prominently featured in your emails at least four weeks or more in advance, providing potential travelers with the necessary lead time to plan their trips effectively.

High Five Tourism Solutions has a wealth of experience in crafting email marketing strategies that work. These strategies are not just theories; they are tried-and-tested methods that have consistently delivered results. If you're a destination marketing organization (DMO), travel and tourism professional, or a destination marketer looking to transform your email marketing efforts, we're here to help.