kamran sharief Email marketing should be a major component in your overall marketing mix. People often underestimate its power, but it’s challenging to get results from email marketing. In this blog, you’ll learn how to walk the fine, delicate line of email marketing to get the best results for your travel agency.
Believe it or not, email marketing can make all the difference, making your travel agency the go-to place for thousands of travelers. But it’s not going to be a walk in the park. In fact, email marketing is one of the most challenging ways to advertise your business. Why? Because all you have is one shot at convincing the reader to try out your services. If you don’t make a good first impression, you’re out. That’s why crafting the perfect email can take a lot of thought and time. Here are the top ways you can make your emails stand out and get leads.
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Visuals are Key
Humans are highly visual creatures. Would you care to read a block of 2 paragraphs or see a pamphlet describing the same information as the paragraphs? It’s obviously the latter. Visuals make your marketing material more interactive and easy to digest. Therefore, you must use images, colors, and different fonts in your email to make it easy to read.
We recommend inserting a digital poster in your email that tells the reader everything you want to convey to them. Running a discount on your tours? Make a poster about it, use big colorful fonts that go with your brand identity, and don’t forget to insert pictures or graphics in your posters. You can use an online email design tool like PosterMyWall to craft the perfect poster in a few clicks!
Great Emails have great subject lines
As mentioned earlier, you only have one chance to convince the reader to open your email, let alone try out your travel services. The first thing anyone would see is the subject line of your email. If it doesn’t stand out or pique the reader’s curiosity, they won’t feel any remorse tossing it into their trash folder.
Instead of saying, “Book your Turkey tour at a 30% discount,” write something like “Turkey tour too heavy for your wallet? Not anymore!” The latter immediately stands out and targets a customer pain point — affordability. Identifying customer pain points is a great way to get the customer on your side and slowly lead them into a purchase.
Just make sure your subject line is relevant to the email content. You should never mislead someone into opening an email. They may open it but will block you soon after and never trust you again. Running an email marketing campaign has many cogs, which can get beginner marketers confused. In that case, you should use a trusted email marketing platform to make it easy. All you need to do is craft your email and upload the subscriber list, and then leave the rest to the platform.
Include CTA Buttons
Most email marketers forget to include call-to-action (CTA) buttons. CTAs are your best chance to redirect the customer to the point of sale, your website. More importantly, a CTA gives your potential customers clear directives on what they have to do from here. You can’t just tell them to try out your tours and leave them to figure out how.
Instead, insert a CTA button like “Book your next tour with us at a 30% discount” with a hyperlink to that specific landing page on your website. Don’t just redirect them to your website homepage and leave them to figure out the rest on their own — they won’t. The aim here is to bring the point of sale to them and remove all the effort they’d have to put in so that they’re a click away from trying you out.
Market Segmentation is Key
No two businesses (even in the same industry) can have the same target audience. You might be catering to families wanting to tour a certain popular destination like Greece or Turkey. Another travel agency may be dealing with people who want to tour around the US or a different country. They may also be targeting a different age group or doing group tours of 20-30 people.
Even your target audience will have people from different age groups and preferences of where they want to tour next. To target all these different people, you can’t just rely on a single email. This is where market segmentation comes in. It means identifying the different shades of your audience and crafting an email tailored to their interests, preferences, and pain points. If you send one email to everyone, you’ll be catering to just one segment and neglecting all the rest.
Remember the 80-20 Rule
You may think your sales email should be focused on marketing your services, but that’s the wrong approach. According to the 80-20 rule, 80% of your email should inform and educate the customer. This is the part where you identify pain points and relate with them to gain their trust. After all, you can’t make a sale if you haven’t developed an iota of trust first.
Only 20% of your email content should be geared toward advertising your services in a way that offers a solution to the pain points you brought up earlier. This is for a good reason — people don’t appreciate being overly salesy. Instead, they want their company to be on their side instead of just looking out for their sales. The 80-20 rule lets you develop trust with your audience, which doesn’t only guarantee a sale but also makes them repeat customers.
A few Parting Words
Since every travel agency is different and has a unique target audience, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that would work for everyone. You must experiment with multiple email marketing strategies to see which ones work best for you. The only way you can gauge that is by A/B testing each one and seeing the results for yourself.