The travel and tourism industry was hit worst by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sector is still in recovery mode, but the uncertainty of new variants is taking the wind out of its sails. Now, businesses in this industry are faced with the challenge of marketing to clients who are increasingly less confident about making plans to travel. For this reason, it’s crucial for businesses to invest their marketing budgets into tactics with high returns. 

In this article, we’ll show you how to use email marketing to get an impressive return on investment from your campaigns. 

How to Promote Travel and Tourism With Email Marketing

Potential customers are ready to travel again, but the uncertainty engulfing the sector could be holding them back from booking. Besides promoting your brand, use email as a tool to inform and educate travelers. Doing so will go a long way in helping dissipate the uncertainty. Here’s how:

1. Leverage Segmentation and Personalization

When it comes to preferences, every tourist is different. For this reason, using email blasts or mass emails will only take you so far when it comes to winning customers back. To be successful, you have to send personalized messages to each customer.  

Personalization begins with segmentation. You have a rich set of data in your system to help you segment your customers. For example, by using a customer’s previous trip bookings, you can segment them into different vacationing groups or categories, such as:

• Relaxation
• Active/sports 
• Business 
• Cruise 
• Culture 

If you’re new to the game and haven’t gathered that information yet, or you have new customers entering the system, all you have to do is send an email survey after purchase, asking them their reason for traveling. 

Beyond the trip types, you could also segment customers based on the countries they prefer to visit and the type of offer they like (early bird or last-minute deals). Doing so allows you to send hyper-personalized messages with details about travel and accommodation packages that meet each customer’s needs and preferences.

2. Create Demand and Capture Interest

Segmentation helps you understand the attributes and demographics of each type of vacationer. If someone continuously books more relaxing vacations, like beach stays or all-inclusive trips, you can send them deals for spa packages or happy hours in the area they’re traveling to. By matching these details with customers’ preferences, you can generate demand, capture interest, and offer personalized service they won’t soon forget. 

This approach can also boost your partnerships. You can reach out to local businesses in the areas your customers are booking and offer to promote them in exchange for a cut of the profits.  

3. Use Automated Workflows

Capturing interest is one thing; converting it to a holiday booking is another. Generally, you have to engage the interested traveler over several emails to convert their interest to a sale. You have to keep in touch, sending vital information about a travel package, to excite them and convince them to commit. 

The engagement doesn’t end with a booking. You can keep in touch with your customer with helpful content such as weather information and restaurant recommendations to help them be best prepared for their travel plans. These engagements happen over different types of emails, including: 

• Welcome emails
• Milestone emails
• Invitations to connect
• Newsletters
• Informational emails
• Confirmation emails
• Thank you emails 
• Reminder emails

Imagine if you had 1,000 customers to engage; sending them these emails manually would be an arduous task. Not to mention it would be extremely difficult to decide who to send which type of email to and when. This is where email marketing automation comes in. 

For example, you could create a nurture campaign where new subscribers get a personalized welcome email. Then, a few days later, the system could send them an invitation to engage with you on social media channels. Alternatively, you could create a series to update customers on protocol changes or informational content about their destination.

Ali Fuller states, “Building email programs through automation not only saves time for the email marketer but also creates opportunities for more conversions when we’re not actively sending single-email broadcasts.” 

Marketing automation does all the heavy lifting around communication, freeing up your time to focus on other aspects of your travel agency. 

Email Marketing to Your Advantage

Using email marketing to promote your travel and tourism agency is effective and cost-efficient, making it crucial to the success of your business. However, you won’t see the results you’re after if you aren’t segmenting your list and building email sequences with relevant messaging. 

With reliable email marketing software, like Benchmark Email, you can get more time back to focus on the other duties your travel agency requires (all whilst sending campaigns aimed at transforming customer interest into bookings). Sign up for our free plan today and learn how we can help boost your bookings with our robust feature set and easy-to-use email builder.