Why Every Travel Agency Should Be Doing Email Marketing
Ryan McElroy
The ultimate game-changer for travel agencies has been and still is email marketing.
For all the years that I have been doing consultations with travel agencies who have been in business for years, there is always one thing that surprises me. They will tell me that they already have a good following or customer base, and they want to grow their company by tapping into digital marketing. Yet these agencies do not use email marketing; they don’t have an email newsletter.
You cannot afford to be operating in 2020 and expect to progress into 2021 without using email marketing to send out newsletters at least twice monthly.
Think about it, if you should check your email right now, do you know what you would find? You will find at least one email from any e-commerce or any business you’ve recently made a purchase from or made some form of contact with online.
Why aren’t you doing the same?
The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is a principle that businesses, especially those using digital marketing, should apply to their operations. In the travel industry, nothing remains static. We function so fluidly that our consumers naturally have FOMO.
Ask yourself this question, have I, a travel agent, been making use of my audience’s fear of missing out?
Here is my answer, as well as my solution for you. You need to start sending your travel marketing emails, and you can never stop. Your newsletter needs to be consistent, timely, crafted with your audience’s preferences in mind, and it should also bring value to and be worth the read to whoever receives it.
Ensure that your content makes it worth opening and reading your newsletter. Use your newsletters as opportunities to make your audience better travellers, keep your clients in the know with supplier, regulation and destination updates. Remember that you are the expert here, and your audience is looking to you for guidance. They trust the information that you share with them, so use your newsletter to deliver your expertise to them.
Twice monthly, our company sends hundreds of thousands of engaging and timely travel marketing emails on behalf of our client base. Because our clients use our email marketing service, the growth of their organic leads has been taking off, and it never stops.
Email marketing is the foundation of all these other social media platforms. Before you invest your time and energy into using them to promote your business, stop to revisit and reevaluate your use of email marketing. If you aren’t using email marketing that everyday becomes so much easier to use now, then you’re marketing as they did in the olden days. So you’re probably not ready to be taking on new trends and keeping up with them.
Go back to your email list. Send newsletters, compare your analytics over time to see who’s opening them, who’s interacting with your content and you via the content you share with them through your email marketing. Then invest yourself in keeping up this interaction with your customers and watch as your leads begin to come in from all those click-backs as well as the click-throughs from the emails you send. From doing this, you will witness the growth and transition of your conversions from consultations to customers.