How to Turn your Customer Emails into Revenue for your Tourism Business

By Renee Goodsell on August 11, 2020 at 04:51 PM

TOM | Blog | How to Turn your Customer Emails into Revenue for your Tourism Business

 

One of the most common questions we get from the many brilliant businesses looking to break through the marketing noise in the tourism industry, is how to approach email marketing and generate ROI.

It's a valid question too; Data from Statista reveals a steady climb in the number of emails received and sent out each year, projecting that the figure will surpass 347 billion per day by 2022. This, in tandem with the fact that 79% of B2B marketers find email to be the most successful channel for content distribution, certainly paints a picture of the value that email marketing has.

If you're looking to build an email marketing strategy and engage with your existing customers and prospects, there are a few things to know. Let's dive in.

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What is a marketing database?

A marketing database is a list of details and data of customers or potential customers that can be used generate personalised communications in order to promote a product or service for marketing purposes. Usually, a database consists of names and email addresses at a minimum, but can be built to record other metrics such as location, age, phone number and even preferences.

Think of a marketing database as a list of contacts who have expressed interest in your business. Usually, these are recorded and kept in a CRM (customer relationship manager) like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho or Pipedrive.

Your database will be the cornerstone of your email marketing, and there are a few things to be aware of when building and maintaining a database you're going to be sending your stellar EDMs to:

  • You'll need to plan ways to build your database list. This could mean asking for the email addresses of customers on-site, creating marketing campaigns where customers sign up with an email address online or even using social media to convert your followers in to valid names and email addresses.
  • Your customers have to give you implicit or explicit permission to market to them. A big mistake businesses make is to assume that just because you have someones email address you can send them marketing emails. In NZ, we have the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 that prohibits the sending of spam (or unsolicited marketing emails), and in most countries, there are similar laws enforced (see GDPR). Always ensure that you're giving customers an option to 'opt in' to your marketing communications when they provide their email address.
  • Don't just dump all your contacts in one place, segment your database. Not every email will be relevant for every customer, so make sure you have different marketing lists to segment your customers and ensure they only receive relevant communication. For example, previous customers and potential customers.

 

How to Plan an Email Marketing Strategy

Before you fire off your first marketing email, we'd recommend putting together some form of plan or strategy for your communications. Here are a few key steps to take to plan an email marketing strategy that delivers ROI.

 

1. Choose an Email Marketing Service Provider

Unfortunately email marketing isn't best executed from your regular email marketing services like Gmail or Outlook, you're going to need a platform that can send mass emails, measure your contact engagement and clicks and ideally, automate. As a part of your email marketing strategy, investigate your options - a lot of businesses start with platforms like HubSpot, Mailchimp or Salesforce Pardot.

 

2. Understand Who Your Contacts Are

Essentially this step is an audit of your contacts to get an overview of who you're communicating with.

  • Who are your contacts and how did they join your database?
  • What are their common demographics?
  • What are their likely interests?
  • What kind of offers and promotions would they find valuable?
  • How can you add value through email marketing content?

The answers to these questions will help you to plan your email marketing strategy and inform the content of your individual emails.

 

3. Identify Your Goals and Plan How You'll Achieve Them

Finally, you'll need to plan what you're going to send to who ahead of time and ensure that every email is working towards your business goal. For example:

  • How often and to whom will you send newsletters?
  • If you're trying to convert leads into customers, will you send EDMs?
  • What offers will your EDMs include?
  • Do you have a process for abandoned cart follow-ups?
  • How will you keep in contact with customers once they've signed up to your database?

Once you've fully mapped out your goals and how you're going to achieve them, you're ready to start executing the plan.

 

What Types of Email Marketing Should I Use?

There are many different ways that you can engage with your new database and start to convert those leads, but we'd recommend starting with the following.

 

Newsletters

Newsletters are your way to regularly communicate with your database, keep them in the loop with business changes, upcoming promotions or competitions and general newsworthy information. This is also the place to promote any blogs or relevant content you might have to your database.

Usually, newsletters are sent once a month (could be more or less frequently depending on your audience), but most importantly they should be sent with a purpose. Before you write your newsletter, establish what you're trying to communicate and the purpose of the newsletter and ensure you write to that purpose.

 

Nurture Emails

According to Marketo, 96% of visitors to your website aren't actually ready to make a purchase when they sign up to your mailing list (yet). So how do you gently nudge your contacts towards making a purchase decision? Nurture emails.

As defined by HubSpot;

The process of nurturing leads involves purposefully engaging your target audience by offering relevant information, supporting them in any way they need, and maintaining a sense of delight throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey.

What that tends to look like, is a series of between three and five emails that are sent to follow up with a customer once they've entered your database. These emails should be tailored to who the customer is and how they've come to be in your database. For example, if a customer engaged with your website to download a tourism brochure, you might follow up with:

  • Email One: Sending them the tourism brochure they've requested
  • Email Two: Following up with sending a video of the activity they're interested in and link to blog or two that support the video.
  • Email Three: Send two or three testimonials and a 20% offer with a call to action to buy.

Every email adds value and aligns with the customers decision making process. Ideally, you'll be able to use your email marketing system to automatically send these at specified times after your contact has engaged, e.g. email one immediately, email two a few days later, and email three the following week.

Within the tourism industry, a popular way to nurture customers is to send abandoned cart follow-up emails. In fact, shopping cart abandonment emails sent 1 hour after the user leaves your site are the most effective, converting around 6.33% of shoppers.

It works, too. Targeting users with content relevant to their position along the buying process yields 72% higher conversion rates.

 

Sales EDMs

The third category of email you might like to send, is a sales EDM. This is a very specific type of email with the single goal (usually) of converting a contact into a customer. Typically when you send a sales EDM you'll have an offer that you want to promote to your database.

These could include:

  • Discounts
  • New product launches
  • Event sign-ups
  • Special offers

Keep the language short, concise and written with purpose, and most importantly, make it extremely clear what action you want your customer to take next and how.

 

Measure Success and Optimise

Once you've created your email marketing strategy and sent your beautifully designed, value adding emails to your customers, it's absolutely key to review how well your email did and make changes to optimise the next one.

Your email marketing platform should offer your business insight into email opens, unsubscribes, subscribes, URL click-throughs, etc, and will also delve down as far as which subscribers are most actively engaged with your newsletter too.

Use this information as best you can to inform how you might change and improve your next email marketing send. This could mean analysing which subject lines get the highest open rates, which calls to action are clicked on the most, which content performs best when sent via. email and even if your design work makes for a pleasant reader experience.

In email marketing, there's always improvements to be made and ways to optimise your send, so always make sure you're looking retrospectively at your results.

 

Want to know if your current marketing is a hit or miss?

No problem! We're currently offering a FREE consultation & domestic marketing health-check for your business. If you're keen to find out how you're currently doing and what could be improved, book a consultation below.

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