As a business owner, you are constantly trying to grow your tourism business and we want to support you with that by talking about email marketing. Email marketing can improve your branding, increase your outreach and help you make sales. This post is designed to help you understand how effective email marketing can be, give you actional steps to take and share a few tips along the way.

Ready? Let’s go!

What is email marketing?

When you send an email message to your email subscribers this is email marketing. Your email subscribers are people who have signed up to your contact list to receive your marketing campaigns and any other information you want to provide them. 

Email marketing is used to inform and educate your audience, drive sales by including a specific call to action, and build a community around your brand.

Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings (newsletters) and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization.

What are the different types of email marketing?

Single Emails – Often called broadcasts, these are one-off emails sent to provide updates (like newsletters) informational (new blog post announcements), promotional (announcing a sale or pushing to drive sales) or just a general check-in with your audience. 

Automated Email Campaigns – Often called automations, journeys or sequences, these are automated emails being sent based on your audience’s action. They often include 2 or more emails that send out in various intervals. Automations are great for things like welcome sequences (3-5 emails introducing your biz to new subscribers), sending freebies, abandon cart emails, post-purchase sequences, upsell funnels etc.

What are the benefits of sending out emails?

Sending out email marketing campaigns or singular emails is a great way to get information out that you want people to become aware of. As a channel email is a more formal way of delivering important messages rather than social media. Emails are an essential part of the growth and management of your business especially if you are a small business. It is a cost-effective solution with a huge potential outreach.

Can using email marketing tools improve brand awareness?

A great way to spread your message and mission is by sending emails. It is a direct communication line to your audience and showing up in their inbox is a great way for you to stay at the top of their mind.  A marketing tip that we recommend is you DON’T have to be in constant contact with your audience. We recommend sending an email out once a week. As a society we spend far too much time in our inbox so it’s important we don’t contribute too much.

Improving customer loyalty

Sending emails help improve customer loyalty and over time helps increase your number of sales. By sending emails it builds customer loyalty at every stage;

• lead-nurturing (welcome sequence)
• sales conversion (abandon cart, upsell offers)
• onboarding (post purchase sequence)
• retention (testimonial requests, ‘bring a friend’ deal offers, community building, repeat purchases etc.).

Travellers today want to KNOW your business.

How do you select destinations and activities? How are you adding ‘sustainability’ into your trips?

They need to LIKE your business.

Like you, your team and your mission. They need to like your trips, destinations, activities and overall travel purpose.

They also need to TRUST your business.

Trust you will keep them safe, trust your guides are certified and well trained and trust their money is having a local impact.

Tell them all this and more by sending them regular emails. Build up the KNOW, LIKE, & TRUST factors and you will have a dedicated and loyal following of travellers.

Improving your lead capture

A.K.A gather emails! Offer your website visitors something for free in exchange for their email addresses. Like this ⬇️

Is email marketing worth it in 2021/22?

Absolutely! Firstly, everyone uses email. It’s important to put your marketing efforts to where the people are and everyone is in their inbox. Yes, people are more cautious of who they let into their box these days but if you provide value and engage with them the right way then you are on your way to success. 

There are over 4 billion users who use email daily and by daily, we mean multiple times per day. Did you know that there are more people using email than Facebook and Twitter users combined? With our phones continuously in our hands, our emails are reaching our audience directly 24/7. 

Another reason why email marketing is so effective – it’s affordable. Most small businesses have a limited budget and every cent counts. Marketing via email involves very little upfront cost and it is relatively inexpensive to maintain over time.

But the best part of the email? – There is a LESS algorithm risk!

You get to be in control of the message, without any risk from algorithm updates. Ensure your business gets you directly in front of your audience. Get them where they work, manage their online accounts and generally handle their digital life. It’s way harder to ‘stop the scroll’ when you’re not necessarily always in front of your ideal clients. Quality leads over quantity leads.

Simple.

What email marketing platforms do you recommend?

There are a lot of platforms out there and disclaimer we haven’t used them all. This is our opinion on the ones we have used. 

Active Campaign

Active campaign is our top recommendation. One of the main reasons why we love it so much is the price. It is the same price as one of the midlevel packages on Mailchimp. It has a LOT of automation and tagging facilities all for $15 per month. Active campaign tends to act as more of a CRM platform. One of the biggest game-changing features for us – when you embed a link in an email you can tell Active campaign if someone clicks this link to apply a particular tag. This will give you a huge advantage when you use your tags to segment your list. This means you are able to send tailored emails to people to a more specific list. 

Pros of Active Campaign summarized 

• Great automation features that simplify customer interactions
• Helpful, friendly, and fast customer support
• All plan levels include data migration and implementation services
• Awesome tagging functionality for optimum list segmentation
• Has 850+ integrations with the most popular software

The final reason we love Active Campaign is that it’s super easy for it to grow with you and is scalable to your business.

Hubspot

Our next recommendation is Hubspot. Another excellent email marketing software that we feel confident in recommending. It has a lot of capabilities but it does cost quite a bit (because it does WAY more than just send emails)! If you get the full package it has a lot of functions and capabilities but if that is out of your price range the free version is able to do everything you would need. The free package is ideal if you are just starting out as a business owner.

Flodesk

Another recommendation is Flodesk. We have recently dabbled with Flodesk and we love it. It has been created by two women and it feels really easy to use. They offer lots of templates, set up automation and tags. 

Why we DON’T like Mailchimp…

A LOT of people are using Mailchimp and several clients of ours before they came to us have been previously using it. The reason a lot of people use Mailchimp is that they have done an excellent job at marketing themselves so we see them everywhere. They use ads, send email blasts and post a lot of content all over. They do offer a great free plan that has a lot of functionalities. 

In our opinion Mailchimp is only ….ok (we’re being polite here). We do find it a bit clunky and a bit difficult to use. When working with clients, we notice they find it super hard to set it up because it isn’t super intuitive and clear to use. For the price, you are going to pay for Mailchimp you could get the same thing but with way more automation on Active campaign. 

On the most popular Mailchimp $15 plan you can only set up three-step automation (that we find unreliable) and you have to create tags first to set up that automation. You also cannot tag when you embed a link in an email, this is a POWERFUL feature for segmenting and seeing who clicks what!

What are the best email marketing practices?

Tip # 1 – You have to have an email opt-in form in multiple places on your website.

And no, “sign up for our newsletter’ isn’t good enough anymore…It has to provide VALUE to your audience immediately!

Tip # 2 – Don’t create too many lists!

You only need to have a few lists. Our recommendations are having;

1. A master client or leads list (your travellers, the people who might want your services one day).
2. An affiliates list of contacts who you want to try and work with in the future. These people will help you sell your stuff so these people will need different content in their emails.
3. A partners list for DMC and supplier contacts or PR contacts. This list would essentially only receive a few emails per year with general updates. 

Tip #3 – Set up segments.

Based on the lists you have created you can set up more detailed segments to send more targeted content to. These segments can target people depending on their location, actions, gender and tags. For example – you could select someone within 100km of Vancouver Island from your client’s list. The people who then would be pulled through would go to a segment list titled – Location 100km Vancouver Island. This is a helpful contact list segment when lockdowns restrict travel.

Tip #4 – Set up tags.

This is the most in-depth you can go when it comes to targeting people and organizing your email list. The best practice for tags is to develop a system something like below.  Anytime you send an email it needs to include your tag. For example, if someone clicks a link about food in Albania they become a lead about food AND Albania. 

What tags should I include?

1. Interests: (add the important thing they are interested in)
2. Lead: (when someone clicks a link/button related to a particular subject)
3. Hot: (they have been on  a sales call or have actively engaged with you)
4. Location: (General trip tags when the person has been and gone on a particular trip)
5. VIP: (Someone who has spent multiple thousands of dollars on your trips previously)

If I sent an email campaign what should it include?

A top email marketing tip is to follow the 80/20 rule. 80% fun helpful educational content and 20% of hard-selling content and know that 80% of revenue will come from 20% of products.

HOMEWORK: write 3-5 emails to create a welcome sequence.

1. The first email should deliver the freebie or be a helpful video or article people would like to watch related to their interest.  
2. Your second email should be an introduction to the business – WHO are you and WHO do you serve and WHAT do you do. Keep is short and to the point.
3. The next 2-3 emails should continue to build the relationship – ask them about themselves: do you prefer small group trips or custom travel for you and your family? What destinations do they wish to explore one day? How long do they like to travel for? Share your top trips, testimoinals and blog posts/podcasts/videos.

Can email automation help me with sales?

Yes! Building out automation can help streamline your sales process and save you a lot of time. You can build out a sales funnel that is extremely effective. As people engage and interact with your emails about particular trips you are emailing them about, you can segment and tag those people. This means you will know who to follow up on (your ‘Hot’ tags) and who to leave and not push any further (Leads who haven’t opened your last 5 emails). 

How important is writing a good subject line?

We all aim to have a 100% open rate (5-10% is actually pretty good!) and a good subject line goes hand in hand with that. Your subject line determines if your email will be opened or not. People receive multiple emails per day so it’s important to stand out and encourage people to open. 

• Limit yourself to 50 characters
• Highlight your most interesting offer
• Appeal to your subscribers’ emotions and ambitions

What are some other things to think about?

Sending test emails 

Always send a test email beforehand! Small mistakes happen to the best of us, we are only human after all. Small typos, spacing issues or broken links. The Peak Flow team always gets someone to proofread something before we hit send or publish. 

Choosing the right time

Send your emails at the right time. Don’t schedule things to be sent out on a Sunday afternoon so by the time people log into their emails on a Monday morning yours is buried deep. Rather than choosing a random day and time, be strategic. Choose a time that makes sense for your audience, based on what you know about them. Most email platforms have a send-in-time optimization feature where you can choose the time when most of your audience is online and active. 

Analysis your metrics

Look at your metrics and results! Are emails with more images converting better? Is a short emailer more effective? Compare your results and tweak until you feel happy but trust us when we say there will always be room for improvement.

10 Email Marketing Best Practices for Tourism Businesses

We have spoken a lot about different ways to make the most of your email marketing here is a summary of things we think are the ten most important things to think about. 

1. Use opt-ins – exchange emails for value-packed free stuff like coupon codes for travel products, itinerary ideas, packing lists, culturally relevent recipies etc.
2. Personalize your content – use the <first name> merge field, apply tags when people click links in your emails, talk to your commmunity like your having coffee with them!
3. Use segmentation – ID which groupings make the most sense (location, interests etc.)
4. Make your emails mobile-friendly – lightweight designs and small image sizes and pre-view on mobile!
5. 1 call to action per email – be clear about what you want reader to do next.
6. Optimize email deliverability – ensure subscribers opt in and be careful with affilaite links and images.
7. Choose an engaging email design – how does your ideal client like their emails? Use that.
8. Clean your email list regularly – delete or archive stale contacts every year.
9. Email your leads list when you have 2 spaces left on EVERY trip! – FOMO is real folks.
10. Set up a welcome email automation – if you do just 1 thing this month to improve your email marketing, do this!

Recently we did a Facebook Live session discussing our email marketing 101 so if you want to listen to that and find out some more information in a visual aspect we would love for you to make the most of that resource. 

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out and hopefully, we can help.

Join the Conversation

We would love for you to join our Business of Adventure Facebook group. This is a collaborative space for business owners or freelancers in the adventure travel and tourism space. The focus here is to share best practices and tips about online presence and digital marketing (front end) and online systems (backend) so you can establish a rock-solid foundation for your adventure business. If this is something you could benefit from, please join!