Email marketing is a vital tool for the travel industry. Whether you’re a vacation rental company distributing information to your owners and guests or an attraction who wishes to communicate with your customers and stakeholders, there’s no doubt that email can be useful; IF you know how to use it correctly that is. In this blog series we will discover how to use email marketing in the most effective manner.

What do you think are looking for when they’re opening up their inboxes every morning? Certainly not more promotional garbage to swipe to the trash folder. People look for content that could possibly make a difference or improvement in their lives. If you already have someone’s email address because they opted into your monthly newsletter, why not build rapport by contacting them with useful content accompanied with special offers and deals? This is where subject lines become very important. It is crucial to have a grabbing subject line or your carefully-crafted message will go to waste. But we will get into that in a later post.

Minimizing clutter in people’s inboxes should be one of your email marketing goals. How do we do that? We need to segment out our email audience intensively so that you are telling different stories to each segment, making sure that the messages you’re sending out will be interesting to the recipients.

Here are a few components of successful email marketing campaigns:

1. What to say. What you don’t want is for your email to read like a sales pitch. It is advised for email content to be composed of 80% fun/informational content and no more than 20% promotional content. You can provide answers to commonly asked questions about your destination/attraction. Set up Google Alerts so you can see what people are searching for and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
2. How to say it. Email messages should be short and concise as possible and presented in a visually appealing format. Including pictures and videos will always boost engagement with your message. However, you should avoid overstimulating your audience with too many colors and fonts.
3. Mobile-friendly format. If your email campaigns aren’t mobile-friendly, you are ignoring the fact that the majority of emails are read on mobile devices. Here is a checklist for mobile-friendly email content:
   • Single column formatting
   • No more than 500 pixels
   • Easy to read fonts
   • Use buttons, not hyperlinks
   • Use 2 – 5 images (with alt text)
   • Use consistent templates
4. Frequency matters. There is a fine line between not communicating enough and communicating too often. It is common practice to recommend sending out an email at least once a month – but you might find that you need to send out more or less communication according to your marketing goals. Most email marketing platforms can show you who opened your email and when. Using this data, you can analyze the best date and time to send out an email. Be consistent in your timing so that the audience is almost expecting your message to hit their inbox at a certain time.

Stay tuned for more on email marketing!

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