Travel Agency Tribes Email Marketing

#1 Sending Unsolicited Emails

Send only to confirmed subscriptions. Sometimes people subscribe to your email list but forget to confirm the subscription. Sending an email to an unconfirmed subscriber immediately raises a red flag on your recipient’s email service. Your message is marked as spam.

#2 Serving Your Travel Product and NOT the Customer

All your emails should be customer-centric. Always send an email that either educates or shows the customer how to solve a problem. Of course, you can occasionally send a product promotion email, but 80% of your emails should be geared towards better customer service. Once a customer feels that you care, it will not be hard for him to buy your travel product.

#3 The Fear of Unsubscribes

Email marketers put too many calls to action (CTA) in one email because they fear people are going to unsubscribe and thus fail to see all their products. The best practice is to have one CTA per landing page. Each landing page should clearly describe what it is that you want your recipients to do. Conversion is higher when the customers do not have to click on more than one link to get what they are looking for.

#4 Failing to Establish If the Email Marketing Campaigns are Paying Off

Email marketing costs include; the value of time spent to come up with the content and the cost of sending the emails through an email service such as Mailchimp. Without knowing if your email marketing campaign has an ROI, you will be shooting at a moving target in darkness.

#5 Bot Emails

Don’t bore your readers with endless statistics if you can tell it with an image or graphics. Emails that lack the “human perspective” tend to get lower click rates. Use social cues and proofs in your email marketing campaigns. Make your email copy sound like it was written by a human NOT a robot.

#6 Contradicting Emails

Ask yourself this: how believable will your brand be if you send two emails with sea cruise offers that contradict each other? Your emails must be consistent. Never send the same email twice unless a subscriber has specifically requested you to do so.

#7 Emailing to People Who Don’t Respond

You will need to take a keen look at your open rates and see who responds to your emails. Sending great content to people who are uninterested is not only a waste of time but also a sure way of getting your emails flagged as spam.

#8 Untested messages

Before you hit the send button, ensure that there are no broken links, the images are loading properly, and that there are no grammar and spelling mistakes. Experts use A/B testing where you send different variations of the email to small portions of the subscribers and then send out the best performing to the whole list.

#9 Email that Looks Like a Giant Ad

Using too many images in an email leaves the recipient overwhelmed. Sometimes it is not even clear where to click. Note that images take longer to load and consume a lot of space in the recipient’s inbox. Don’t use more than two images in your email. Ensure that your feature image is both clickable and mobile friendly.

#10 Failure to Use Good Emailing System

A great emailing system helps you to;

• Minimize mistakes
• Send the emails faster
• Personalize the messages
• Get formatted headers
• Manage bounced email
• Get awesome feedback statistics
• Beat the anti-spam filters

#11 Emails with No Subject and Name of Sender

An email recipient will want to know from whom the email is coming from and what it is all about. An email without a sender’s name and subject line will most likely not be opened. Make sure the subject is consistent with the body. Overhyped subject lines that are not consistent with the body negatively impacts your brand trust.

#12 Difficulty in Unsubscribing

Your email recipients should be able to unsubscribe with a maximum of 2 clicks. Anything more than this will either get your email flagged as spam or the customer will block you. If there is a large number of people flagging your email as spam, the email services will start seeing the trend and thus send all your subsequent emails directly into the junk folder.

#13 Poor Graphics and Structure

Ensure that your text font is optimal. Usually, anything that works well with Gmail will work on other email systems. Your email’s structure should observe the rules of brevity, clarity, and call to action. Never assume that your recipients will read through the whole email. Rather, ensure your call to action is prominently highlighted and explained.

#14 Ignoring the Feedback Statistic

The following statistics are very important for your email marketing campaign success and should never be ignored;

• Open Rates – To increase open rates, you should send valuable content consistently. All your emails should have clear subjects and the name of the sender. These details are important if the recipient is going to trust the source.
• Click Rate – A high click rate is determined by how relevant the email is to the recipients. Always send out high quality content with an awesome call to action to increase the click rate.
• Delivery Rate – Delivery rate shows you how many emails have been delivered and hence the quality of your email list. If there is a lot of delivery failure or bouncing, then you need to recreate your email list.
• Unsubscribe Rate – If you are sending high quality and relevant content to your subscribers, there will be no need for them to unsubscribe. If the unsubscribe rate is high, you will need to reinvent your content or get a better email list.

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