Tips to Increase the Open Rates of Your Travel Agency's Marketing Email

If you mention the name of your email subscriber in the subject line, your readers are more likely to take your email seriously.

#1 Be Sensitive About the Local Time

In order to increase the chance of your subscriber seeing your email, send during their local time, preferably working hours. Most people read and reply their emails between 15 and 30 minutes after they log into their computers.

#2 Use the Subscriber’s Name

If you mention the name of your email subscriber in the subject line, your readers are more likely to take your email seriously. Emails with general subject line tend to be dismissed as “just another marketing email”. Overusing the subscriber’s name in the body of the email makes you look desperate for attention.

#3 Short, Captivating Subject Lines

Your subject line is the first thing that the reader will see. If it is uninteresting and useless to your subscriber, he will go on to the next email. Nobody will waste their time reading a useless email while they have over 200 emails in their inbox to attend to.

If, for example, your subscriber loves tropical destinations, you can use a subject line such as “You Will Fall in Love with Ocho Rio’s Newest Beach Restaurant”.

#4 Use Exactly the Same Theme in Your Emails

You need to spend some serious time creating your marketing email templates and themes. Use the same font, text color, logo and signature on all your emails. Once a customer has gotten used to a certain theme/template, and you have been delivering quality every time, they will open every email you send them.

#5 The First Paragraph

Capture the essence of your email in the first paragraph. The first 100 characters of the first paragraph are especially important because most email systems display them even without opening the email. Ensure what you write here can immediately entice your travel customers to open the email.

#6 Filter Good and Bad Subscribers

You want people who are not opening your emails out of your list so that you can add even more of the friendly travel customers. Send your emails 3 times a week so that the subscribers that are not interested in your content will unsubscribe and leave people who are really interested in your content.

#7 Get a Great Email Marketing Service

The most popular email marketing services are MailChimp, Get Response and Aweber. Irrespective of whether you are just starting out or you are an old hand at email marketing, there is something you can learn that other marketers are doing better than you. There are a variety of online tutorials on how you can customize the above services to get better results.

#8 Provide Valuable Content

Before you put down your content, research your subscribers’ problems and then put down some well-researched solutions for these problems. Great content is the only way to avoid being marked as spam.

#9 Invite Your Subscribers to Engage With Your Business

Ensure that your website and social media channels are part of your template so that you can invite your subscribers to engage with you more closely. The more your subscribers get engaged with your business the harder it will be for them to unsubscribe.

#10 Short Sentences and Large Font

Short email copies with short sentences are easier to read and understand. If you send a very long email, your subscribers will either not read it or they will skim read it.

#11 Write the Email to One Person

People are more likely to respond to emails that are singularly addressed to them. If a person feels that the email can be responded to by someone else, they will not feel obligated to open it leave alone reading it through.

#12 Send From a Person NOT Company

People will first check if they know the person sending the email. If they don’t and are still interested, they will look up the sender on. An email from a company is immediately seen as advertising and most people won’t bother to open it.

#13 Stay Out of the Spam Filters’ Radar

As spam filters become more sophisticated, you will need to avoid the words and links that trigger the filters. Click here to see some of these words. If your email ends up in the spam folder, the likelihood of it never getting opened doubles.

#14 Email List Segmentation

In order to send your subscribers only the relevant content, you will need to segment them. You can for example put all those interested in cruise, beach, Europe, Caribbean, or Safari vacations in different segments so that you don’t end up sending an email about the jungles of Africa to a subscriber only interested in Europe’s nightlife.

#15 Grow Your Leads Organically

The only way to use email marketing to increase your brand’s visibility is to get subscribers that are interested in your travel business. Do not buy leads unless you are sure that they are people who are really interested in your travel agency’s niche.

#16 Make Your Email Mobile Friendly

About 74% of smartphone owners use their phones to check email. If your email does not read well on the smartphone, it will definitely be discarded.

#17 Try Resending Unopened Emails

This is another way of filtering out people that are uninterested in your content and reaching those who would have missed your email.

#18 Try Different Subject Lines

After you have established the best time to send out emails, you will need to try out different subject lines to see what works out best. Follow themes such as urgency, humor, controversy, personalized, mystery, and scarcity to change your subject lines.

#19 Try Video Content

Sometimes, people want to see the person who sends them emails talking about a destination to believe that they are truly the expert they say they are.

In Conclusion:

Just like other forms of marketing, your email needs consistent optimization so that you can improve client engagement. Use the travel industry benchmarks to gauge how successful your email campaigns are.

Contact our consultants for more information on how to improve your email open rates.

Travel Agency Tribes Email Marketing