11 Effective Email Strategies to Increase Travel Sales

Sending the right emails at the right time to potential customers is a sure way to boost the number of sales you make. Email is by far the most effective way to reach out both to existing customers as well as new ones. One of the biggest mistakes that travel providers make is not using email effectively. If you are not using the strategies covered in this blog post you’re definitely leaving sales that could have been closed on the table.

1. Response Time

Over 50% of companies take at least 24 hours to respond to customer inquiries or emails. This is way too long! You should aim to respond to new inquiries within an hour and to other emails within four hours and if you can do it faster it’s even better. If you’re a small business owner this probably means answering all your emails several times a day including right when you wake up and just before you go to sleep.

Remember your customers are probably engaging with other tour operators and not just you. Responding fast not only builds trust. it creates a dialogue. The more time a potential customer invests in sending emails to you the more likely they will book.

2. Concise Content

The best emails provide a lot of information clearly in as few words as possible. You only have a matter of seconds to engage a potential customer. If your email is lengthy and confusing you probably just killed your chances at a sale. The key is to answer the customer’s potential questions as clearly and as briefly as possible. For example, if you’re listing all your inclusions maybe you can skip those that are less meaningful like the complimentary bottle of water. If you are describing an itinerary do you really need to have a paragraph on each day?
Short well formatted emails with relevant details work best.

3. Proper Presentation and Formatting

A recent study by Hubspot showed that nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email. The take home message here is to keep it simple. That said, I have seen lots of poorly formatted plain text emails that go overboard with different colors of text, bolding and different fonts. Keep it clean and simple to read.

4. Follow-up Emails are Key

Average rates of email opens are around 15% so even if your email is perfect, chances are that no one will ever look at it. According to Yesware, an email tracking service, 70% of businesses never send a follow-up email. By sending several follow-up emails you can probably double or even triple the number of responses you get. My suggestion is to track all your leads on a spreadsheet so that you can easily see which leads need email follow-ups. I suggest scheduling follow-ups at 3 days, 7 days, 15 days and 30 days.  If you have not received any response after two months and 5 emails you can give up.

If you are in a dialogue with a potential guest and they disappear, keep following up. This doesn’t mean to email them every day but an email every 2 or 3 weeks until your 5 emails is a good tactic.

Advanced Tip: You can continue to send follow-ups if your recipients are opening emails. For that you will need to install an email tracker. Read: 3 Ways an Email Tracking App Can Increase Your Travel Sales

5. Save Time with Templates

If you send a lot of emails you’re sure to be sending the same thing over and over again. It pays to spend the time to create some great templates. You can save templates right in Gmail or you can use a service like Briskine templates that integrates into Gmail. Working on your templates lets you perfect your responses. I suggest you collect all of your customer’s common questions and create templates for each so that you can more quickly follow-up. A template does not need to be a complete email, using either of the above template services you can insert more than one template into an email response.

6. Personalization

It’s fine to use templates but you still need to personalize each email. The first tip here is to make sure you spell the customer’s name properly. Beyond that make sure you address any specific concerns or questions near the front of the email so that the customer knows right away that you have taken some time and effort. No one wants to respond to an email template so make sure it does not feel like one.

7. Track Email Opens

Are your emails getting opened? One of the best ways to track this is to use a service like Mailtag which is a simple service that connects with gmail and lets you track opens and schedule emails. These types of applications add a bit of code into your email that the customer can’t see but allow you to know when and where the email was opened. This is extremely valuable since you can learn which customers have read your email and not responded. If someone is opening your email it might be a good time for a Whatsapp message since you know they are interested at that point in time. Figuring out the right way to use this data takes some time but it is an extremely valuable sales tool.

8. Know Your Customers

The quickest thing to do is probably just a Google search of the email or phone number. If that does not turn up anything, Linkedin is good as well. Sometimes you won’t find anything but oftentimes you can pick up some interesting information on your potential customer and it only takes a few seconds. For example, if you know you are sending an email to a top manager at a high profile company you know immediately that it’s probably better to customize your offering and focus on convenience and service as opposed to price.

There are several plugins for gmail that will pull the users social profile however I have yet to find one that works reliably.

9. Create a Great Footer

Last but not least is the footer of your email. I suggest creating a template for this in Gmail. Include information about your company website, contact details and your own LinkedIn profile. Remember, your footer is secondary. If you are writing simple text emails you don’t want to have a footer with so many graphics that it will catch more attention than your actual email.

10. Ask a Question

Make responding to your email easy by asking a relevant question. Asking a question is like providing the potential customer with the next easy step. If they are thinking about responding, answering your question will be an almost unavoidable response. In addition, answers to your questions can help you craft a better itinerary for your guests.

11. Provide Great Information

What do your follow-ups look like? Are you just sending an email and asking the guest if they are still interested? These are fine but alternate them with some good content that adds value. These could be links to blog posts or information on the best time to visit or what the highlights of the trip might be. Keep it short and sweet.

Build Your Email List

This post has focused on individual sales emails. I am going to be writing another post shortly that will cover mass emails. In the meantime, I will just mention to save all your emails along with names and whether the person booked in a spreadsheet so you can start building your own email list for marketing.

Do you have any of your own great tips on making sales via email? Feel free to share them or any questions you might have in the comments below.