COMMENT: Make an offer customers can’t refuse
Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Boyan Manev, VP business development & product marketing of Vayant Travel Technologies on email marketing.
Email marketing is powerful at connecting with customers. With an EDM (electronic direct mail) you can send messages straight to the person you most want to reach as well as personalizing the message and making sure it ‘talks’ to your customer.
Like any direct marketing, the art of email marketing is about targeting – selecting the right recipients for your offer.
EDM is certainly making its mark in travel. It’s the most utilized digital marketing channel and one of the most successful, as confirmed by research conducted for Blue Hornet – Integrated Email Marketing Trends for the Travel Industry, 2011.
But the same research shows travel firms are not integrating their marketing channels: three quarters (75%) say they don’t have a comprehensive view of individual customers’ behaviour and interests.
Integrated customer data is critical. Only with this can travel sellers target travel shoppers with offers that really speak to their interests, preferences and pocket.
So for the travel agent who’s serious about effective EDM, the first task is to collate the customer information that is distributed across the business – and beyond. This means customer data from marketing and customer databases as well as sources like social media.
Simple promotions – which can be set up on social media linked to customer interests – are a good way to harvest up-to-date email addresses for potential customers. Getting your customer data in order will take time – it won’t happen overnight. But you can start to see results relatively quickly if you take a staged approach.
Start small, focusing on one set of customers (for example, customers who you have booked a winter sun holiday in the past). Then you can start to put that data to work.
An email newsletter is a powerful way to reach out to customers and show them that you are a source of relevant and inspiring travel ideas. At the very least, this will help keep your brand top-of-mind for the customer. Things get really interesting when you start to add offers to the newsletter, using your customer insights to target them with promotions that speak to their lifestyles and travel passions.
With modern email live search solutions, you can ensure your flight offers are available the moment the customer opens the email. Just a couple of clicks and the customer can be booking and buying.
Email marketing may require an investment in integrating customer data but it’s an investment well worth making, in terms of payback in selling opportunities and building your brand.
And once you start, you can continually refine and improve the quality of your data using feedback from each email campaign, making your messages more relevant and ensuring you really do have an offer that customers cannot refuse.
Diane
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