by Andy StroteEmail is still the fastest, least expensive media for “stay in touch” marketing, ongoing promotions and last minute notifications. Anyone in the tourism industry who is in charge of marketing a destination, an attraction, a hotel, a B & B, or an event should have email marketing as part of the mix.
Here are 10 immediate advantages of email marketing:
• You can reach thousands of people on the same day with an e-newsletter, a special offer or a notification.
• It costs only a fraction more to reach ten thousand people than it does to reach one thousand.
• Email is the foundation for word-of-mouth marketing. How many times have you forwarded or received a forwarded email? That’s word-of-mouth in action. And it costs you nothing.
• Email drives traffic to your site, and that should drive business (if not, you need to do something about it immediately).
• Email lets you test offers quickly and inexpensively. It’s easy to send one offer to 50 people on your list, and another one to 50 others. See which one does best, and send that to the rest of your list.
• You can even test more than one offer in an email. Give each offer its own landing page on your site. See which link gets the most clicks. Learn from it and fine-tune your next offers.
• Email is easy for recipients to keep and reference later. How many emails have you kept? Most people have thousands that they can look up any time they need.
• With email, you can get detailed reports within days. Your report should tell you how many people received the email, how many opened it, who clicked on which links and who forwarded it.
• Your reports form a customer history. Work with that history to finesse your marketing efforts.
If your list is big enough, you can invite compatible organizations to advertise on it. You can charge for it, or perhaps swap services to attract each other’s customers. The obvious candidates to do combined email marketing are destinations, attractions, accommodations and events.
Top 10 ways to build an email list
So now that you know why, the question is how to build your list. Here are 10 ways to get started now.
• From a software perspective, any database program or contact manager such as Microsoft Excel or Outlook that allows you to export into Tab or Comma delimited text files, will do to keep your list. Work with what you’re comfortable with – later on you can always export your data into other programs if required.
• At the very least, you’ll want to collect first name, last name and email address. Depending on your situation, you may want to include further information such as postal address and previous purchase information. That will let you segment your lists to develop custom offers. But strictly speaking for the deployment of email, name and email address will do.
• Decide on the nature of your emails and let your prospects know. Will it be a regular newsletter, a periodic newsletter or a notification when you have special offers? Set the expectations and then commit to deliver on them. Subscribe to other email lists to see how they set up their offers.
• Put your email subscription information on all of your printed pieces. Think of including a special offer to encourage sign-ups.
• Feature your email subscription form prominently on your Web site. Promote the benefits on your sign-up page. Enhance the subscription value with benefit-oriented copy. Think like a customer – answer the only question that matters: What’s In It For Me?
• Make sure the customers you meet day to day have a chance to sign up. If you’re a hotel, be sure front desk personnel ask guests whether they want to sign up and have the appropriate forms handy.
• Do you attend trade shows? Make sure you’re promoting the value of subscribing to your list and have a fast and easy way to gather the required information. Consider tying email subscriptions into contests – enter the contest and we’ll send you our regular email.
• Use a professional email marketing company (like this one) so that you can take advantage of built in features such as “Send to a Friend” (more sophisticated email forwarding), and detailed reporting.
• Do you have postal contact information for customers but no email addresses? Send them post cards with a special offer to encourage them to go to your Web site to sign up.
• When you cross-promote yourself on other sites or email lists, make sure you’re promoting your own list too. Having a good list is valuable – don’t miss the chance to grow it.
OK, here’s the really cheap and cheerful bonus tip – use the signature file on your own email to direct people to your sign-up page. That means every time you’re sending an email, you’re promoting your list. Costs you nothing.
Really important bonus tip #2 – email must be by permission, it should allow easy unsubscribes and unsubscribes must be honoured.
Email is the medium, but content is still king
This newsletter deals with the “why” and “how”. But it’s the “what” – the actual messages in your emails – that will determine your success. Do your readers find them compelling? Are they biting on your offers? Are your emails getting forwarded and attracting new subscribers? The good thing is, with email, you’ll find out quickly and you can make appropriate adjustments.
If you aren’t sure whether your writing skills are up to the challenge, hire a professional and experienced email marketing company to write, send and report on your emails.
The Tourism Marketer’s Bottom Line: Email campaigning should be part of every tourism marketer’s mix. It’s quick to deploy, it’s relatively inexpensive, it can be highly targeted, it’s highly flexible and gives you rich feedback that you can use for further marketing. There’s nothing else like it.
Our Offer to You
How should you start improving your e-marketing efforts? Start with our offer of 3 hours of complimentary E-marketing Consulting. This will be three hours of practical, no-nonsense consulting about your site, your e-marketing efforts. We understand your business is unique, so this session will be about you. You’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned immediately and successfully. Imagine if your new e-marketing efforts could increase your business by 10, 20 or 50 percent. What would that mean to you?
After the meeting we’ll follow up with a summary report with suggested next steps. You’ll be able to take immediate action to start a high performance e-marketing initiative for your business.
Contact Andy Strote to get started with our offer.
