The travel industry was one of the hardest hit over the past 18 months. With tourism spend unlikely to return to pre-Covid levels until 2025.
That means that brands in the travel industry need to do more with less. More engagement, more bookings, more return customers. But less resource, less spend, and less time.
Sounds impossible, right?
Not necessarily.
Triggered emails support travel brands in doing all of the above. Serving up timely and targeted communications with recipients. Whilst travel marketers barely have to lift a finger.
So, read on to hear 6 triggered email campaigns that will help travel brands to increase their bookings.
1.
The welcome email
Let’s start with the key to starting a flourishing relationship with your consumers. The welcome email.
Welcome emails are the perfect way to get started with email automation.
Consumers are at one of their most engaged states when they first sign up or purchase with you. So make the most of this mindset by getting in front of them, introducing your brand, and offering them all the essential information they will need.
This could include a link to your social channels, a promotion of your latest offers, or contact details if they need a little help and support.
And if you have lots to say, you can even split these emails up into a welcome series. Taking a deep dive into key information in each email.
2.
The personalised recommendation
Sending out promotions and offers is easy. But travel brands can take their promotions up a notch up by offering personalised recommendations.
Brands can utilise automation capabilities alongside dynamic content to send highly personalised recommendations based on consumers’ behavioural and purchase data. These could be their favourite locations, attractions, or restaurants.
And these emails can be triggered on a number of actions, such as consumers regularly visiting a destination page. Or recommendations for similar attractions based on previous bookings.
Why go to the effort of personalising your recommendations?
Because personalised emails deliver 6x higher transactional rates. And 63% of consumers will stop buying from brands that use poor personalisation tactics.
3.
The booking abandonment
Travel brands can lose millions by ignored abandoned bookings.
Which is surprising, as triggered emails make it simple to follow up these hot leads.
Booking abandonment emails are triggered when a potential customer begins the process of making a purchase or booking, but then leaves before checking out.
This could be due to a number of reasons. They could have been distracted, found a better offer elsewhere, were unsure of some details, or just needed a little more time to consider.
With a booking abandonment email, you can automatically deal with all of these hurdles.
Firstly, the email offers a reminder to those who have been distracted or forgotten about their booking. But they can also contain essential information, contact details for help and support. And, if you’re feeling generous, a discount code to encourage them to finally make that booking.
4.
The countdown
Once you’ve secured that all-important booking, keep the momentum going by automating regular countdown updates for your customers.
These emails can helpfully cover everything the customer needs before their trip or booking. Confirmation of their details, guides to the area they are visiting, ‘what’s on’ updates, and weather forecasts.
You can even include dynamic countdown timers in these emails to spark even more excitement. Due to their dynamic nature, they will update every time the recipient opens their email. So their countdown will always be accurate.
All of the above is perfect to put the recipient in the holiday mood. Priming them for our next triggered email.
5.
The upsell
As well as sending updates, make the most of how the recipient will be excited and engaged by upselling other products, services, and add-ons.
These can include helpful services such as booking a taxi or a restaurant nearby their destination.
Or, luxury add ons such as champagne in the hotel bedroom, upgrades, or spa treatments.
Position these emails as being helpful, and tap into their holiday mood. Instead of going for the hard sell.
6.
The rating request
92% of global consumers trust word of mouth recommendations over other forms of marketing.
That means that ratings, reviews, and testimonials are worth their weight in gold (well, almost).
Once your customer has been on their holiday or enjoyed their booking, now is the perfect time to check-in and see how their experience was.
This offers the opportunity to re-engage and keep your brand in their minds, whilst also showing that you care about their experience.
Rating and review requests can be done in different forms. You may ask them to leave a review on a site such as TripAdvisor or Booking.com. Send them over to your website or Google listing. Or maybe share your social channels so they can offer a review there.
However, it’s also important to include contact details so they can directly get in touch with someone if they had a bad experience. Ideally, they will come to you to rectify this, before going public.
Are you a travel brand looking to increase your bookings?
Then as well as triggered email, we have lots of tactics that you can try.
Our all-in-one AI email and web marketing platform, alongside our Customer Success Team, will soon help you on your way to better results.