When it comes to seasonal online sales, the travel market adheres to fairly predictable trends with the same peak times each year. This pattern is important because it enables you to plan your airport’s email marketing strategy to make sure you send the right messages to the right people at the right time. Understanding when customers are likely to purchase and which messages are likely to resonate with them is one of the most reliable ways to gain traction and improve sales.
It’s also important to know how customers research and buy their travel products. According to Statista, the market size of the online travel booking platform industry worldwide is 517.8 bn USD and the revenue share of online sales in the global travel and tourism market is now 65%. In addition, more and more travellers are now planning and booking their holidays, flights and travel ancillaries independently, using digital tools, such as online travel agencies, review portals and price comparison websites. This highlights the importance of having an airport ecommerce website to remain relevant to consumers and competitive.
When it comes to targeting online travel bookers, you might be interested to hear that email marketing is still the most effective marketing tool in terms of ROI. In fact, email generates $42 for every $1 spent, offering an outstanding ROI of 4,200%.
Want to ensure you’re making the most of your airport’s seasonal email marketing campaigns? We’ve shared top tips from our airport email marketing experts below…
8 tips for improving your airport’s seasonal ecommerce emails
Email is a great way to engage with customers at every stage of the buyer journey, inspiring them to book through your airport, supporting them with valuable and relevant content, and sharing enticing, personalised offers. These 8 points form the cornerstone of a strong seasonal email campaign.
- Share interesting, personalised travel content
- Make the most of a seasonal theme
- Offer specific seasonal discounts
- Get the timing right
- Use customer segmentation
- Don’t ignore the weather
- Capture the imagination
- Write a brilliant email subject line
Share interesting, personalised travel content
Your email copy should be engaging and seasonal. Use storytelling to develop a theme. Even if the angle seems too obvious or cliché, you can connect with people by using captivating subject lines like, ‘Planning your summer getaway? Check out our must-have holiday essentials!’ Or “Looking for that perfect romantic city break? Here are some great alternatives to Paris.’
Questions like these focus on the customer and trigger them to think about their plans and preferences. Your email should offer value. You want it to be helpful – supporting people in making decisions and booking their trips.
Content needs to be unique, exciting and full of helpful information, or customers won’t engage with it. While the average customer attention span has increased, the average time spent reading an email is still just 11.1 seconds!
You can further improve engagement and drive revenue from your airport marketing emails with personalised, dynamic content. Use previous booking data, analytics and consumer behavioural traits to feature the destinations your customers are most likely interested in and the products they’re most likely to buy. 84% of customers say being treated like a person (rather than a number) is crucial to winning their wallet share, and an easy way to achieve that is through personalised email content.
Make the most of a seasonal theme
If you design your email campaign around promoting a particular travel or holiday season, it pays to make it really clear which holiday you’re celebrating.
One way to do this is with the design of the email. For example, an email sharing Valentine’s Day travel ideas can reflect the holiday in colour scheme and with romantic themed photos and gifs. Ensure all of your images have direct clickable links to the relevant landing page on your website and pull in elements of social media and user-generated content to create a sense of community.
Remember, for a seasonal email design to make sense, it must be consistent. Maintain your theme across the email, including the subject line, copy and call to action. Integrate our easy Drag-and-Drop Email Builder with your airport CRM to create professional and personalised seasonal marketing emails at speed.
And don’t forget to optimise your emails for all devices. As travel sales on mobile continue to grow, it’s crucial customers can continue the booking journey on a single device if they want to. Rezcomm Drag and Drop Email Builder is fully mobile optimised.
Offer specific seasonal discounts
Travel companies traditionally see a spike in sales in January and July, but there are other seasonal opportunities to promote travel. For example, Christmas markets, Valentine’s Day, or travel focused around a specific event such as a big sporting tournament are all relevant to someone on your mailing list.
It pays to spend plenty of time planning for each seasonal campaign. First, prepare a series of offers and emails that will go out in the run-up to each main date. Then, build excitement around your products and destinations by sending subscribers flash sales, discounts and personalised voucher codes.
It also pays to check out your competitors’ offerings and implement a seasonal referral offer, encouraging people to share your promotions with friends, family, and colleagues.
A ‘countdown’ series of emails is an excellent way to encourage customer spend and boost engagement. With Rezcomm’s Email Sending Service, you can easily set this up to send completely automatically using workflows that engage every subscriber with personalised content based on their interests and buying behaviour.
Segment your airport’s email marketing database to help personalise communications and make sure you’re targeting the most relevant offers to customers that are likely to convert from them.
Get the timing right
Timing is everything. It’s one of the much-quoted basics of email marketing to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Consider timings from a logistical point of view – when do you want people to book? But also think about customer buying behaviour. For example, when will people most likely open, click through and engage with your airport marking emails?
Because Rezcomm partners with airports worldwide, we have valuable insights into the buying behaviours of over a quarter of a billion passengers. This means we can advise your airport about the best time to send emails for your location.
However, when you’re scheduling a whole email sequence, you may want to avoid always sending campaigns at the same time of day. This could make your campaign seem too automated and mean you never connect with certain customers who don’t fit the typical pattern of email engagement. Instead, we advise continually testing different seasonal email marketing send times to maximise email reach.
Use customer segmentation
Customer segmentation is vital. And with the Rezcomm Marketplace, it’s simple too. By segmenting your customer lists according to shared attributes, behaviours or purchase history, your airport can send communications to targeted groups of people. For example:
- Loyal customers
- Different genders
- Single people, couples of families
- Specific age groups
- People who always buy luxury or business-type products and services
- Car owners or public transport users
- Last-minute bookers
- Customers who browse city breaks
- People who book all-inclusive family holidays
The list is almost endless!
Don’t worry – this type of targeting is not as cynical as it sounds. Segmentation is a proven marketing strategy that leads to higher click-through rates and more conversions, but at the same time, it offers real value to customers. As a result, the products and offers that arrive in your customers’ inboxes are relevant and valuable to each person.
Don’t ignore the weather
The weather can impact travel plans both at home and at the intended destination. For example, a projected lack of snow in an otherwise popular ski resort will obviously affect the popularity of that destination. Therefore, it’s wise to be sensitive to current news and events, and plan alternative campaigns.
Capture the imagination
The average office worker receives a staggering 121 emails per day, so any seasonal marketing emails you send will need to stand out in their inbox and entice them to click open.
Harness the power of scarcity and FOMO (fear of missing out) with headings like “Last chance to book” and “don’t miss your chance to ace Valentine’s Day” to increase open and click-through rates.
Include images of other happy customers. User-generated content such as holiday pictures and reviews capture the imagination and really help inform people’s buying decisions, triggering a feeling of “I want that for myself.”
Appeal to people’s curiosity but offer valuable, relevant content. People don’t like clickbait, so you will turn people off if you send emails that don’t deliver the promised content.
Write a brilliant email subject
Did you know that 47% of people open an email based on the subject line? So if your heading doesn’t inspire people, they won’t read your message.
Make the heading snappy, relevant to the season and interesting. Don’t worry if it seems overly descriptive. If it’s describing something the customer wants, they will click on it.
You might be interested to hear that subject lines with 6 to 10 words deliver the highest opening rate, and featuring a person’s name can increase open rates by as much as 20%!
Improve your airport’s seasonal marketing campaigns with Rezcomm
We hope you have found our expert email marketing tips helpful. Download our brochure to learn more about our industry-leading marketing modules and get in touch to work with Rezcomm to generate even better results from your airport marketing efforts.
As Director of Communications Sarah oversees project management at Rezcomm and works with clients to deliver their ecommerce projects efficiently, on time and on budget.
