Somehow email has survived every change the internet has gone through. Everyone has an email address and checks it most days, which means it’s a great way to market. But there’s a lot to go through before you start email marketing campaigns
The first was sent in 1971 and it has survived every iteration of the internet since. Every so often, someone comes along and pronounces it dead but it always remains useful. Everyone has an address, checks it every day, and it feels secure (even if it isn’t). Because of that, email marketing campaigns are still a very good use of your time.
However, because we are all very used to being marketed to online we can automatically filter out the emails we’re not interested in. Also, many marketing emails will not make it through spam filters even if the person receiving them has signed up. Several laws need to be followed, especially for companies that operate globally.
Despite that, they are still considered to be a good way to stay in regular contact with new and old customers and allow you to build strong relationships. Email is an excellent way to educate customers on your products and offers. It can drive repeat business — and it is relatively cheap.
How to set up your email marketing campaigns
By this point, you will have defined and segmented your target audience, set your goals and worked on crafting a lot of compelling content. If not, do those before setting up your email marketing campaigns. The next stage is choosing the tool that you will use to send your emails. Gmail only allows you to send 500 emails a day, so it’s not going to work.
There are two types of tools to choose from. One will simply send emails and is good for small businesses who aren’t looking for much else, such as Mailchimp. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool will do much more but will often cost more once the email lists start to grow. These will include Hubspot and Zoho.
A CRM will help you to manage every touchpoint with your customers. Instead of having different notes everywhere, these can track and connect each conversation so that they are found under one contact. Email marketing is not their main function, but because it is so closely related many software providers have this integrated and it is often their most used tool.
Upload your email addresses to the tool and then choose which sort of campaign you are going to try first. You will already have a lot of emails within your company that you can use, and more can be collected through your website using lead generation techniques, such as discounts, small competitions or freebies.
Then create your email, test it, and send it out into the world. Analysing your results is very important, as always. You will want to look at your open, click-through, bounce and unsubscribe rates. There are many other metrics to examine as you get deeper into sending campaigns. A fully-fledged CRM will automate some of this for you, such as cleaning your email list of customers it thinks will never make a purchase.
Types of email marketing
Transactional emails are those that you will be sending all the time. These are likely to be tours and activity operators’ first contact with a customer unless they have sent a pre-booking request for information. They will contain all the confirmations and information a customer requires. You will already know these aren’t always read by the number of people who arrive without knowing what they should do. However, they are an excellent place to upsell the tour that has been purchased.
Welcome emails are often the first contact that a business might have with a customer, but this might not be the case for tour operators. They are usually sent when a potential client signs up for your email list. These emails will contain some thanks for signing up and some confirmations that the receiver did indeed want to sign up. It’s important to get the tone of these emails right and they can be used to share a little bit more about your company. Include a few blogs and some products but keep it light.
Somehow over the past few years, email came back in a big way. Newsletters are the new blogs. People seem to think this is because social feeds are so cluttered and Google delivers increasingly poor results. So people began to take control, decide what to subscribe to and curate their experience again. It also never left as a business communication channel — no one stopped checking their inbox.
These newsletters are less about pushing visitors directly to your site, although that is always a goal. The emails are the content. These emails should be treated as a blog post or article in itself, followed by links to your product and blog. If your email marketing is solely full of offers, that unsubscribe link is getting hit. Think of these newsletters as branding.
However, newsletters usually aim to get people from their inboxes onto the website. These are full of links to different stories and blogs. You should be aiming to convert the customer once they are on your site. Products and offers should be included more frequently in these emails.
Direct marketing emails are probably going to have the lowest open rates and the highest unsubscribe rates. These are the emails that we’re able to skip past with barely a second glance. Their only goal is to make a sale and if you get it right, they will convert — especially if you have an engaged audience.
Keeping your customers engaged is the purpose of nurturing campaigns. The longer someone has been receiving your emails, the less likely they are to open them and take action. Nurturing emails are often automated within a CRM so that they are sent whenever a lead hits a certain point. For example, they’ve been subscribed for more than a year but haven’t opened an email in two months. For operators with a low level of repeat business, they won’t be that useful but they will be for those with regular guests.
When the trigger is pulled, the CRM will send a series of emails. These should contain information and stories that people might want to learn about your business or area, and what is coming up in the future. Nurturing emails are quite broad because you’re fishing to get someone to re-engage. You can segment these so that each group receives different information that they may be interested in.
Re-engagement emails are a more direct version of a nurturing campaign. They will be sent when everything else has been tried to a customer who has probably been lost. These will contain no real marketing but instead a link to a survey for feedback, or sometimes a very straight: “We’re removing you from our list. We’re very sorry to see you go.” If these people aren’t going to make a purchase, then you are better off not having them on your list.
Good reviews are the best marketing a tour operator can have. If you’re not sending out an email with links to every site where you can be reviewed after every trip, start now. These are some of the most important emails you will send. They should be automated to go out after a certain period following the trip.
There is a smorgasbord of email marketing platforms to choose from. The most famous are Mailchimp and Hubspot. Zoho, Drip and ActiveCampaign are others that are commonly used. Each one works to fill a specific niche. Mailchimp is simple to use but doesn’t offer many of the more complicated options. It’s good for those starting out and with a small budget.
Hubspot aims for the mid-market. It offers a lot more than Mailchimp and is a fully-fledged customer relationship management (CRM) tool. It has a free tier but becomes quite expensive quickly as you grow. Hubspot is also one of the less flexible options, but it is usually fine for small- and medium-sized companies and has plenty of features.
Zoho works with a similar market to Hubspot but it’s a bit more complicated. Again, this is a full CRM. It has more automation and good lead scoring and analytics. Zoho’s free plan is much more limited than the others but it’s generally considered to be more affordable.
Drip aims at the e-commerce segment and is one of the easiest CRMs to use. It has good analytics and integrations, and its automation is good — particularly when it comes to cleaning email lists. Drip is on the more expensive side and the customer service could be better.
ActiveCampaign is a full-suite CRM that has a steep learning curve. Its dashboard is horrible. However, it more than does the job that it’s meant to. Once you’ve got a handle on how it works, it’s full of features and automation. ActiveCampaign also comes in at the cheaper end of the spectrum.
There are many other email-sending tools and CRMs to choose from. Think about what features you need, read the reviews and check how good companies are with customer service, maintenance and updates.
Privacy and data protection
Covering the different laws across different jurisdictions that affect your ability to send emails is a whole article in itself. Depending on who you talk to, privacy is either taken very seriously or not seriously at all. If you break any laws, likely, you will only get into trouble if you’re a (very) large company. In Europe, the law that covers this is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in California, it is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and in Canada, it is the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, (PIPEDA).
These are the main ones to pay attention to. If your website can be accessed in these jurisdictions, then you need to follow their procedures. Companies are being fined under GDPR, with Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Google and British Airways all paying hefty fines. It’s hard to tell exactly who is being fined under CCPA, but a grocery chain got caught.
What this means for you in terms of email is: make sure you honour every single unsubscribe request and if someone requests the information you hold on them, provide it.
Make sure you don’t send spam
If you take a look at your spam box, you’re going to see that there are a lot of emails that you have subscribed to at some point. That’s because these have been scored badly by whichever service provider you use. It’s something marketers are constantly trying to avoid and one reason why you want people who aren’t interested in your products to be taken off your email lists.
Google has announced new measures to fight spam received by Gmail. These include ensuring you have an unsubscribe button if you send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail inboxes. These are part of an ongoing battle to stop fraud.
Your email provider or CRM may provide a checklist for each batch of emails that you send to keep you on the right track. These can include changing the wording, not adding attachments and using the 80 / 20 rule for text and images. Link shorteners, such as Bit.ly, are a surefire way to get your emails delivered to junk. They shouldn’t be used on social media either — they’re commonly used for scams.
Other parts of the process are more difficult. You want to maintain a healthy email marketing campaign. This means following the law, unsubscribing people when they ask, and having a good reputation. If you have ended up on a blacklist, it is challenging to get off. That means you want good open rates, make sure no one sends your emails to the junk folder, and don’t send campaigns to people who aren’t interested.