Email Marketing

Email Marketing is particularly useful when you want to interact with your customer.

It’s really a form of direct marketing. An email is sent with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a business with its current or previous customers, and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.

To conduct an email campaign you need two things – an audience and a message.

Your audience

Most businesses now have a database containing contact information for various market segments and stakeholders.

As a small tourism business, you will probably have information on all your previous visitors, and everyone who has made an enquiry about your tours, accommodation or destination. To grow your database of interested readers, encourage site visitors to sign up for a regular e-newsletter or special offers. Creating an online sign-up form is easy to do if you have a user-friendly, self-managed site.

We also recommend using a reputable autoresponder service, such as Aweber, which will store and manage your database, enabling you to send out automatic email responses when new visitors sign up, and broadcast messages to the list when you have news, offers or other messages.

Importantly, a service like this ensures that your customers see you abiding by the rules of ‘permission marketing’. This means that your audience, or email recipients, allow you to communicate with them by opting into a subscription and sending you their email address. Email that is unsolicited is usually referred to as spam and is something you want to avoid.

A good autoresponder service will also enable you to track your leads with charts and graphs showing at a glance how many new new leads you’re getting, how they sign up, where they’re located, the number of respondents who open your message, and which links they click on inside your message.

For example, aweber presents “click-thru” information in an easy-to-read pie chart - a screen dump from a message to our Hidden Jewel registrants is shown here. We were able to see from this how many people opened the message, and how many clicked on each link. Each of the colours on the chart corresponds to a URL listed below with number of visitors to each.

The message

Your message will be built around your goal, or objective, for your email campaign: for example, to encourage repeat bookings, to spread work of your latest special package, or to obtain feedback on service satisfaction.

You need to be clear about the purpose of your message and make sure it’s giving something to your readers - solving a problem, making an offer, giving a useful piece of information. Just sending out snippets of news about your business won’t get enough attention, because people want to read messages that are centred on them and their needs and wants.

A useful exercise is to ask yourself if your message achieves any of the following:

• answers a ‘want’ among my audience that isn’t yet being met …
• addresses an issue that hasn’t yet been tackled effectively …
• taps into a new trend or event that can be used as the main focus …
• rides on a surprising statistic or scenario that is likely to grab attention.

For example, have you created a new package in response to enquiries? are you the first to offer a particular kind of tour for children? are you paying closer attention to your environmental footprint? are you offering special rates during a high-profile local event? have you come across another useful site that makes holiday planning easier? do you have surprising information that might encourage your prospects to look again at your region as a holiday destination?

Communicating messages like this encourages a continuing conversation with your customers and prospects, building trust and inspiring action.