I was recently invited to deliver two workshop sessions at NTA’s annual Contact event, which was being held for the very first time in my hometown of Québec City. How nice to speak at an international event… and then be able to sleep in my own bed at night!
My session on Right-Time Email Marketing provided quite a few interactions, so I thought I would share with you some of the useful tips that participants enjoyed the most or that I believe travel marketers should focus on when it comes to communicating by email in this day and age.
Tip 1: A/B Testing
Is there a best time to send out newsletters to your audience? Of course there is. Should you write a title such as “Exclusive Offer: 50% during a limited time” or perhaps “Deal of the century!” might suffice? You may wonder if you should insert a photo at the beginning of your email, or rather position it further down in order not to divert the reader’s attention…
The above scenarios don’t have any silver bullet answer, as things will vary per brand, per industry and per target audiences being reached by the email or newsletter. The key thing here is to test things out to see how your audience reacts to the above A or B scenarios.
When using tools like MailChimp, you can decide to send two versions of an email to only 10% of your database, then see how users react, through open rates or click-through rates for example. Depending on the results after 24 hours, you can then send out the most impactful version to the remaining 90% of your database.
Simple enough, right? Indeed, yet it is estimated that less than 30% of email marketers actually test their content on a consistent basis!
Tip 2: Include Photos and Videos
In a world where we have less and less attention span, and consumers are bombarded with ads and content on every device, we need to keep it simple and keep it short. Photos and videos thus work wonders when it comes to communicating promotional messages while providing quality storytelling.
Read more of this article from Frederic Gonzalo
