Travel Newsletter Template

Why Travel Marketers Must Publish an Email Newsletter

Think about your travel marketing budget for a minute. How much are you spending on advertising and social media campaigns each month? Now think about how much of your travel marketing budget is spent on email marketing? If you are not offering an email newsletter subscription to travel consumers you are leaving booking conversion to chance.

Driving traffic to your website is easy, but what happens when people are not ready to book now? Do not make the mistake of leaving your website visitors to fend for themselves. As you probably know, as much as 97% of your visitors will leave without completing a booking. Unless you capture and remarket to those warm leads, you are missing out on your best opportunity to convert more lookers to bookers.

Email marketing has been and still proves to be the most effective online advertising medium. Still not sure about the benefits? Read our report ““ for a primer.

You may be under the impression that everyone is on social media or reachable via the Google Ad Network. Planning and booking trips is not the top reason people are hanging out on Facebook. Plus consumers are inundated with ads everywhere and all the time. Delivering opt-in messages to their inbox is still your best way to market to travelers that visited your website and are likely to book travel now or later.

Getting Started With Travel Email Marketing and Remarketing

Fortunately running an email marketing campaign is simple and costs a fraction of your online advertising spend. Email newsletter vendors provide all the tools and training you need to get started. After signing up, you can quickly add an email capture form to your website and publish a newsletter with the professionalism of the major tourism operators.

1. Sign up today for, , , or

Read our reviews of the to pick the best one for your travel industry requirements. There is no wrong choice since these are all established companies. However it pays to spend 30-60 minutes to research your options first and not face the hassle of swapping vendors in the future.

The email vendors differ slightly on price, newsletter design tools, advanced features, and customer support (very important). BookingCounts employs a combination of MailChimp and GetResponse, but don’t let that sway your decision. If you are given the option to sign up for a free (time-limited) trial, use that opportunity to test out the user friendliness for yourself.

2. Create a travel email marketing list (contact list or campaign name)

You must have at least one travel email newsletter list. This marketing list is for collecting the email addresses of people who visit your site and subscribe to your newsletter. Since all these email newsletter vendors are CAN-SPAM compliant (see our ), subscribers can opt-in and unsubscribe without worry.

Create several email lists if you wish to segment your visitors and email targeted newsletters to each. You may choose to segment by tour destination, traveler demographic, business and leisure travelers, or new leads versus past guests.