Ag Voice | Ahoy there! You've got mail!

Forty two years ago, Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email using ARPANET. Four decades later, email has evolved into one of the most cost effective forms of direct marketing. On the sidelines of the email marketing workshop conducted by Experian CheetahMail at the IAMAI Travel and Tourism Summit 2014, Bhavneet Sekhon, Head Operations- Marketing Services, Experian Services India, explains why email marketing is not only quick and efficient, but has led to new avenues in monitoring consumer behaviour in the travel and tourism sector.

The 21st century has welcomed the era of up-to-the-second, real-time email personalization and responsive mailers. With filtering technology gaining significance, email marketers are constantly innovating in order to reach their target market while negotiating spam filters.

Over the last couple of years, the travel and hospitality vertical has employed email marketing for greater customer engagement through targeted offer driven emailers and loyalty programs. At the same time, leading brands have made known their need for data to be able to send personalized content to their subscribers’ basis their past engagements. This includes re-examining historical email behaviour trends and transactional data for running automated campaigns like shopping cart abandonment, post-purchase/thank you campaigns and loyalty programs. In order to get relevant reporting and analytics to enable these programs, email automation plays a key role, and players expect their ESPs to provide this relevant data.

As per Experian’s APAC benchmark report on email marketing, email volumes for travel and hospitality players peaked in the last two quarters of the year with the maximum volumes being sent in February and March before the onset of the summer vacation season in India. In terms of response metrics, the overall open rates for Travel players during the October-December 2013 period were 20% lower as compared to the same period in 2012 while unique openers were down 9% as compared to 2012.

An effective email marketing campaign ensures that targeted and personalised email messages reach the right target audience at the right time. The below tips can aid travel and hospitality players to effectively tailor their email communication for greater ROI.

Get your keywords right

‘Offers’, ‘comfort’, and ‘entertainment’are frequently highlighted words in airline emails. Including such keywords in the subject line of an email win airline customers over. Airline emails with the word ‘comfort’ in the subject line have a 40 percent higher click-to-open rate than emails that do not mention the word. For travel agencies, emails with Dollar / Rupee offers in the subject line garner 14% higher open rates and 16% higher click rates.Hotel emails with the word ‘escape’in the subject line have seven percent higher open rates and nine percent higher click rates than other hotel emails. Email provides a means for ongoing conversations with travellers across all travel categories.

Go mobileForty-seven percent of email opens are on mobile devices and 80% of the subscribers delete an email if it doesn’t look good on their mobile device!

Forty-eight percent of airline email opens occurred on mobile devices in Q1 2014, forty nine percent of travel agencies email opens and fifty four percent of hotels email opens also occurred on mobile devices in the same period while the majority of clicks were still received on desktops. Therefore, emails need to be optimised for all platforms / devices in order to ascertain maximum click-through rates.

Time yourself

Hotel customers engage most with emails sent during the months of June, July, and January. There may be an opportunity for hotel brands to increase email volume during these months to further engage customers when they are most receptive to email. 

Loyalty programs are the key

Hotel loyalty email programs enjoy high engagement rates, with a 49 percent lift in unique open rates for loyalty mailings compared to non-loyalty mailings (28 percent for loyalty emails compared to 19 percent for other hotel campaigns).

Keep them engaged

Email provides a means for ongoing conversations with travellers across all travel categories. Over other promotional travel emails, triggered campaigns like welcome and thank you emails sent throughout the travel experience have 33% higher unique open rates and 90% higher unique click rates. | By Bhavneet Sekhon, Head Operations- Marketing Services, Experian Services India Pvt. Ltd.

About The Author: Bhavneet Sekhon currently heads the account management, client servicing, pre-sales and technology teams for Experian’s digital Marketing Services (EMS) SBU in India. With a rich and diversified marketing career spanning nine years, she adds valuable insight and expertise to Experian India’s Marketing Services team. She is well-versed in marketing communications, digital marketing and sales enablement.  She has worked in diverse marketing roles with renowned technology companies such as TIBCO Software, Rave Technologies- part of Northgate Information Solutions Limited and Kale Accelya.

Bhavneet holds a Masters degree in International Business from K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai and graduated from Delhi University with a Bachelor of Commerce degree.

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