Email marketing may be arguably the oldest digital marketing tactic there is, and it may have a bad reputation thanks to years of misuse and abuse, but it remains one of the easiest and most popular marketing methods there is – and, as email marketing solutions and CRMs get smarter, it is becoming increasingly effective. Here are some stats that may surprise you:
Roughly 80% of marketers have reported an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months. (HubSpot, 2020)
Email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses. (Campaign Monitor, 2019)
The number of global email users is set to grow to 4.48 billion users by 2024. (Statista, 2019)
So far from being a dead technology, increasingly replaced by messaging, global email usage is growing, and its effectiveness as a marketing tool is actually increasing.
One of the primary reasons for this is the increasing use of email list segmentation. Sending carefully targeted emails to a segmented list is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies there is – far more so than just blasting out the same email to your entire list. A 2017 Mailchimp survey found that segmented emails get 14.3% more opens than unsegmented ones, and achieve a staggering 100.95 increase in clickthrough rates. And with contemporary CRMs and email marketing solutions making segmenting easier than ever, there’s no longer any excuse not to segment your email marketing.
One of the key challenges to travel marketers when it comes to segmentation is that most of their customer data is not in their CRM system (if they even have one); it’s in their booking system (if they have one!), or various spreadsheets, or in many cases it isn’t even centralised at all and is spread across various hard drives, email accounts and other databases. Even when it is readily accessible, it may not contain the kind of information – travel preferences, interests, favourite destinations, preferred airlines/hotels etc – that is required for effective segmented email campaigns.
To do this effectively, you need a booking system that captures the right data about your travellers, and which integrates with your CRM system to enable you to build segmented lists based on that data, as well as performing other marketing tasks such as retargeting and analytics. And that’s where a solution like eRoam can help.
Whilst eRoam doesn’t come with a full-function CRM solution (we prefer to leave that to the experts and focus on what we do best), its customer area captures all the relevant data you will need to run segmentation campaigns. As well as the basics – name, address, nationality etc – we dive deeper into client data and capture details such as interests (eg Food, Photography, Golf etc), preferred airlines & flight class, preferred hotel chains & room type, preferred car rental company and vehicle type, and favourite destinations. You can also separate these by type of travel, with different preferences for leisure, family and business trips.
Then, via API, you can connect eRoam to your CRM solution and export this data to add it to the client’s CRM record. Now the magic happens. Let’s say, for example, that you have a special deal from Emirates on business class flights to Sydney – all you need to do is create a segmented list of clients whose preferred airline in Emirates, whose preferred flight class is business, and who have Australia in their preferred destinations, and bingo, you have a very clearly targeted list of people who will be more likely to be attracted by your deal. And if they come back and ask you to put together a trip for them, at the itinerary building stage eRoam will remember those preferences and apply them to the quote.
Email segmentation and personalisation at scale used to be a challenge, and it still is if you’re not collecting the right data. By harnessing the travel knowledge of eRoam and the marketing power of your CRM system, you can transform your email marketing strategy and see your click rates – and conversion rates – start to soar!