Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools that businesses use for reaching out to their target audiences and customers, with travel businesses being no exceptions. As per a survey, as much as 80% of businesses globally use email marketing for new customer acquisition as well as sustenance. Another statistics that points towards the effectiveness of email marketing, a whopping 66% of email users ended up making purchases through emails. It is for these reasons that email marketing has gained precedence over various other methods for converting and retaining customers.
With all these stats and market favor supporting email as a useful medium for reaching out to the target audience, it is only pertinent that a travel business learns an inevitable element of email marketing, i.e., how to build an email list.
When it comes to listing down strategies and ways for curating an email list of target audiences, the options are immense. Thus, zeroing in on some best strategies that a travel business can utilize as a successful way of how to build an email list. But before that, let’s have a quick look at what an email list means and why a travel business should build the list.
Know The Meaning And Importance Of An Email List
An email list closely resembles the contact list saved in one’s phone, with the difference that it refers to the email contact IDs. The list is used to send out business prompts like offers and upcoming events to individuals subscribed to such a service via the travel website, blog, newsletter, or any other mode of communication.
For travel businesses, a well-targeted email list can go a long way in earning new customers, increasing business revenue, and attaining such other marketing goals. A travel business may need to send various types of emails to different target audience funnels, like promotional offers, newsletters, deals and discounts, etc. for which an email list is needed that helps with better targeting. The need for email marketing also emerges from the fact that customers are more likely to know about your travel offers when conveyed through an email than any other mode. This is typically because emails are personalized messages reaching directly to the individual in their private messages.
Now that we know why an email list is important, let’s move on to answering how to build an email list for your travel business.
Here’s How To Build An Email List For Your Travel Business
If you are a travel business planning to expand your customer base or earn higher revenue, knowing how to build an email list can be the stepping stone to implementing various email marketing strategies. Find out some best ways to build this list.
Through Surprise Pop-Up Forms
One of the first solutions on how to build an email list comprises collecting subscription permissions through surprise pop-ups. Your website may receive visitors from a broad target audience base and knowing their intent can be difficult unless you get their permission for pushing in periodic newsletters. One of the best ways to collect this free will permission and collect their contact email is via surprise pop-up forms.
These are well-drafted and catchy pop-ups that serve as dynamic tools for collecting emails from website visitors without needing them to take any additional steps for subscription. Surprise pop-up forms present an active and direct collection of visitor emails. These surprise pop-up forms may be designed for better visibility once you have opened the site and may appear right after a few seconds of scrolling. You can also choose to present these pop-ups to visitors while they are leaving the website, more commonly known as exit intent pop-ups.
Surprise pop-up forms are a great way to gain subscribers as well as create an email list for future targeting.
Traditionally Through Opt-In Forms
If you want to take a more traditional approach to email collection of website visitors, you can resort to presenting opt-in forms on your official travel website. These are similar to surprise pop-ups in their appearance, but are more subtle and directed through strong CTA buttons on targeted web pages.
These opt-in forms can be crucial points of connection between the travel website and its visitor. They can also be a great resource for sending upcoming offers and discounts on travel purchases from time to time.
Gaining Subscribers Through Embedded Forms For Signing Up
Another useful way of how to build an email list for travel businesses is through embedded forms. These are sign up forms traditionally used, and probably for the longest, for gaining visitor attention to the subscriptions.
These embedded sign-up forms are often targeted on website pages that receive high traffic. They are strategically placed on the page sidebar, footer or header for maximum visibility and can conveniently nudge the visitor to sign up for various subscriptions that the travel agency plans to offer. While seemingly obvious, embedded forms have proven to be a useful way of gaining subscribers typically for online businesses, and can work equally well for travel operator websites as well.
By Providing Access To Content Hub Pages
A travel business can always tap the power of content to convert its site visitors into subscribers. It is also a proven way on how to build an email list across various industries and business verticals, including the travel industry.
The old content of a website is often phased out as new content is generated and published. They can be a valuable source of information for many target audience segments and can be utilized for a content hub creation related to topics of interest or demand.
Such a hub creation not only brings user focus to the old content hosted but also helps improve the page’s visibility on search engines. Not to mention, email subscription glides on smoothly as an added advantage of such content hub creation.
Once you have created a content hub, you can link in the best content as per relevant topics on this hub and add an update box with opt-in feature that the hub visitor can agree to. Content hub creation is also a great way to earn organic traffic on the internet for your website.
By Offering Subscription Incentive
More targeted email list creations also use incentive as an offer for your travel website visitors when they subscribe to the travel updates. It is also one of the fastest and most fruitful ways on how to build an email list for travel businesses.
These incentives offered simply address the immediate gratification that visitors might be seeking, thus turning out to be one of the most successful modes of gaining email subscribers. The incentives need not be elaborate and can be as simple as a suggestion checklist of the best travel places to visit for the season. Travel businesses seeking to provide additional value to visitors through these incentives can also provide elaborate trip itineraries along with places to explore and such other aspects.
One of the best ways to choose subscription incentives is to know what the targeted audience segment is looking for. Offers, deals, and discounts can be other valuable incentives to offer against these subscriptions.
Through Landing Page Targeting
While the process of how to build an email list traditionally remained localized to the website home page, many travel businesses are experimenting with creating dedicated landing pages to gain visitor subscriptions. Utilized mostly as a part of email marketing campaigns, these email opt-ins on landing pages are created with a sense of urgency, allowing visitors to gain through limited time offers.
Tapping the impulsive needs of travel enthusiasts to make booking during sales, these opt-ins allow redirection to a landing page rather than the website home page. These landing pages are designed sparsely with few intriguing elements like focus on a particular trip booking offer at discounted rates so the visitor does not need to check multiple things and can focus on the offer in place for signing in with their email IDs.
Via Gamification Interactions
While not widely popular in the world of travel websites, gamification interactions are steadily catching up as a means of gaining email subscriptions. These out of the box ideas of how to build an email list can keep offer availability interactive through game format embedding on dedicated web pages.
SIte visitors not only find these interactions fun but also spend longer time on the web pages, exploring various winning options across a spectrum of offers. The presence of an impressive content copy is still necessary to keep visitors interested and pitch just the right offers to add value to their efforts apart from extending a fun interaction.
By Offering Giveaways
Contests can be more of an attractive prospect to participate in for travel website visitors than simple sign-in forms requesting subscriptions. Travel businesses can thus arrange giveaway contests offering exciting gifts to the winners of such contests, and in turn reach out to a wide base of target audience, requesting them to participate and add emails as their contact details.
For travel businesses, giveaway contests are a great way to gain email subscriptions of website visitors as the enthusiastic traveling lot often looks for exploration and experimentation to add to their overall experiences.
Roping In Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are a great way to reach out to travel website visitors with a request of email subscription. The business can offer them value in return in the form of free gifts, travel guides, restaurants to explore, places to visit, etc. These lead magnets can be presented in a multitude of forms. Pop quizzes are one of the most prominent lead magnets used for gaining email subscribers.
Via Social Media Marketing Campaigns
Another great way to gather email subscriptions for travel businesses would be through social media marketing campaigns. Social media can today serve as a useful link for generating travel business leads, running ad campaigns, and landing page linking along with email list creation.
One of the best ways to tap social media for gaining email subscriptions is through a display of targeted lead generation cards.
Conclusion
In all these ways on how to build an email list for travel businesses, the integration of killer content still holds the centerstage. You may also want to explore options like using strong CTAs, email list-marketing software integration and referral programs as a way to reach out to your targeted audience for email subscriptions and create the much valued email lists.
Building your travel website on innovative platforms like Pathfndr can ease email list creation too through its huge travel database collected from across the globe. Travel operators can also leverage over 1,000 travel business partnerships for implementing their email and other marketing campaigns. A host of other benefits remain to be tapped in the Platform for travel operators.
Check out the bunch of benefits that Pathfndr has to offer with travel website building, to get set and go with your travel business online!