Only 31 days until I get hitched to the man of my dreams!! Eeeee, so exciting!! My bridal shower was this weekend and it was oh-so-fun. Here are a couple pics from it.
Onto today’s topic!
If you send out e-Newsletters (which you definitely should be doing!), you know it can be a LOT of work. So, you need your e-Newsletters to be effective and get results – or it’s not worth the time and energy.
There are two HUGE (yet oh-so-common) mistakes that travel agents make when creating e-Newsletters. They are really easy mistakes to make because these two things require you to do the exact OPPOSITE of what you probably think you should be doing in order to get results.
I made you a quick video explaining these two mistakes and what you need to do to get dramatically better results with your e-Newsletter. This is definitely going to surprise you!
Watch your short video now.
2 Biggest Marketing Mistakes Many Travel Agents Make – Transcript
Hello there Travel Experts! This is Heidi from marketingfortravelagents.com. Today, I’m going to share with you a strategy that’s going to help you get dramatically better results with your e-newsletters. After all, if you’re taking your time to send out e-newsletters, they should be getting you results. So today, you’re going to find out how to get dramatically better results.
The way for your e-newsletters to be dramatically more effective is by having your content focused on general travel topics as opposed to topics that are specific to your niche and the destinations you book. We have split tested it 6 ways to Sunday and the results of the test are always the same. The general content converts better and it keeps people on your email list longer and they’re much more likely to forward your emails, your newsletters to their friends, family and co-workers.
Here’s why: Let’s say that your niche is River Cruising.
You probably have a bunch of people on your email list that love river cruising and they go on a big fantastic river cruise once a year, maybe twice a year, maybe once every other year and so they’re a fantastic dream client for you. That person however though, does not want to constantly hear about river cruising. So if you’re sending out your newsletter say every week or every other week even if you’re only sending them out once a month, if you’re talking about river cruising every single time, they get bored they don’t want to hear more about it especially if they just got back from the river cruise and they’re not going on another one till next year or 2 years from now and so then they unsubscribe and now you’ve lost them out of sight, out of mind and when they’re ready to take that river cruise you’re out of sight and out of mind so they’re last likely to book with you.
Now, if you’re giving them information on a regular basis that’s just something that’s really interesting and useful like packing checklist because chances are if they go on river cruises, they also go on other types of trips and they would love to get a packing checklist. They’ve love to hear about how to take fantastic photos with their smart phone while they’re on vacation, they’ve love to hear new travel apps how to find healthy restaurants when they’re on vacation or they would love to hear about how to get through security faster and TSA pre-check and whether or not they get travel insurance.
In addition to that, consider doing some pieces of content on destinations that you don’t book. I know that sounds crazy advice but hear me out here. If I’m a traveller and I spend a descent amount of money travelling and I’m on your email list, I want to hear about really cool things.
For example, send me a newsletter on the Top 5 World’s Most Amazing Destinations that should be on everybody’s bucket list.
Now, you might not book any of those destinations and I might not ever go to those destinations but I would think that it was so fun to read that. Then I see your picture, I think of you, I remember that you do river cruises or you specialize in honeymoons or you do whatever it is that you do and I find that article’s so fun and cool and I want to forward it to my co-worker Sally and my sister Jane.
Forwarding it on to my friends, family and co-workers and I’m engaged with you I am on you newsletter list. So, 80-90% of your content should be general then 10-20% of your content can be specific to the destinations you book and your niche and so that can include fam trips that you’ve gone. Every time you go on a fam trip, you should be video taking and taking pictures and blogging and taking and doing a review of your fam trip turning that in into a great newsletter or maybe 2 different newsletters like 2 part series or even on a 3 part series if you have enough stuff to talk about depending upon the fam trip and location and all of that.
If you book a destination, let’s say, you book Fiji or Maldives and a brand new resort open, do a review of brand new resort. Things that are specific like that should be 10-20% of your content in your newsletters and then 80-90 should be general content and that is going to get you dramatically better results with your newsletter.
One more tip, every single newsletter that you send-out absolutely needs to include a clear and compelling call-to-action for your prospected clients and past clients who might be getting your newsletter to book a free consultation with you if they’re ready to start planning their next trip. So if they’re in the planning stage, they should book a free planning session with you and you want to craft a cute name for it and pitch for it and have that in each of your newsletters. It can sometimes be in the PS, it can be embedded in the copy, you can have a cute graphic that call-to action needs to be in every single newsletter that you send out and make it very clear to them how to book that session and make it very easy for them to book that session.
If you do these 2 things, you have 80-90% of your content be general and be fantastic fun articles that they love getting, tips that make them say, “Wow that was so valuable” and they want to share it with their friends, family and co-workers; they can’t wait to get the next one from you. Then you’ve got 10-20% of the time, you’re talking about something specific to your niche, your destination, a fam trip or a review of a resort or something new that opened up on an island that you book and then you have a clear and compelling call-to-action in every single newsletter for them to book a free consultation. Those 2 things alone are going help you get dramatically better results with your e-newsletters.
Now, if you’re finding that creating content actually sitting down and researching a topic, copy writing it and then editing it, doing all of that is a lot of work and you’re not getting around to it, so you’re not consistently sending out newsletter or maybe you’re not even sending one at all but you know that you should be because you absolutely should be. I’ve got good news for you. We put together something called the E-newsletter Library. We have professionally researched, professionally copy written and professionally edited 50 articles for you that are on general topics and you can get access to all of those 50 articles for a very small one time investment and then you can use them as you wish. You can use them in the current format that they’re in, you could edit them if you want to change anything about them, you can post them on your blog or send them out in your newsletters. We give you full copyrights to use them.
So if you want to get information on that, go to marketingfortravelagents.com. Go up to the little services button there and there will be a drop down box that says, E-newsletter Library and that will take you to the page with all the details. I hope that was helpful I will see you next week in our Travel Expert Insider.
Love & Success,
Heidi and Your Marketing Team
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P.S. If you like the idea of sending out e-Newsletters but hate the idea of writing them, then you’re going to love this…
We created a library of professionally written and edited e-Newsletters for you!
For a small one-time investment, you can access the ENTIRE library and use as many of the professionally written e-Newsletters as you wish.
