In the fiercely competitive world of travel agencies, maintaining a steady, predictable stream of ongoing bookings is essential for long-term success.
But with such an abundant choice of agencies for travellers to choose from, standing out, enticing new customers, and retaining current ones isn’t an easy feat.
Fortunately, marketing automation is a powerful tool for travel agencies looking to boost their travel bookings without the need for additional budget, resource, and stress. By leveraging marketing automation, travel agencies can enhance efficiency, engage customers more effectively, and ultimately drive conversions.
In this guide, we explore how travel agencies can make the most of marketing automation to boost their business, focusing on key strategies and practical examples.
The benefits of Marketing Automation for Travel Agencies
If you’re unsure if marketing automation is right for your business, here are five benefits that the technology can bring to travel agencies:
Improved efficiency
No matter what your business or industry, marketing automation is well-recognised for streamlining processes and making marketing more efficient. That’s because marketing automation reduces time spent on those essential, but manual, tasks.
This allows travel agencies and marketers to focus on more high-value, strategic activities. Increasing overall productivity and results in the process.
Better targeting
Personalisation packs a punch when it comes to engaging with travellers. But sending out highly tailored communications to each individual is nearly impossible on a manual basis.
With marketing automation, travel agencies can tailor communications to specific segments based on their shared demographics, interests, or behaviour. Even better, they can implement dynamic content blocks to automatically populate emails with content, offers, and suggestions that are specific to each individual.
Effective nurturing
With the use of marketing automation, travel agencies can nurture their leads throughout the sales funnel, maintaining engagement and increasing the likelihood of bookings.
This can be achieved through automated workflows which run in the background, drip-feeding relevant information to customers to keep them engaged, and guiding them towards the point of booking.
Data-driven insights
Marketing automation can help travel agencies gather, manage, and analyse all-important data about their customer base, their demographics, and their behaviour.
With this information, travel agencies can make data-led decisions by understanding what marketing strategies work, and what don’t. Allowing for ongoing optimisation and improved results in the long term.
Achievable scalability
Growing a travel agency is exciting, but it doesn’t come without challenges.
Increased customers mean increased data, communications, and resource, all of which contribute to additional hurdles in scaling a business.
With marketing automation, travel agencies can easily handle the additional data and communications required to engage with larger amounts of customers, without the increase in workload. They simply design the right templates, and let marketing automation do the hard work for them.
Implementing Marketing Automation in Travel Agencies
By now we hope you agree that marketing automation brings a wealth of benefits to travel agencies. However, the process of implementing this technology may be holding you back.
Worry not, with the right support and guidance the process can be straightforward and seamless, incorporating the following steps:
1. Define objectives
Before you get carried away, it’s important to take a step back and identify what your travel agency wants to achieve with marketing automation. Since you’re reading this guide, we’ll take a guess that one of your main objectives is to increase travel bookings. Great!
However, it’s important to consider the finer details. Such as how much you wish to increase your bookings by, if these are from new or existing customers, or if there is a specific destination or package you wish to improve bookings for.
By defining these objectives, you can focus on the right technology, tools, and processes for your business.
2. Choose the perfect platform
Not all marketing automation platforms are created equally, so it’s important to find one that suits the specific needs of your travel agency.
We recommend researching platforms that are experienced in working with travel brands, and offer automation over a variety of channels such as email, SMS, and in-app. And of course, one that offers industry-leading support and guidance to help you get the most from your system.
3. Tidy up your data
Great data is the secret to great marketing automation. So before getting started, ensure your data is clean and tidy.
This can include dividing your audience into segments based on factors such as their demographics, travel preferences, or browsing and booking behaviour. Enabling you to easily target these groups with relevant communications.
4. Build automated workflows
Now the fun starts!
Once you have worked with your chosen provider to set up your marketing automation solution, it’s time to build some workflows. These workflows can run in the background and meet a variety of goals, such as nurturing new leads, engaging current customers, or driving travellers to book.
5. Report and optimise
Whilst marketing automation can run in the background, it’s important to regularly check in and identify areas for improvement so that your campaigns don’t stagnate.
With the use of data from your marketing automation solution, delve into results and insights to help you regularly review the performance of your campaigns, and optimise for better results.
5 automated campaigns to increase travel bookings
Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, let’s dive into a little inspiration with five of our favourite campaigns to increase travel bookings.
Welcome series
The welcome series is one of our favourite email campaigns, and with good reason.
Welcome Campaigns generate 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than regular email marketing campaigns. This point of high engagement makes welcome campaigns the perfect opportunity to encourage a first booking.
Travel agencies often have a lot of important information to share with customers, so consider breaking a welcome campaign into a mini-series, such as the below:
Email 1: Immediately after sign up
Automate a warm welcome email which introduces your travel agency, your ethos, the benefits of booking through you, and a discount for making their first booking.
Email 2: Two days later
Send a personalised list of travel destinations, based on customer segments or (if you have the data) utilising dynamic content for an even more personalised experience.
Email 3: Five days later
Share content to inspire travellers who are still unsure about making a booking, this could include traveller reviews, tips, or destination guides. And don’t forget to remind recipients of their discount code!
Personalised travel recommendations
Personalisation is the secret ingredient for encouraging bookings with travellers. So, once your agency has enough data on individual recipients, it’s time to get creative with your recommendations.
If the data you have is fairly basic, consider using segmentation to divide customers into groups based on a range of factors, including favourite destinations, preferred travel times, or predicted spend.
If your data is more sophisticated, utilise dynamic content blocks within your emails to personalise each communication to the individual recipient. This can include pulling through recent destinations they have browsed, or dates they have searched for.
Social proof: Customer experiences
According to recent research, 86% of consumers report they have been inspired to visit a specific location after seeing user-generated content about it.
Fortunately for travel agencies, their customers offer a wealth of useful content to inspire other travellers. This content can be used in the form of ratings, detailed stories, and testimonials from happy travellers who have had memorable trips via the agency.
This campaign utilises the principle of social proof by showcasing real experiences and positive reviews from satisfied travellers. By highlighting a wide range of travel experiences, agencies can build trust and encourage potential customers to see the value others have found through their services.
Automated lead nurturing
Sometimes a one-off promotion isn’t enough to encourage the more cautious travellers to book. In these instances, keeping your brand front and centre of their mind is the key to securing a booking in the long term.
Automated lead nurturing achieves this by running in the background, continuously engaging travellers with useful content and news to warm them up to your brand, offer reassurance, and guide them into booking.
Lead nurturing can be achieved through drip campaigns, which are sent at regular intervals and take travellers through a series of information, typically ending with a call to action to book.
Lead nurturing can also encompass behaviourally triggered communications to complement drip campaigns, automated based on actions such as visiting specific destination pages, or downloading travel guides.
And of course don’t forget the power of simple newsletters to nurture your leads and keep them engaged with your offering.
Abandoned booking reminders
The travel industry has one of the highest abandonment rates of all sectors, estimated to be as high as 87%. This is a significant challenge for agencies looking to boost their travel bookings.
Fortunately, marketing automation plays a significant role in reducing the abandonment rate.
These emails can be triggered when a potential traveller starts the booking process but leaves the page without completing it. This can be for a number of reasons, the most common of which should be addressed within a booking reminder email.
By utilising dynamic content, travel agencies can populate these emails with information on the booking that was abandoned, to remind the recipient and offer a gentle nudge.
Even better, they can include similar destinations for the same dates to offer the recipient a wider choice if the original destination wasn’t ‘the one’.
Complete these emails with reviews and testimonials to offer extra reassurance, contact details if the recipient has any questions, and even a discount code to provide that final incentive to book.
Post-booking engagement
Your customer has made a booking, congratulations! However, the hard work doesn’t stop once the trip is booked.
Customers provide an integral source of ongoing bookings for travel agencies. Therefore, brands must continue to engage with them, even post-booking.
Encouraging repeat bookings from customers is beneficial as much of the hard work building familiarity, trust, and rapport has already been done. Post-booking engagement, however, offers the cherry on top that can make your travel agency a brand of choice for future trips.
Simple post-travel communications such as automated travel updates and reminders through email, SMS, and in-app help to build trust with an agency and position them as an essential guide throughout their trip.
During the trip, travel agencies can send out targeted destination guides, restaurant suggestions, and activity recommendations to enhance their trip.
And post-booking, agencies can treat their customers to a VIP experience by offering them exclusive discounts or early access sales for similar destinations, riding on the post-holiday buzz, and encouraging them to book again ASAP.
Next steps
In this guide, we have explored how travel agencies can maximise the potential of marketing automation to gain a significant boost in their travel bookings.
From improving efficiency and delivering targeted communications to nurturing leads and providing data-driven insights, marketing automation provides a wealth of benefits that contribute to boosting bookings.
Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of how to increase travel bookings with marketing automation, you may well be ready to take the next step in your strategy.
If you are looking for an industry-leading marketing automation solution supported by experts in travel agencies, then Deployteq can help.
We have transformed the results of a range of brands in the travel industry such as Center Parcs, and we’re confident we can help to improve your travel bookings too.
Get in touch with our friendly team to find out more.
