17 Oct 2014 Top 5 Features of Email Marketing Software for Tour Operators

Email is by far the number one way that businesses communicate with their customers, because that’s how people want to be contacted. In fact 77% of consumers want to get marketing messages via email (Marketing Land).

Emails are accessed anywhere, at any time, via mobile and at the desk. They’re a great way to encourage loyalty with past customers, and send out deals to prospective customers.

If you’re a tour or activity operator who’s looking for email marketing software to send out promotions to your contacts, make sure it allows you to easily…

1. Manage contacts

Your contact database has to be easy for you to use, so that you don’t spend hours juggling multiple spreadsheets to segment and create lists.

For example, if you want to send an email to everyone who booked your tour through Groupon and lives in Sydney, then it should take a couple minutes for you to prepare the list.

You must be able to:

• Easily import lists of your customers, and potential customers.
• Further segment your lists by demographic or behavioral traits.
• Add custom fields to your contact records (eg. You can add a “Booked Through” field to see wich channel they booked through).
• Merge lists.

2. Manage campaigns

You and your staff are probably pressed for time as it is. Instead of spending your time fiddling with your email tool, you’re better off servicing your customers out on your tours or at the office.

This is why execution-type features are so important – they can be a massive time saver.

You must be able to:

• Schedule emails. This is a basic must-have feature.
• Send auto responder emails (eg. an automatic email goes out after someone fills in your inquiry form).
• Upload images and files to the software’s server, so you can do a quick search for a past image you have used.
• Integrate with the tools you use (eg. your online booking software). This kind of integration would allow all of your customers who booked through your website to be automatically added to your email marketing software as a contact. Rezdy works with Zapier to allow for this.
• AB split test your emails. This is probably a nice-to-have, but it allows you to create two variations of the same email, and shows you which one performed the best.

3.  Create emails

It shouldn’t take ages for you or your staff to create a professional looking email. In fact, pre-set templates should be available for you to choose from and customise. All you should need to be armed with is your logo and images of your customers on tour.

You must be able to:

• Quickly figure out how to use the email creation interface.
• Add images and links within the text, edit fonts, headings, and text sizes.
• Edit HTML code of the email.
• Personalise the email with the recipient’s first name, and the tour they went on.
• Easily preview the email while you’re writing it.
• Test the email by sending it to yourself or a set of email addresses.

4. Measure results

Your email marketing software should allow you to track metrics associated with your emails. Without knowing these metrics, how are you supposed to know what works or set goals?

For example, you can see that Seasonal Tour Promotion A gets a higher click through rate than Seasonal Tour Promotion B, but Seasonal Tour Promotion B results in more sales.

You must be able to:

• See how many receive, open, click through, unsubscribe, and forward your email.
• See how many sales you can attribute to a particular email.
• See a snapshot of the above information in a digestible format, using imagery like graphs and charts.

5. Get support

With any software service, support is a key consideration in your selection process. The ability to get to the information you need – and fast – is necessary to make the most of your investment.

You must be able to:

• Access much of the information you need online by yourself. Things like blogs, webinars, FAQs, written and video tutorials are all a part of this.
• Contact your provider through email, live chat, and over the phone.
• Submit and track support tickets.

Connect your email marketing tool to your booking software

Within Rezdy, you can send automated booking confirmation, reminder and follow up emails. And through our Zapier integration, you can automate tasks between Rezdy and heaps of email marketing tools.

So if you’re looking for all-in-one booking software, try Rezdy for free. No obligation, no credit card required.

Topics email, marketing, tour operator, tour operator software