The travel industry has had a tough year.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And many travel brands are fast ramping up activity to increase those all-important travel bookings.
Key to them achieving this is utilising personalisation in their marketing efforts.
That’s because 57% of tourists believe that brands should personalise their shopping experience based on their personal preferences, behaviours, and past purchases.
And 36% of customers are more likely to pay a higher price for travel experiences based on their own behaviour profiles.
Fortunately, there are lots of creative ways for travel brands to use personalisation in their marketing.
Here are 6 of our favourites:
Targeted recommendations
A sensible place to start is with targeted recommendations.
Instead of wasting precious email and website space promoting the same destinations to everyone, help your buyers discover the locations and promotions that they are actually looking for.
This can be achieved through segmented campaigns, led by preference, purchase, or behavioural data.
Alternatively, brands can utilise dynamic content. Which enables them to track buyers’ favourite locations, hotels, attractions, and restaurants. Then target them with highly personalised destination recommendations.
Even better, the more the buyer engages with your dynamic content, the more intelligent it will become. Further fine-tuning their preferences and improving their experience.
RFM segments
RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis allows brands to group customers into segments based on their past purchases. For instance, how recently, how often, and how much they have bought from their brand.
RFM analysis can enable travel brands to segment these customers based on who is more likely to respond to promotions, and who is most likely to spend more.
This means that travel brands can tailor their communications based on these segments. Promoting more expensive destinations or VIP perks to their higher spending customers. Or upselling and cross-selling to their most recent purchasers, for instance.
RFM analysis also has the benefit of increasing ROI for travel brands. They can focus their marketing efforts on those most likely to purchase. Instead of wasting time and money on those who are less likely.
Live pricing and promotions
Keeping your email and website updated with the latest prices, discounts, and deals can be a resource-intensive manual job.
However, if you want these prices and promotions to also be personalised, it’s almost impossible to achieve manually.
Fortunately, dynamic content can help.
By connecting your relevant feeds (such as pricing and deals) to a live image, you can automatically display the latest travel deals and prices at every email open or landing page refresh. This tactic also works well for other changeable information, such as reviews and ratings.
This means that buyers won’t be misled if prices have gone up or deals have expired. And they will be exposed to your latest and greatest offers, automatically.
Geotargeting
Travel brands can utilise geotargeting to identify where in the world recipients are opening their emails or using their browsers. And tailor their promotions accordingly.
Firstly, this eliminates the chances of a travel brand promoting destinations in a buyers’ hometown, or local area. Which would likely be wasted marketing.
Secondly, when dealing with lockdown and travel restrictions, geotargeting can help travel brands to establish where in the world their buyer is. And personalise their destinations accordingly.
This year in the UK, for instance, many consumers may choose to stay closer to home due to travel reactions, budget restraints, and health concerns.
Countdown timers
Countdown timers are ideal for adding urgency to your email and website communications.
And urgency is important in marketing. In fact, promotional emails that convey a sense of urgency have at least 14% higher click-to-open rates, 59% higher transaction-to-click rates, and twice as high transaction rates compared to regular marketing emails.
To help increase travel bookings, brands can use countdown timers when promoting a limited-time deal or offer. This may give buyers that nudge they need to purchase.
Countdown timers can also be highly personalised, based on a tailored offer for a specific recipient. Or relating to a purchase or booking that a customer has made.
Countdown timers also just look great. They are eye-catching, and offer an interesting visual that is different from the regular email and website designs.
Image source – Pinterest
Live weather
Live weather forecasts are a great tactic that can be used by travel marketers in the run-up to a holiday.
However, it’s also a great tactic to increase travel bookings.
Travel brands can show the weather forecast in a specific destination they are promoting, to encourage recipients to book a trip and make the most of the fabulous weather.
Similarly, if the weather is looking dismal in their recipient’s home location, travel brands can use this to encourage them to book a holiday somewhere hot and sunny.
And just like countdown timers, live weather forecasts offer a fun and engaging visual to grab the attention of recipients.
Image Source – FreshRelevance
Are you a travel brand looking to increase travel bookings?
As well as personalisation, there are lots of other tools and tactics we can offer to support your business.
Simply get in touch with our team of experts to hear more, or book a demo of the Pure360 platform.