Adam Oldfield, founder and CEO of Force24, has published his email marketing strategy guide, revealing the mistakes all cruise lines and travel agents should avoid.
A strong email marketing strategy is essential to communicating with cruise travelers in an engaging and memorable way.
But promoting the right offer to the right people at the right time is easier said than done, especially when other cruise lines and travel agents are trying to do the same thing.
Luckily, Adam Oldfield, founder and CEO of Force24, has some helpful tips to help you keep your email marketing strategy from becoming stale: It's all part of a clever concept he calls “content nurturing.” Cruise Industry News We spoke to Oldfield to find out more.
Most people receive dozens of marketing emails a day, most of which they ignore. Is email marketing still an effective strategy for cruise brands?
In a quiet room, the first person to yell gets the most attention, but in a room where everyone is yelling, the first person to yell gets the most attention. That's where we are with email today. We're learning to lose focus, so personalization is the key to standing out.
Why would you benefit from taking a more personalized approach to your email marketing strategy?
“It's very easy for businesses to pursue short-term gains by pushing offers, deals and discounts, but in reality what consumers want from brands is knowledge and insight. We work with brands to establish a nurturing strategy that aligns with what they're trying to achieve commercially, and get them to think about their contacts on a timeline rather than across campaigns.”
How does the concept of “content cultivation” fit into this?
The biggest goal of nurturing is to understand your audience as an individual and plan how you want them to experience each stage of your campaign.
Most marketers [think they] While you should push a general offer, what’s actually more important is taking an individual on a journey to determine what cruising means to them and then understanding what sales message will work best for that individual.
How do you decide what the right sales message is?
First off, do you look at someone's booking data and find out what you already know about them?
For example, we know when they went, where they went, and how much they spent, but we typically don't have other data to support a level of personalization. Ideally, we'd like to know their revenue and if there was a special reason that prompted them to make the initial booking.
Once you understand what's missing, you can use open source data to fill in the gaps, so the next time you're trying to sell an affordable cruise for families, you'll know exactly who to visit and what to say to them.
Where do cruise lines and travel agents tend to make mistakes when communicating via email?
One interesting thing I've observed is that marketers in the cruise industry tend to overload their emails. What they try to do is send out emails with all sorts of qualifying information that creates a lot of noise in the inbox.
By simplifying your messaging and recognizing that the email is part of a conversation (i.e., there will be another email the next day or the day after), you can be more direct and take the time to get your full message across.”
Force24 will be speaking about the power of email marketing in the cruise industry at this year's Cruise Summit, which takes place at the NewsUK offices in London Bridge on 17th June.
