Many travel businesses today still rely on email for marketing, but they could be doing it more effectively, writes Andrew Hennigan

Despite the popularity of social media, 40 years after it was introduced, email is still the one tool everyone can use to communicate with customers, partners and colleagues. Most people have much more advanced communication apps on their phones and laptops, but the problem is that there isn’t any single alternative that works for everyone. The need to contact people in different countries using different devices means that businesses will have to continue using email for a few years yet.

In fact EyeforTravel research in 2014 found that:

• Email is by far the preferred mode of contact for customers (55%) while on the trip, followed by push notifications through an app (30%)

But, simple though it might appear, email is actually quite hard to get right, but there are three simple rules that will help.

1.  Ensure the message is delivered

One of the hazards of email – especially for marketing emails is that Internet service providers block many emails.

“Many marketing managers simply don’t realise how few of their emails are actually being delivered into their target’s inbox,” says Jason Sullock, the UK Digital Marketing Manager at Zeta Interactive. “ISPs are constantly changing their blocking and filtering technologies to protect their customers from spam, so when they see huge volumes of the same email, or regular cycles of the same activity, or key words or phrases within emails, they automatically start downgrading the sender’s reputation”.

There are many ways to avoid including personalising messages to make them more relevant, avoiding overuse of the same email list and being extra careful to send emails only to people who asked or them.

Email tools can provide useful statistics about the deliverability of emails, but it also helps to create a few monitoring accounts on different providers just to see what happens to your own emails. In some cases the email might not actually be blocked, but simply sidelined into a ‘promotions’ folder where it is unlikely to be seen.

2.  Keep your messages brief

Back in 2005 the time customers spent reading an email was believed to be 15-20 seconds. This left the marketer two to three seconds to get their key message across. Continued fragmentation of both channels and technology means that it’s only become harder since. So for any email message, whether it’s for marketing or simply communicating with a colleague, brevity is one way to make sure an email is read and understood. “Say what you mean in a few words as possible,” says Sullock.

And it’s not just the length. Today more than half of emails are read on smartphones, where people can see the subject and the first two lines of the message without opening it. Use this small space wisely. Putting the crux of the message in the subject line and the first few words means that people are much more likely to see it, even if they are just glancing at their phone between meetings.  For very important messages or when you are testing templates for automatically generated emails try sending a copy to yourself first. This way you can see how those first two lines will look like on your phone and could might the difference between a timely answer or not.

3.  Make the emails user friendly

For routine non-marketing emails like hotel confirmations and flight itineraries the key is to deliver the essential information without annoying the customer. One simple way is to ensure that emails, like boarding passes and access maps, are easy to find and easy to print. Another is to give each message a short, helpful subject line and avoid wasting printer ink. Some airline boarding passes have large blocks of solid ink that are unpopular with customers using home inkjet printers. Swiss Airlines is a good example of how to do it: it uses mostly light fonts on a white background.

Today have chosen to help them. New email tools like Google Inbox and Concur’s Tripit group together information from incoming emails to automatically build a complete itinerary for each trip. Both Google and Concur are reluctant to give tips for making emails that work with these automated features, but everyone can test new email templates with accounts on these services to make sure the key information is extracted correctly.

Zeta Interactive is quoted in this article as part of EyeforTravel’s sponsored content programme