Introduction

Almost every industry was transformed by the pandemic, but none so much as the travel and tourism industry.

Now that the world has opened back up, people are making plans with renewed enthusiasm and new priorities. Staying home left people with a lot of time to daydream about their next travel destination and the lingering items on their bucket lists. Generic travel excursions are out and unique, personalized experiences are in as consumers search for more meaningful vacations. That search usually begins and ends online, and your digital marketing must keep up with this quick-moving audience motivated by pent-up demand. 

How do you stand out from the crowd with your digital marketing strategies and tap into what this hungry audience wants? Your competitors are vying for their attention too, and you don’t want to be left behind. 

If you're considering an upcoming tourism campaign, upgrading your social media marketing, or just looking for something other than traditional marketing strategies, you're not alone. Companies across the world have come to the realization that now is the time to use every tool possible to attract and retain new customers in their target audience.

Here’s a guide on the best-performing travel marketing campaigns and tourism marketing campaigns and how you can use them to your advantage to take your digital advertising to new heights.

Travel and Tourism Campaigns That Increase Conversion Rates

    Automated Price Drop Notifications

Problem

Customers want to find the best price without having to constantly monitor your site for updates. 

Solution

Give deal hunters and budget-conscious travelers an enticing reason to become a subscriber (and eventually a customer) by providing them with the option to watch their desired flights and bookings. Automatically send a price drop notification or availability update as soon as there is a change. Plus, you can use your visitors’ preference data to offer them relevant recommendations as alternatives in case there are no new updates regarding their desired destination.

    AI-powered Personalized Recommendations

Problem

Sub-par, irrelevant search experiences are incredibly frustrating. Visitors want recommendations of products and services they would actually want to purchase. 

Solution

Using native AI recommendations, you can make your customers feel like you’re reading their minds by serving them personalized offers on flights, hotels, car rentals, and more based on their past behavior, then matching them with real-time, available inventory. You can choose a model that suits your needs, such as collaborative filtering, which harnesses user and product data to provide recommendations based on customers with similar interests.

    Contextual Personalization

Problem

Providing the best possible customer experience is dependent on you truly understanding your visitors. What are their purchase drivers? Is it price? Convenience? Exclusivity, perhaps? Without understanding each visitor’s context, you can’t deliver true real-time 1:1 personalization.  

Solution

AI-driven contextual personalization provides a major edge in A/B testing by determining which offer a customer is most likely to convert with from the very start of the testing. Whether it’s a discount, a free service, or a service upgrade, AI can help you match the right promotion to the right customer at the right time, offering a faster path to valuable insights and results than traditional A/B testing. 

    Personalized Newsletters

Problem

Newsletters typically have lower engagement and conversion rates — mostly because they are automated and on batch-and-blast schedule

Solution

Email is a noisy place to attempt to reach potential travelers, so it’s no surprise that newsletters typically have low engagement and conversion rates — mostly because they’re usually generic. Grab your prospect’s attention with personalized emails that feel so relevant to their interests that they have to click. For example, to engage a potential customer who has a clear affinity for Spain, customize the email to lead with a header image of Barcelona followed by trip ideas to Mallorca and Ibiza. This can be done through advanced customer segmentation, combining zero- and first-party data to come up with a list of criteria for your customer to be added to a segment. 

    Abandoned Bookings Retargeting

Problem

Your visitors are thinking about booking with you and even take the step of adding to cart or getting to the reservation page. Then…nothing happens. 

Solution

An abandoned booking is an excellent opportunity for conversion. Using a variety of channels, you’ll want to get in front of your prospect everywhere they go online to remind them  (“hey, you forgot something”) and sweeten the deal with special discount offers. Your retargeting campaigns should include email, SMS, push notifications, and paid ads on social media, where you can use Facebook Conversion API to serve prospects dynamic information about their unfinished bookings. Personalize your ad content to get higher conversion rates and reduce customer acquisition costs.

    Prediction-based Goals

Problem

How do you really know you’re targeting the right customers and not wasting valuable ad spend?

Solution

Using AI prediction models, you can determine which visitors are most likely to book a trip or identify those unlikely to. From there, you should create a different set of goals for each of these two segments. For prospects likely to book, provide an immediate bonus during their session and increase in-session goal completions; for those unlikely to make a purchase during the session, offer an incentive for them to subscribe to your email newsletter and focus on converting them further down the line.

    Zero-party Data Collection

Problem

Expectations for data privacy continue to rise, which means companies need a better approach to gathering traveller data and preferences. 

Solution

The best data is data you can trust. Using zero-party data collection, ask your visitors to tell you their preferences directly. Allow them to configure their own experiences by providing you with their preferred destinations, price ranges, number of travellers, and more. Use personalization tools to collect these directly on your website and app, and adjust their offers in real time.

    Local Social Proof Recommendations

Problem

Travellers tend to trust recommendations from other travellers, but how do you surface these to them in a meaningful way? 

Solution

Showing the most popular destinations for those in your subscriber’s region can act as social proof and inspiration to choose the next trip. What are other Berliners looking for? Where are your neighbours spending their vacations? What experiences are people closest to you looking for? Use this info to present relevant offers on your website and app or via email.

Campaigns That Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

    Omnichannel Welcome Flow

Problem

Your ideal prospects have recently subscribed, but they’re not yet ready to make a booking. 

Solution

Go beyond email in welcoming new subscribers. In addition to launching an automated welcome email series — designed to introduce customers to your brand and ultimately incentivize them to make a purchase — create an omnichannel campaign that helps you stay top of mind. Using SMS/MMS, push notifications, in-app messages, and paid ad content, you can stay visible at multiple points of a prospect’s buying journey. When they’re finally ready to book a trip, they’ll be more likely to choose your brand.

    Find Customers on Social Using High-intent Lookalike Audiences

Problem

You’ve had success gaining valuable customers, but now you want to win over more high-value travellers. How can you target your ideal audience? 

Solution

Once you’ve incorporated a solid social media strategy into your omnichannel approach, you can create lookalike audiences to find high-intent prospects with similar purchasing potential. Based on a seed list of your own first-party customer data — which can include past behavior, customer attributes, and predictions — you can target new customer segments with the highest lifetime value on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

    Best Channel Prediction

Problem

The nature of digital media and the modern buyer journey means your customers interact with your brand across multiple channels and touchpoints. How do you know which channel your customer is likely to show up on and convert?

Solution

In the travel industry, the decision-making process is longer than it is in general retail, so it’s important to find the channels where your customers are active to stay top of mind in the long term. Using AI predictions, you can determine the channels where a customer is most likely to engage with your content, which makes your distribution more effective and increases conversion rates.

    Upsell Campaigns

Problem

You’ve already spent valuable marketing dollars to get visitors to choose your brand. Now, you need to maximize booking value to increase ROI. 

Solution

After all the hard work of acquiring a new customer, it’s time to show them what else you can offer. Using the information from their purchase and the zero- and first-party data you’ve been collecting, hook them again as they prepare for their trip and increase the booking value. Create an upsell/cross-sell campaign featuring engaging content about recommendations of places to visit and activities to do, combined with additional services such as room upgrades, extra luggage, car rentals, and more. Emails are the most effective way to do this, as they can be seamlessly integrated with transactional communication.

    Transactional and Marketing Communications Combines

Problem

Visitors expect consistent and personalized communications from travel companies to make their experience a good one. 

Solution

Some of the most effective travel email campaigns combine savvy storytelling and stunning visuals with transactional calls-to-action — and, as a best practice, the more personalized, the better. By using the same email service provider (ESP) for both transactional and marketing communication, you can maintain consistency in messaging, branding, and templates. But most importantly, you can also combine the information a customer is looking for with additional offers to capitalise on high engagement.

    Seasonal Promotions

Problem

Travellers seek to plan ahead by searching for the best deals during holidays or festive periods, and don’t want to be disappointed with a lack of availability or unaffordable prices. 

Solution

Many people travel for events or have event-based travel on their bucket list, and it’s advantageous to find those customers and appeal to this desire. Start by identifying audiences who frequent seasonal events — for example, a music festival such as Tomorrowland or a cultural event like Oktoberfest — using data available from browsing behavior, past purchases, and recent views. Then, target them well in advance of the event with available inventory and the most up-to-date pricing ahead of the peak rush. Your customers will feel you’re looking out for them and their interests and you’ll drive repeat bookings — a win-win.

Campaigns That Build Customer Loyalty

    Thank Your Customer Campaigns

Problem

The most loyal visitors want to feel appreciated. If you don’t do enough for them, you won’t be able to push them to be brand ambassadors. 

Solution

Nurture and thank your most loyal visitors — your “customer champions” — with rewards and special offers. You can find these customer champions by using RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary) segmentation, which will keep your loyal customers list up to date. Then, create a loyalty email series using loyalty tiers segmentation. Use data about average time between bookings to find the perfect time to email them and offer a special bonus for their next journey. Your customer champions will love it and it’ll grow your CLTV.

    Win-back Campaigns

Problem

When customers haven’t made a booking in a while, it’s easy for them to completely lapse and never interact with your brand again. 

Solution

Don’t let a customer forget about you, which can be common in the crowded travel landscape. Using RFM segmentation, you can target customers who have made a purchase in the past, but haven’t purchased recently. Launch a personalized win-back campaign using data from their past and current preferences and purchases to provide them with recommendations of similar offers, as well as new offers to discover.

    Gamify Loyalty Programs and Rewards

Problem

Customers are increasingly choosing brands that provide meaningful experiences with their personal data and reward loyalty in an interesting way. 

Solution

Take your loyalty program to the next level by incorporating games that incentive customers to purchase more frequently and trade their loyalty points for rewards. Spin-to-win games, friend-referral challenges, and more tap into multiple aspects of psychology including reward-seeking behavior and competitiveness. Using personalized content, create special offers for achieving new loyalty levels and reward long-term champions with discounts based on their point totals.

    Feedback Campaigns

Problem

Not knowing what your customers liked or didn’t like about their visit will only lead to making the same mistakes in the future. 

Solution

Close the loop on each booking by following up with a feedback email campaign that asks your customers to fill out a survey about their experience. Use the feedback data to score your customers based on their experience and create customer segments based on that feedback score. With real-time connection to your CRM or help desk systems, you can filter out customers who have a booking issue (cancellation, delay, change, etc.) and send them automatically to the help desk. The same can be done with those who provide negative feedback to immediately take action.

    Reengagement Campaigns

Problem

The people in your database who have been inactive for a long time provide a great opportunity to regain revenue and create new loyal customers, but it’s not always easy to know how to start reengaging them. 

Solution

When customers go dark — as in not clicking on any of your emails or other content — it’s time for a reengagement campaign. Track down these customers where they are online using omnichannel orchestration, targeting them through email, SMS, push notifications, in-app, or paid ad campaigns on Google or social media. Ask them clearly and simply why they stopped engaging. It helps to incentivize them by offering a gift or prize for providing feedback. This best practice strengthens your relationship with customers and also improves your lists. Reengagement campaigns should be used as a last attempt before unsubscribing an inactive user yourself — a healthy database brings a better customer experience, as you only send content to those who are interested in it.

Don't Settle For Less Than The Best With Travel Marketing Campaigns

With travellers both eager to get out and more particular than ever with who they purchase from, you’ll need to take advantage of a marketing campaign like the ones mentioned above to inspire travelers to establish loyalty with your brand.

If you’re ready to put some (or all) of these into practice, then look no further than Bloomreach Engagement. Our powerful platform unifies your customer data into a single customer view, making it easy to launch omnichannel campaigns across 13 channels. Plus, our AI makes it possible to personalize content and recommendations for your customers in real time, so you can drive faster ROI in a competitive industry. 

Learn more about how Bloomreach Engagement can facilitate the best travel marketing campaigns today.