Travel email triumphs: Everlytic’s insights

A new marketing report reveals innovative trends have emerged in travel email marketing after the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Email marketing continues to be a dominant channel for communicating messaging in the trillion-dollar travel and tourism industry. Brand communication in this space is highly competitive, and being able to stand out from competitors is critical. In 2022, more than 3.9-billion travel-related emails were sent from SA’s largest digital messaging platform, Everlytic. 

In a bid to understand what worked best in these travel mailers, Everlytic collaborated with BreadCrumbs Linguistics, a behavioural communications firm, to analyse the language trends and communication patterns in the 20 top-performing emails.

The research found travel emails that incorporated behavioural insights — paying close attention to the link between language, decision-making and behaviour — were the most effective. 

Top 10 insights from Everlytic’s research:

1. The most successful travel mailers were sent midmorning, right at the beginning of the week. The best months for travel email engagement were February and October. 
2. Reference to rewards and discounts boosted consumer engagement, particularly where these were framed as “exclusive” to customers on loyalty programmes. 
3. Language of urgency, where consumers feel they need to act quickly to secure a deal or special offer, drove better click-through engagement rates. 
4. Power of free extra perks — with reference to freebies — and complimentary add-ons got higher engagement. 
5. Subject lines using imperatives (exclamation marks) got the highest open rates. 
6. Visual language using non-people-based imagery (including wildlife, sunsets, ocean views and greenery) increased interest and engagement. 
7. No emojis were used in any of the top-performing mailers — across both subject line and body copy. 
8. Linguistic tools such as alliteration and superlative adjectives (best, greatest, perfect) made brand writing more persuasive and boosted engagement. 
9. Trends with price references included placing the price point below the mailer visuals (making the offer seem cheaper), framing discounts using “up to” percentages, and presenting offers where the original cost is struck through to emphasise the lower cost. 
10. Travel sales communications that offered multiple destination options — but with a single call-to-action button (normally “book now”) — got the highest engagement. 

To find out more about these successful ways to boost engagement and sales in your travel emails, as well as how behavioural communication can help your brand achieve this, download and explore this full free report on www.everlytic.com

This article was sponsored by Everlytic.