It’s an experience most of us can relate to. You get an email from a prominent airline. The subject line blares Fare Reductions! Come fly away with us for less!
You open in eager anticipation, dreaming of a quick weekend mini-break, only to find that not one of the advertised deals departs from an airport near you.
Of course this email is all the more irritating since the airline knows where you live and your preferred departure airport because they asked you when you signed up.
In fact, a Return Path study of top-tier marketers in the UK found that 70 per cent of travel companies required more than just an email address to complete the sign-up process, with two fifths requiring an address or partial address information (like a post code).
However not one of these companies used that data to personalise their first promotional mailing to subscribers.
In comparison, 14 per cent of the other marketers studied personalised their first promotional message to subscribers.
Even the 30 per cent of travel companies that collected preferences at sign-up did not use that information in subsequent messaging.
For example, EasyJet subscribers could select from a list of departure cities, LastMinute.com offered four different types of email newsletters and Opodo asked for a preferred departure airport, yet none of these companies used this information to customise their promotional messaging during the five-week study period.
No wonder the average consumer is unimpressed by email marketing messages. They may be justified in thinking, Why did you bother to ask me about my favourite airport if you are going to send me promotions for airports nowhere near me?
This kind of segmentation can be a key component in making email relevant for all companies. But it is especially important for travel companies where the value of the promotion is so closely tied to geography.
But it’s not just segmentation and targeting where travel companies miss the mark when it comes to email. They seem to be having an issue just getting the email out the door.
In fact, the Return Path research found that it took an average of 12 days to receive a first promotional email message from the travel marketers studied, and the most common length of time was 15 days, significantly higher than for the rest of the marketers studied, which was four days.
And some never sent any email at all in the five-week study period. For example, Thomas Cook mentioned a weekly email programme but the researchers never received a single email from them, other than a registration confirmation message.
Likewise, Virgin Holidays sent an email confirming registration, but the researchers never received anything else from them after that either.
Of course, this could be related to problems with deliverability. Globally as many as one in every five opt-in, commercial email does not get delivered to the inbox because of blocking and filtering by Internet Service Providers.
Travel companies were also slightly less likely to follow the very basic best practice of sending a welcome message. Only two out of five of travel marketers did so, compared to 45 per cent of total marketers in our study. They were also slightly less likely to personalise those messages based on the data collected during the sign-up process.. Three quarters of travel companies personalised their welcome messages, compared to 81 per cent of all marketers studied.
Yet despite the fact that location is arguably the most relevant detail to the travel consumer, amazingly only one travel marketer used that information to personalize the welcome message. That was Thomson, but even then they only included contact details for the closest store location based on the subscriber’s post code.
Most personalisation by travel companies amounted to welcome messages that simply used the subscriber’s name (75 per cent), followed by referencing their account details, like user name and password (50 per cent). It’s a missed opportunity.
It’s important for all marketers to remember that consumers generally define spam as email that is not interesting to them – whether or not it’s from a company they do business with and whether or not they gave permission to receive email.
When the emails that get sent aren’t valuable – and really, how can an email with specials you can’t possibly use be valuable? – consumers quickly tune out.
If the marketer is lucky the subscriber will opt-out of future messages or simply delete them. But many consumers will use the this is spam button to register their dissatisfaction, putting the deliverability of all future messages – to all subscribers – in jeopardy.
Margaret Farmakis is senior director, strategic services at Return Path