With summer fast approaching, people are looking for ways to travel further and faster. One popular way to do this is by taking a cruise ship vacation.
If you’re looking to get started with email marketing for cruise lines, here are some tips from HubSpot.com on how to create a successful email marketing program to attract cruisers to your business—not to mention how to maximize your ROI (return on investment).
Understand The Unpredictable
One of the biggest drawbacks of a cruise ship vacation is the unpredictability of the travel schedule. While you can usually plan out your cruise itinerary and know roughly what ports of call you’ll visit, the exact dates and times are often subject to change. For better or worse, this is part of what makes cruise vacations fun—you never know when you’re going to land at a particular port of call or how long you’re going to be there. But that also makes it more difficult to plan out your email marketing campaigns. After all, you can’t expect people to subscribe to your newsletter if you don’t even know when you’ll be able to send it out.
To make the most of your email marketing efforts, you need to have a strategy in place that can adapt to changes. There are several pieces of advice that can help:
Set Up Regular Communications
This point applies to any type of marketing or advertising, but it’s especially important for your email marketing campaigns. Regular communications with your subscribers allow you to stay connected and relevant. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your audience and update them on what’s happening with your company. You can also use email to introduce new products or services, offer special discounts, or simply just keep your subscribers up to date on what’s happening.
Another important point to make here is that while you should always strive to stay relevant, you don’t want to bombard your audience with constant emails either. Setting up regular communications with your subscribers allows you to be relevant but not overbearing.
Build A Quality Inbox
One way to determine the success of your email marketing program is by looking at your open and click rates. If you’re not sure what these are, it’s probably time to ask. Open rates are the percentage of emails that your subscribers actually read and click rates are the percentage of emails that your subscribers actually click on. In general, you want both of these numbers to be as high as possible. This indicates that your messages are being seen by the right audience and that they’re being accessed in a meaningful way.
If you’re sending out mass emails with generic subject lines (i.e., sales tips, special offers, or general promotions) it’s easy for your email to get buried in everyone’s in-box. Make sure you have a quality email list and send out messages that will inspire curiosity and interest. When someone adds your email to their lists, they’re sometimes prompted to check out your website or download a product you’re promoting. These simple interactions can lead to sales—which is what you’re trying to achieve with your email marketing program.
Use Personal Details
There are several ways that you can add more personality to your emails. You can include a personal message from you, you can use graphics designed to look like you, or your logo, and you can even use an actual photo of yourself. Of course, you don’t have to go this far—but it’s always nice when your emails look like they’re from a person and not just a faceless corporation. Adding a bit of personality and a photo of yourself will give your email an extra boost of authenticity that could potentially land you some new customers.
Reward Loyalty With Special Deals And Promotions
A frequent pitfall of most businesses is that they treat customers as if they were one-time buyers. But there’s a distinct difference between a customer and a subscriber. A customer is someone who has bought something from you in the past, whereas a subscriber is someone who has shown an interest in your product or service and decides to sign up for your mailing list. In the case of email marketing, a customer could be anyone who has ever purchased anything from you online, either directly from your website or from a third party vendor. (i.e., Shopbop, Nordstrom, etc.)
To show that they were worth it, you can reward your customers and subscribers with special deals and promotions. You could bundle discounts for a cruise or travel package, or you could offer a freebie with the order of a selected product. Whatever you do, make sure that it’s relevant to your audience and that it will push them to take action.
One of the major draws of a cruise ship vacation is the opportunity to travel to several destinations, spending a few days or a week at a time. While you don’t have to travel far from your home to have a nice vacation, it’s nice to be able to choose where you want to go. If you want to take a cruise ship vacation to Europe, you can without worrying about the weather too much. You’ll have a nice, cool shipmate to look after you as you get to know more about European history and culture.
To get started with email marketing for cruises, add your chosen cruise line to your list of suppliers. Then, you can start looking at individual cruise lines to see which one is right for you. Once you’ve picked out the one that suits your needs, you’ll want to look into what ports of call the ship will be visiting so that you can plan your itinerary. Then, you can get to work on your email marketing campaign. And, when you’re done, sit back and enjoy the benefits of your hard work!