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 South Africa’s largest digital messaging platform, Everlytic.
In a bid to understand what worked best in these travel mailers, Everlytic collaborated with behavioural communications firm, BreadCrumbs Linguistics, 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.
Here are the top 10 insights from the research:
- The most successful travel mailers were sent mid-morning right at the beginning of the week. The best months for travel email engagement were February and October.
- Reference to rewards and discounts boosted consumer engagement, particularly where these were framed as 'exclusive' to customers on loyalty programmes.
- Language of urgency, where consumers feel they need to act quickly to secure a deal or special offer, drove better click-through engagement rates.
- Power of free – with reference to freebies – extra perks, and complimentary add-ons got higher engagement.
- Subject lines using imperatives (exclamation marks) got the highest open rates.
- Visual language using non-people-based imagery (including wildlife, sunsets, ocean views, and greenery) increased interest and engagement.
- No emojis were used in any of the top-performing mailers – across both subject line and body copy.
- Linguistic tools like alliteration and superlative adjectives (best, greatest, perfect) made brand writing more persuasive and boosted engagement.
- 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 (R4,999) to emphasise the lower cost.
- 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.
