What Makes A Great Travel Newsletter [Plus Tips]
Email marketing is a powerful tool for travel brands.
It works.
Reports indicate that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. (That’s a lot.)
Done well, travel e-newsletters can boost your conversions, attract qualified leads, and bring your brand to life.
Done poorly, they can cause lasting damage to your brand image and serve only to waste your valuable time.
This article will provide you with all the tools needed for building your own successful travel newsletter.
In this blog:
What goes into building a successful travel newsletter
5 ingredients every travel newsletter should have
What to consider when planning a newsletter strategy
Audience
Purpose
Consistency
Clarity
Length
Enjoyment
Design
Tone
Branding
Advanced tips for creating a successful travel newsletter
Let’s dive in.
Qualities of an Amazing Travel Newsletter
Like anything, newsletters come in all shapes, sizes, and smells.
And you can smell a bad travel newsletter from a mile away.
They stink of irrelevance, cheap design, weak subject lines, a hint of braggadocio, and the wasted sweat of a hard-working CEO that doesn’t quite know what they’re doing.
A good travel newsletter:
Makes sure consumers never forget about your brand.
Engages with readers on a personal level.
Establishes authority and trust for your business.
Demonstrates an eagerness to be useful.
Keeps people up to date with your latest news and business updates.
Building a travel newsletter that achieves all of these things takes time.
Here are a few tricks to help speed up the process.
What to include in your travel newsletter
It’s one thing to blast out a bunch of newsletters every month. It’s another to wield them as a powerful marketing tool that people are eager to digest.
These 5 ingredients will boost the efficacy and appeal of your travel newsletter:
Valuable, relevant content
High-quality multimedia
Mobile optimisation
Special deals, promotions, and discounts
User-generated content
Let’s look at each in turn.
1. Dangerously useful content
Seriously, the stuff going into your emails needs to change people’s lives.
And that means life-changing content. It needs to teach, inspire, entertain, and move the reader every single time.
This may sound intimidating, but creating highly valuable content is simply a matter of understanding your audience holistically.
Once you know who you’re talking to, start educating. Don’t be parsimonious with your insider knowledge; dish it out like treats on Halloween.
Provide actionable travel tips. Become a resource for staying on top of the latest trends.
Like a good parent, your job as a travel marketer is to prepare readers for the big, wide world.
2. Top-notch visual stuff
Travel is a dreamer’s industry.
You need to bring those dreams to life.
In 2019, it was reported that roughly 75% of travellers take action on videos they see, including swiping up, sharing with a friend, and clicking through to a website.
Where possible, include idyllic imagery and videos in your newsletters to really put your subscribers in mind of the perfect holiday.
The more they associate beautiful pictures and clips of foreign destinations with your brand, the better they’ll come to see you as a free vacation.
3. Optimise for mobile
Next time you’re at a bus stop or a train station, look up from your phone…
...at the other 50 people looking down at their phones.
43.5% of all emails are opened on mobile phones, with 83% of these coming from iPhones.
A great travel newsletter gives subscribers the best possible experience when they read. In this case, that means using a mobile-friendly design.
By doing so, you’re proactively helping users to absorb your content every time.
4. Pay it back with sweet rewards
By signing up for your e-newsletter, people are doing you a favour.
So return their generosity.
Gift your subscribers special discounts, offers, and upgrades… Send them free downloadable goodies that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to… Be a great friend.
Imagine you went to the supermarket one day and the person at the till said,
“Thanks for shopping with us today. Here’s a fresh carton of milk and some eggs, on us.”
You’d be back there next week, I bet. And you’d probably tell your friends about this awesome supermarket, too.
Get the hint?
5. Users love users
No, I’m not talking about addiction-romance.
I refer to a shared thought that 93% of marketers agree is true: Consumers trust consumer content more than they trust brand content.
So what should you do?
Acquire some.
Ask your users to send through their best travel-related content and, with their permission, weave it into your email newsletters to really help other consumers feel connected to your brand.
Throw in a testimonial or two, while you’re at it.
Bonus points if the user-generated content features your product or service in it as well.
Okay, so we know what goes into a great travel newsletter. But how do you put it all together?
This next section will cover exactly that.
Keep reading.
Considerations When Crafting Your Travel Newsletter
When it comes to creating and publishing travel newsletters, many brands make the mistake of thinking any old message will do.
But by neglecting the consumer’s needs and desires, a newsletter lacking in strategy is little more than a waste of resources.
A great travel newsletter – one that establishes brand authority and pushes readers along the sales funnel – can be achieved with a systematic approach.
When designing and delivering your travel newsletter, focus on these things most:
Audience
Purpose
Consistency
Clarity
Length
Enjoyment
Design
Tone
Branding
To simplify your understanding, I’ve broken each point down individually below:
Audience
Who are you writing to?
Are you working from a buyer persona and targeting your newsletters appropriately?
Have you considered segmenting your newsletters for maximum results?
Cull anything from your travel newsletter that doesn’t help your reader in some way. Replace it with extremely valuable content specific to them.
Purpose
What are the main goals for your newsletter, both business-wise and content-wise?
You should know what sort of story you are telling with each newsletter, and in the overarching strategy for all newsletters.
Is it in line with your CTA?
Is there a CTA in every newsletter?
Consistency
Pick a frequency and flavour, then stick to them like glue.
It matters less whether you’re publishing your newsletter monthly, fortnightly, or weekly. The important thing is that you be consistent.
If your landing page promises a newsletter every three days, make good on that promise.
Likewise, the tone and style should stay consistent from one newsletter to the next – except when testing new ideas or making drastic improvements.
Clarity
Here’s the part you have to nail if you want anyone to read the whole newsletter.
Make it easy to read.
Master the art of telling complicated issues using simple words. Don’t try and wow your readership with fancy words and industry jargon.
Keep it succinct, simple, and abundantly clear what you’re talking about.
Better yet, hire a professional copywriter to do it for you!
Length
The optimal length for an email newsletter is 200 words or about 20 lines… surprisingly short.
And while brevity is always good in email writing, this might not be the optimal length for your niche – nor, in fact, for your specific subscribers.
Do the research (you can even ask your subscribers directly) and work out how long your newsletters need to be, then stick to that.
Enjoyment
In blunter words, make it good.
Nobody has to read your newsletter. Most people won’t.
But for those loyal fans that take precious time out of their day to soak in whatever content you’ve just delivered to them, make it worth their while.
Don’t be dry and boring. Show some character, some charisma.
Entertain your readers, regardless of what the message is.
The best outcome you can get from an email newsletter is one of your subscribers enjoying it so much they forward it to one of their friends.
Design
I spoke about the benefits of having a mobile-optimised design earlier.
But there are other design features that can improve the quality of your newsletter.
Here are four tips for designing a powerful travel newsletter:
Get inspired
Research popular travel newsletters online and see what colours and formatting they’re using.Simplicity works
Try not to use more than 2 or 3 colours. The design is there to catch the reader’s eye and direct them to the content, not distract them from the actual newsletter itself.
Stay on brand
Have the colours and style match the design of your website and other published content.Make it look professional
Hire a designer that understands your brand and shares your passion, or download a free travel-themed template from a reliable email marketing service like Mailchimp.
Tone
Who is your audience and how do they talk?
This is what you’ll need to consider when deciding on the right tone for your newsletter copy.
People that invest in Luxury Travel speak differently to backpackers living hostel-to-hostel.
Your subscribers want to know that you understand them, that you’re one of them.
Branding
Speaking of brands… proper branding is essential.
After all, this is your newsletter.
And if you’ve taken the steps to make it a great one, you’ll be wanting to make sure users associate the amazing free content they’re getting with your brand.
Include your logo right at the top of the newsletter so there’s no confusion. Every email should also contain multiple links back to your site to drive conversions.
Next up, I’ll show you some pro tips for boosting the success of your newsletter campaigns.
Here we go.
Tips For Nailing Your Travel Newsletter
You now have a strong basis for building your travel newsletter from scratch.
But as you start to develop your newsletter and implement these ideas, there are a few challenges you may inevitably face as a travel marketer.
I’ve put together some of the most common ones, then provided actionable advice for overcoming each one.
Let’s go.
1. Coming up with ideas
Ever tried for a brainstorming sesh and ended up getting brain-drought?
This is not uncommon. There is nothing in this world quite so terrifying as a blank page.
Here are a few quick-fix solutions for choosing topics and themes for your newsletter:
Write about the latest news and trends within the industry.
Ask yourself what the biggest problem your customers have that you could solve for them.
Check out the Travel & Leisure category on reallygoodemails.com for inspiration (and other similar sites).
Ask your customers what they’d find most valuable in a newsletter.
Subscribe to successful newsletters within your industry, and see what sort of things they talk about.
Never turn your marketing brain off; always keep an ear open for new ideas wherever you are.
Most importantly, write something. Getting started is the most important step.
You can always edit out the bad stuff at the end.
2. Choosing a format
Having a template in place can make the actual production of your emails much easier, as you’ll have something to go off every [week/fortnight/month].
A newsletter theme is also great for staying consistent and making your content memorable.
The simpler the better. You may want to start with just two or three basic sections that allow for lots of different angles.
Check out how Top Hat’s daily marketing newsletter Please Advise does this using the same three sections every day: LOOK; DO; TRY.
3. Nailing the copy every time
Good copywriting is crucial to the success of your travel newsletter.
Copy is the vehicle that allows you to transfer your valuable ideas into the heads of your readers. If you don’t know a whole lot about copywriting, Backlinko’s guide is a great place to start.
Understand also that good copywriting is not the same as regular writing. Copywriting is a form of persuasion and lives more in the realm of empathy than of grammatical nuance.
If you’re just getting started, consider hiring a travel copywriter to produce your travel newsletters for you.
This will help you get your strategy off the ground and ensure that every newsletter achieves the desired business goals you’ve set out to achieve.
In case, you’re not sure where to find a good travel copywriter, I named my website after one. He also shares my name. It’s me.
I’m trying to sell you something.
Sorry about that.
When you’ve forgiven my brazen swipe at your good business, you can book a free copywriting consultation with me here.
4. Boosting open / clickthrough rates
If you’ve gotten your newsletter out to the public and have started diving into email metrics, you might be wondering why so many of your newsletters are not being opened.
Or, just as bad, why they’re being opened but not being acted upon.
In the case of the former, here are a few tips to help you improve your open rates:
Invite subscribers to respond directly to your email and add you to their VIP list. This will help you avoid the spam folder.
Use split testing for your subject lines to get a better understanding of what phrases trigger your audience into opening an email.
Make it easy for users to Unsubscribe so that you lower the number of uninterested recipients in your contact list.
And if people are opening your emails but not clicking through to check out the rest of your website, try doing some of these:
Test different CTAs to see which ones readers are likely to respond to.
Always make sure your subject line is relevant to the actual message of your newsletter and not misleading.
Don’t push the salesy stuff too hard; remember, they signed up for content not a weekly catalogue.
Get your copy reviewed by a professional copywriter a few times to be sure you’re directing readers to the desired action in a clear and persuasive manner.
Key Takeaways
Wow, you read everything. Great stuff.
If you continue to put this much effort into your travel newsletter strategy, I have no doubt you’ll be putting Travel + Leisure to shame in no time.
Before you go, however, let’s quickly recap what you’ve learned.
Here are some of the main ideas we covered:
Readers come first.
Everything about your travel newsletter needs to be crafted with the audience in mind. From highly valuable, relevant content to simple design and UX optimisation; it’s all about them.
Be consistent.
Consistency should be applied to everything you do: Frequency, Tone, Style, Format, Length, Quality… you name it.
Research, test, and enquire.
These are three of the best ways to get your newsletter down to a fine art.Research current trends and other great newsletters.
Test different ideas, subject lines, CTAs, etc.
Enquire with your subscribers to learn what they want you to tell them about.
