Marketing emails are an easy and powerful way to communicate with your customers. Yet so often, our carefully crafted missives go straight to the virtual bin. So what’s involved in creating emails that are so irresistible and compelling your customers have no choice but to open them? Here are 5 tips to entice your customers to open your emails.

1. Don’t bombard people with emails

Otherwise you’re the equivalent of the pesky work colleague who never shuts-up about his seasonal allergies (‘there was soooo much snot, my sinuses were clogged for days!’). In fact, Campaign Monitor cited that emailing too often was the biggest factor for people unsubscribing from mailing lists.

No matter how funny, insightful or relevant your email is, if you are spamming your customers, their eyes glaze over like they do with Bob the sinusy admin guy. It could be even worse. In a pique of frustration, they may unsubscribe, think that your tour is about as fun as wheezy Bob and never give you their business.

So how much is too much?

Three times a week is probably pushing the friendship. Once a week will remind your customers that you still exist, but not so much that they feel overwhelmed by your presence.

2. Timing is everything

And on the topic of timing, when you send your email has a big impact on your open rate.

Each business is different, but a good rule of thumb is Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.  Mondays — people are too concerned with getting settled into their working week and by Friday, they aren’t concerned at all. Having said that, you know your industry and your customers, experiment with different times and see which results in the best open rates.

3. Optimise for mobile

You can’t log onto your mobile device without hearing about how mobile is the tech world’s Beyonce. It’s omnipresent. According to emailmonday, 55% of people will read a business email on their mobile rather than on their desktop device. HubSpot estimates that 69% will delete an email immediately if it isn’t optimised for mobile.

To capture customers who check their emails en route to work, or before bed, you have to make sure that your email is optimised for mobile. The easiest way to do this is to ensure that you have a responsive email template.

You can also maximise your mobile impact by making your email images smaller, your CTA buttons bigger and keep your subject headings short (between 25 and 31 characters.)

4. Be authentic

When it boils down to it, you are a person writing to people. Anything too salesy, overt or jargon-heavy will immediately feel like spam and will have your subscribers hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ button faster than Usain Bolt’s 100 metre time. We are lucky in the tourism industry that we facilitate amazing, aspirational and exciting experiences, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to make people feel that by opening your email, you are giving them a nice reprieve from their daily grind.

5. Get to the point

You have but a few seconds to connect with your subscriber so you have the tiniest amount of time to give them what they want. Depending on your ideal customer you will want to evoke a specific feeling that your experience might provide. Destination NSW cited that many families book a holiday because they love the idea of 'reconnecting', while a single millennial traveller may be attracted to the idea of being special and worldly. Use emotive words in your subject heading to capture the feeling that your experience might evoke for your subscriber. Here is a brilliant list of high emotion words that will get you started.

We hope that these tips will have your subscribers eagerly opening your missives. If you would like more information on great tourism marketing tips, check-out our guide to making the most of the low season now.

Booking Boss is an online booking system for tour operators and attraction providers. Trusted by many in the tourism industry, Booking Boss is about getting you out of the spreadsheets and into the sun. We provide free education resources for operators like you, to make your business the best it can possibly be.