Tourism Marketing: Build Stronger Customer Relationships Through Email

The global travel experience market could soon be worth a cool $1 trillion – music to the ears of providers who slogged through the long, hard months of the pandemic.

But if you’re going to grab your slice of the pie, you need to get your tourism marketing right. And email has a key role to play, with exclusive Drip data revealing that email marketing represents a massive opportunity for travel experience brands.

Why Travel Experience Brands Need Email 

Traditionally, plenty of businesses in the travel experience sector – tour providers, attractions, and activities – have been reluctant to invest in email. Some think it’s spammy; some dismiss it after sending a couple of newsletters.

To be clear, email marketing isn’t spammy. It’s not about:

❌ Sending cold emails to disinterested consumers who’ve never heard of your brand. 

❌ Relying on one-off newsletters to generate a ton of revenue.

Effective email marketing involves sending customized, automated workflows to people who’ve actively given you their name and email address. Once you’ve captured a customer’s email address, you can reach out to them time and again with targeted offers and promotions to inspire their next purchase – and it all happens on autopilot.

That way, you get to break down the barrier built by online travel agencies and seize control of your customer relationships.

And it achieves real results, delivering an average return of $36 for every $1 spent.

Email Trends in Tourism and Attraction Marketing 

Plenty of travel experience companies are already leveraging the power of email – we should know, because 100+ of them do it with Drip. With that in mind, we dived into our platform data to identify three key trends in travel experience email marketing:

🔁 Travel experience brands see the highest repeat purchase rate of any industry.

💰 Emailing in the “fulfillment period” drives revenue through upselling and cross-selling.

✍️ Waivers are a crucial tool in growing your email marketing list.

Let’s explore those trends in more depth…

Travel Experience Companies See High Repeat Purchase Rates

Think tours and experiences are a one-and-done purchase? Think again.

Drip customers in the travel experience industry use email to generate additional sales from their customers. So much so that travel experience has the highest repeat rate (RPR) of any industry, by far, as our platform data demonstrates:

* Based on all email workflows run by Drip customers in the travel experience industry in 2024.

Now let’s find out how they’re capturing all those repeat sales…

Emailing During the Fulfillment Period Drives Revenue

If you only take away one thing from this article, let it be this:

Emailing customers during the fulfillment period – after they’ve made a booking, but before the event – is the #1 opportunity for travel experience brands to capture repeat revenue through upsells and cross-sells.

You might use these emails to promote…

👉 Merchandise

👉 Wine pairings

👉 Champagne toasts

👉 Photo packages

👉 Queue jumps

…or something else entirely. It all depends on your niche and business type.

But one thing’s certain – this is the sweet spot for travel experience companies.

Waivers Are a Vital List-Building Tool

Waivers are a fact of life for high-liability travel experience operators.

But Drip customers are demonstrating that waivers can be a valuable tool for any travel experience business. Why? Because they’re an easy way to capture more email addresses.

It works like this: you ask everyone attending the experience to sign a waiver. On the waiver form, you add an "opt-in to marketing" checkbox. Once they submit the form with the box checked, you can add them to your email list.

And the best part? It's all done on mobile, making the process quick and easy.

Now let’s find out how they’re capturing all those repeat sales…

Email Marketing Benchmarks for Travel Experience Brands 

Whether you’re already doing email marketing or planning to launch your first campaign, it’s helpful to know how similar brands are performing. So our data team compiled the following benchmarks for email workflows and single email campaigns based on our travel experience customers:

For comparison, ecommerce brands selling physical goods see the following numbers:

👉 Workflow click-through rate: 8.5% (⬇️ 39% lower than travel experience brands).

👉 Workflow RPR: 8% (⬇️ 50% lower than travel experience brands). 

👉 Single email campaign RPR: 8% (⬇️ 56% lower than travel experience brands).

So travel experience brands are clearly getting something right. Let’s explore the specific workflows they’re using to drive results…

4 Travel Experience Email Marketing Workflows You Can Steal

There are lots of types of marketing emails you could be sending – so where should you start? Well, here are four example workflows you can use to engage and convert your audience:

👋 New subscriber welcome series

️💨 Abandoned browse series

💳 Post-purchase/pre-tour upsell

🎂 Birthday/anniversary series

You can find even more examples, including the different sequence steps and timings you should be using, in our Email Marketing Playbook for Travel Experience Companies.

New Subscriber Welcome Series

Welcome emails are your opportunity to kickstart your relationship with a potential customer by sharing information about who you are and what you do. While they’re not the place for super aggressive sales messaging, you can still mention your product – just don’t be too pushy about it.

Tour operator OvRride gets it right with their two-step welcome series.

They keep things simple with their first email by thanking the customer for subscribing (or “joining NYC’s largest snow community”), briefly explaining their product, and adding a call to action (CTA) that compels readers to click through to the OvRride tour calendar:

Then, in email #2, they follow up by sharing the different mountains covered by their various trips:

Of course, clicking any of those mountains will take you to a page where you can learn more about the trip, check availability, and book your ticket.

Abandoned Browse Series

Did you know that 70.19% of all online shopping carts end up being abandoned? And just imagine how many more website visits end before that point…

That’s where the abandoned browse series comes in. When a signed-in customer quits your store without purchasing or adding-to-cart, you can hit them with an automated abandoned browse email to remind them what they’re missing.

Check out this example from Campbell River Whale Watching:

The chatty tone of voice ensures would-be customers don’t feel like they’re being stalked, while the copy highlights the range of tours available. And we love how the actionable CTA combines with the pre-CTA message “adventure awaits.”

Plus, if readers have any questions before they’re ready to book, Campbell River Whale Watching shares its customer support phone number and email address.

Post-Purchase/Pre-Tour Upsell

Remember – the post-purchase, pre-experience “fulfillment period” is your biggest opportunity to drive additional revenue through upselling and cross-selling. You’re emailing people who are already in the buying mood. And they clearly trust you because they’ve already bought from you.

In this example, Dive Provo reaches out to customers who have…

✅ Booked a diving trip.

✅ Answered a question during the booking process that indicates they haven’t been diving for a while.

All of which makes this the perfect opportunity to upsell a refresher diving course:

This tactic works well because it’s not just about pushing an upsell – it’s about helping the customer to get more from their existing booking.

Birthday/Anniversary Series

Milestone events give you an excuse to reach out to existing customers with an anniversary email.

For example, Dive Kauai emails customers on the first anniversary of their last booking with the company:

Not only does this demonstrate that Dive Kauai cares about customers, but it also keeps the brand at the front of mind if the recipient is ready to book their next trip.

Next steps

The best email marketers are always learning from their peers. We’ve made it easy for you by collating:

📤 Even more examples of automated workflows you can steal.

💡 Ideas for high-converting single email campaigns.

⏱️ Tried-and-true campaign timings to boost engagement and revenue.

Find all that (and more) in our Email Marketing Playbook for Travel Experience Companies.