5 Essential Email Workflows To Turn Contacts Into Sales

96% of businesses have revealed that personalization improved their email marketing success. And what’s the best way to personalize your email campaigns? Using automated email workflows.

Automated email workflows can save your travel business valuable time and effort while ensuring you send targeted messages to your customers at the right stage of their buying journey.

With effective email workflows in place, you can turn a lot more prospects into customers.

This guide explores how this works, including five of the best email automation examples.

What Is An Automated Email Workflow? 

Automated email workflows are emails automatically sent to certain leads based on specific triggers. You can set up these workflows in your email marketing platform, and design different workflows to send relevant, targeted messages based on certain actions, preferences, or behaviors.

Generally, automated email workflows include a series of emails. For example, you could set up a series of welcome emails (also known as an email drip campaign) to send to people as soon as they subscribe to your mailing list.

In this case, the action that triggers the workflow is a new lead subscribing to your emails, which results in them getting sent a relevant series of welcome messages to get familiar with your brand.

The point of an automated email workflow is to send the right information to the right people at the right time.

By personalizing your email marketing, your emails become more relevant and more engaging. This can help you generate better results from your email marketing efforts.

To roll this out effectively, you should segment your mailing list into different groups - something you can also do automatically with email workflows.

Automated email workflows typically have very clear goals - like onboarding new customers, turning cold prospects into customers, or re-engaging old customers.

How Email Automation Aligns With Lead Nurturing 

While you can use automated email workflows to achieve various goals, the most common use of email automation is in lead nurturing. This refers to when you want to engage and nurture leads to help turn them into customers.

By using email workflows, you can send relevant, targeted messages to your different leads - helping you move them down the sales funnel more efficiently.

Automated email workflows align well with lead nurturing strategies as you can set up automation based on your lead generation efforts.

For example, let's say you acquire new leads through a giveaway. You can set up an automated email workflow to send out to these leads, nurturing them with content that relates to the giveaway. The same idea can be applied to all of the different landing pages and lead generation channels your business runs.

This can help you acquire your contacts through your sales pipeline more efficiently, as each automated lead nurturing sequence sends information and content that best aligns with your different groups of contacts.

These contacts will relate more to your messages and may be more interested in each email sequence - helping you turn more prospects into customers with less effort.

5 Types Of Email Workflows Your Travel Business Can Use 

Now that you know what an automated lead workflow is, next, we’ll cover how your tour company can apply these workflows.

While there are endless possibilities for email automation, here are some popular examples and groups of automated email workflows that your business can use.

1. Leads Who Subscribed To Your Newsletter 

One of the most common types of email workflows that all businesses use is a simple email sequence sent to new email subscribers. This is easy to set up, and serves as a great way to introduce your business and what you’re all about.

If you skip this kind of welcome email sequence, your new subscribers could get confused by your business and feel like they’ve been thrown in at the deep end. By sending a two-email sequence, new subscribers feel more comfortable and familiar with what you offer. This will help them stay more engaged with any future communications.

Start by sending these new leads inspiring content or valuable resources about your trips - such as blog posts or brochures. This will help them gain a better understanding of what you offer while also inspiring them to travel. Sending positive customer testimonials can also be helpful in welcome email sequences, as this adds some valuable social proof.

One of the best tactics here is to offer some kind of a welcome incentive. This could include a discount code, for example.

Remember, people who have just signed up for your emails have clearly shown an interest in your business. So, by offering a discount straight away, you stand a good chance of turning these prospects into customers.

2. Leads Who Didn't Travel With You Because Of Budget Constraints 

Email workflows are incredibly useful for re-engaging leads who showed an interest in your trips but never followed through with a booking. In this scenario, let’s attribute it to budget constraints.

In this case, leads abandon their carts at the last moment. Sending automated cart abandonment emails is a highly effective strategy to counteract this.

This is because you can see how close these people were to completing their booking. They have an interest in what your travel business has to offer, they just need an extra nudge to become customers.

A great strategy here is to implement a two-email sequence with an incentive for these customers - like a discount code for upcoming trips, or added extras to the trip they were interested in (like a free upgrade).

By adding more value or offering a small discount, you could easily inspire these customers to come back to your booking pages and complete their transactions. You could even highlight the flexible payment options you have available to entice them to complete their booking.

Cart abandonment email workflows that use multiple emails consistently outperform single abandonment emails. It’s also worth noting that these emails have considerably higher open rates and click-through rates compared to regular marketing emails.

3. Leads Who Traveled With Your Company In The Last Year 

Email automation is a useful strategy for re-engaging your existing customers, you can use workflows to create lists of customers who have traveled with your company previously.

They’ve trusted your business and booked a trip through you already, so there’s a good chance that they would do it again (especially if they're reminded of your incredible brand and travel packages).

You could set up a two-email sequence with a retargeting approach, showcasing the details and descriptions of other trips based on the destination they first visited. This could help entice them to book another trip.

Remember, maximizing customer lifetime value is a key factor any business should focus on, as it’s a lot cheaper to sell to your existing customers than to acquire new ones. Using email workflows is an ideal strategy for achieving this.

4. Leads That Showed An Interest In A Specific Destination But Haven’t Booked 

This email workflow is designed for leads that have expressed an interest in a specific destination, but have not taken the plunge and booked a tour. This could be because they want to learn more about the destination or aren't entirely sure about the tours or trips you offer there.

You can set up a three-email sequence tailored to each specific destination. The first email could provide more information on the destination, covering popular attractions, unique experiences, and local culture.

The second email could offer personalized travel itineraries or sample trip packages for that destination.

Finally, send a third email with customer testimonials or reviews from travelers who visited that destination. Consider adding a discount code or special offer to help encourage leads to book a trip to the destination they’re interested in.

5. Customers Who Have Recently Returned From A Trip 

This type of email sequence is not a lead workflow to help you turn email contacts into customers. However, by staying in contact with your existing customers after a trip, you can:

• Encourage more repeat bookings
• Generate valuable reviews and testimonials to help you acquire more customers

For this email workflow, you could set up a two-email sequence that sends as soon as customers come back from a trip.

The first email could thank the customer for choosing your travel business, including a personalized message asking the customer for details about their experience. You could link this to a customer satisfaction survey.

The second email could follow up on the customer feedback and ask customers to leave a review for your business. You could then link to the platform you’re aiming to generate reviews on.

Conclusion 

Implementing email workflows is not only essential but also incredibly useful for preventing the loss of potential customers.

The five types of email workflows mentioned above are all simple to set up and implement. Once they’re in place, you can focus on other areas of your business while the automated emails nurture leads and turn them into customers.

This is one of the most effective travel marketing strategies for any business. And using a strong and reliable platform will aid your efforts and seamless your processes to create a 360 experience.