Dotdigital for travel
A guide to Dotdigital for travel brands
Discover the key to a cross-channel marketing strategy that will engage today's travel audience with Dotdigital.

As a travel marketer, you know how important it is to keep your audience engaged, updated, and informed. Dotdigital gives you all the tools you need in one place, so that you can manage the entire customer journey from acquisition to loyal customer.
More than just email marketing software, Dotdigital makes it simple to create a cross-channel experience. Use push notifications, SMS, MMS, and social retargeting to compliment email campaigns, and you can do this in just one click – more on that later.
We all know personalized messages are the key to engagement, but to do so you need reliable customer data. Whether you want to dig deep or see a top-level view, we ensure your customer data is always easily accessible with seamless integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Experience Cloud, GA4, Zendesk, Meta, and more.
Chances are your travel brand holds a lot of customer data; from their preferences to their experiences. You need a platform that allows you to easily access this data in real-time so that you can personalize your marketing campaigns, ensuring relevancy and stronger engagement. You can turn impulsive browsing into invoices and deliver a customer experience that’s sure to get your brand invited on future vacations.
Knowing your audience is important in any business, but for travel it’s imperative. A vacation isn’t a small purchase, so you need to know how to target and appeal to each and every customer’s personal temptations.
With Dotdigital’s on-site popovers and customizable preference centers you get to know your audience quickly. Begin by asking customers for their preferred name as well as their preferences for messaging frequency, channel, and topics. This gives you a great baseline of zero-party data to send personalized and engaging marketing from the get-go. You’re also enhancing the customer experience by demonstrating responsible marketing practices. By giving your audience a sense of flexibility and control you’ll build trust and reduce churn.
As the relationship with your customers progresses you’re going to gain a host of insights. From web pages browsed, to links clicked in an email, your customers show you what they want and who they are with every interaction. Dotdigital collects this data and compiles it for you, you’ll be able to see at a glance what’s important and not need to sift through spreadsheets to get there. We like to say our data is comprehensive but never complicated.
Deliver a seamless customer experience thanks to understanding your customers’ entire journeys by accessing every interaction in one place. Single customer view (SCV) shows you every touchpoint a customer has experienced and every engagement. See a customer’s experience and demographic data in one place to gain a detailed understanding of your customer. From here, you can generate a lookalike segment that automatically collates other contacts like them.
There are a wide variety of ways SCV can be implemented to improve your travel marketing.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Segmented email marketing campaigns can increase revenue generation by up to 760%. Segmentation allows you to create like-minded groups of travelers together so you can easily select a particular audience for your targeted campaigns. This could be families, business travelers, adventure seekers, last-minute travelers, and so on. Having easily defined groups means personalization takes no time at all.
Creating segments is a smooth and logical process in Dotdigital. You can choose to make a segment from a template for ease, or create a brand new segment using contact behavior and data fields.
You don’t have to start from scratch with segmentation. Dotdigital has created an eRFM customer modeling tool that builds personas based on your customers’ spending and engagement habits. It combines traditional recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) scores with engagement scores to give a much fuller picture.
RFM scores depend on customers’ order data:
Engagement scores are measured by:
Cross-channel marketing is the creation of seamless, connected customer touchpoints across all marketing channels, and it is essential for successfully converting travelers. Cross-channel marketing is growing, travel marketers now have more and more ways to reach their audiences. At Dotdigital, we have made sure that marketers can utilize the channels they need, all from within the Dotdigital platform. From email, SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and targeted ads, you can create a cross-channel campaign that spans these channels to better engage your customers.
By adopting a cross-channel marketing strategy, you can communicate with your customers on the channel that makes the most sense at the time. Reminding a customer to check in to their flight only needs to be a short message and you want to ensure it’s seen, so SMS will work better than an email. Likewise, when you want to showcase a selection of hotels in an area a customer has shown interest in, email is the way to go.
Dotdigital makes it easy for you to create campaigns across various channels so you’re not using different software for each channel – can you imagine the manual admin? You can even turn an email into an SMS in just one click thanks to WinstonAI.
SMS is an especially valuable channel for travel marketers. People don’t tend to check their email as much on vacation, and that’s if they even have Wi-Fi. SMS doesn’t need an internet signal to get the message to your customers and it’s much more likely to be seen which is perfect for important travel updates and reminders.
The British Airways management team regularly monitors customer satisfaction through the monthly global “Think Customer Survey”.
BA required a way to survey customers as soon as possible post-flight. The survey needed to be delivered in a timely fashion and provide the traveler with an easy route to feedback on the service they’d experienced and grade their overall experience.
SMS was chosen as a convenient and immediate channel. The user journey involves four messages offering easy service grading and the ability to give individual feedback. This is triggered from the BA operational platform, with messages sent automatically at a period shortly following arrival.
Thanks to Dotdigital, the two-way SMS survey is conducted in over 40 countries worldwide that are major territories for BA. Each country is provided with localized two-way functionality to minimize costs to the customer.
Email is a great channel for travel marketers, it allows you to send personalized, relevant, and engaging content to your audience regularly. Emails can easily be personalized, ensuring every campaign is relevant to the individual.
As emails are longer than the likes of SMS and push, you can include more content and CTAs. This could be written content such as a travel newsletter to boost brand-customer loyalty, or an image-heavy campaign full of dynamic, personalized, and enticing travel offers with CTAs designed to drive a sale.
Travel brand Awaze uses countdown timers in its mass marketing emails for cottages.com and Hoseasons to highlight sales and boost urgency. “The emails definitely drive a lot more urgency when customers can see the time counting down to the end of a discount,” says Tina, Calder, Head of Customer Retention, Awaze.
The company is seeing close to a 40% increase in conversion rate across cottages.com and Hoseasons with dynamic countdown timers.
Push notifications are very similar to SMS in terms of the benefits. Push notifications allow you to surface a message on your customers’ cell phone lock screen or notification bar to instantly grab their attention. Push notifications are great for time-sensitive updates for marketing, such as flash sales, or transactional, such as ‘time to check in’ messages.
Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and LINE are popular messaging apps, increasingly used by marketers. These apps allow you to engage in a two-way conversation with ease, creating a better customer experience. At Dotdigital we integrate with these apps to make it simple to communicate with your customers on their preferred messaging app.
Messaging apps can be used as broadcast-style channels for marketing messages, but the real winner is using these apps for customer service. You’re able to provide a natural and engaging experience and filter support requests by urgency based on automatic filtering you can set up.
Vacations are rarely spur-of-the-moment purchases, people take time to research and consider. This means a cross-channel approach that keeps your brand front-of-mind throughout this consideration process is imperative to secure the sale.
Utilizing a channel like targeted ads means that whether a customer is actively checking their inbox, or simply browsing social media in their free time, your travel brand will be on their mind at all times. Use the data you have on these customers to ensure these ads speak to their desires by including content they’ve shown interest in already.
As part of its personalization strategy, icelolly.com decided to add the Facebook Extension into its business-as-usual marketing programs in Dotdigital. The tool targeted engaged email subscribers with personalized ads based on the zero-party data customers had shared via the preference center. This encouraged customers along the customer journey – from awareness to consideration and conversion – by providing highly relevant Facebook ads.
Engaged contacts were served with targeted ads that reflect their individual data, such as local airports to maximize the relevancy of the message. icelolly.com generated a 17% conversion rate from Facebook. What’s more, retargeting ads have seen a 3% higher conversion rate than general social ads – which we can attribute to the increased relevancy.
Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time has also bolstered customer satisfaction as Trustpilot reviews are at an all-time high. Plus, by leveraging browsing data, icelolly.com has enhanced its emails by displaying the searched and abandoned deal, improving the relevancy of email content for its customers. The results have been compelling, with the brand seeing a 35% higher open rate; 201% increase in CTR; and a 45% increase in conversions with this strategy.
As well as different messages suiting different channels, a cross-channel approach hugely increases your reach. If you’re only sending out emails, your audience will probably only think of you when they go to their inbox – and that’s only if you’re at the top when they do.
When you add in a mixture of SMS, app push, WhatsApp, and social retargeting, you’re going to be front-of-mind a lot more often. We never want to spam customers, but when you naturally integrate with your customers’ day-to-day channels, your marketing will be more successful. Marketing across a plethora of channels is not as daunting as it sounds, and you can do it all on one platform with Dotdigital.
A vacation is more than a regular purchase, it’s when people make memories and traditions – and for many, it’s the reward they work for all year round. Travel is a very personal thing, it makes up a huge part of people’s identity. When you show you understand that, you’re going to gain customers for life.
Personalization in all kinds of marketing is important, but for a big ticket and often emotional purchase such as travel, it’s imperative. You need to show customers you understand them to build trust. No one is going to book something so important with a company they don’t feel understands their wants and needs.
You need to show customers content relevant to their interests, if someone loves to explore on city breaks and you send them all-inclusive resorts, they’re not going to engage.
Stand out from the competition by building a rapport built on understanding, relevancy, and helpful marketing content.
Personalization is great, it removes generic messages, gets rid of the guesswork, and makes every single message you send resonate with your audience. We live in a time when digital marketing is super sophisticated and targeted. At Dotdigital we want you to be able to utilize all of that customer data you’re collecting, and actually put it to use easily, every time you create a campaign.
From classic first name personalization to showing customers travel destinations based on their browsing history, personalization is the key to customer engagement and boosting conversions. When you show someone content that is clearly tailored to them, they appreciate it. When you show them the exact hotel, flight, or excursion they’ve been looking for, they’re going to book it. When you personalize your campaigns you’re improving their experience and removing barriers to conversion by making it super easy for them to click and book.
Location-based personalization is essential for a travel brand. You want to be able to show your customers relevant content based on where they are at that moment.
Use geo-targeting to showcase relevant content to your customers based on where they are on that particular day. You can use it to showcase nearby excursions or update them on the weather forecast for where they are to add in a touch-point whilst they’re on vacation.
You can also utilize geo-targeting by dynamically showing or reacting to the weather in your customers’ home location. On days full of grey skies and rain, an email promising some Mediterranean sun is going to really appeal to them.
Personalization is key to engaging prospects and customers and it’s crucial for trustworthy communication post-booking. The difference between ‘Check in for your flight’ vs ‘Hey, David. Check into your 12:15pm flight to Chicago online now’ is huge.
This isn’t about getting engagement, but delivering a trustworthy and sophisticated experience for the customer. When you’re on vacation you’re on high alert for scams and the last thing you want is for your brand to add to that pressure. Don’t give your customers any reason to doubt the legitimacy of your messages by including details only you would know.
With Dotdigital you can use Liquid, a flexible and dynamic markup language that allows you to pull in sophisticated customer data to campaigns and landing pages to hyper-personalize the experience.
Fresh Relevance, Dotdigital’s advanced personalization tool, allows you to personalize slots on your website without needing any support from your website development team.
Our personalization platform helps travel marketers deliver bespoke, relevant, and consistent experiences on the most important channel you own: your website.
“Before Fresh Relevance, we had one of those homepages that was stuffed with information. But now we can tailor the homepage to each person. We’re able to listen to website visitors and serve them what they need rather than broadcasting the same content to everyone.”
Janis Thomas, Ecommerce & Marketing Director, Look Fabulous Forever
Marketing automation is a travel marketer’s best friend. Automation means you can set up a program in advance and know that your customers are going to get the perfect campaign at the perfect time – without you doing anything. Examples of this include welcome, abandoned browse, pre-trip check-in, post-trip review requests, and so on.
Triggered marketing like this ensures you’re sending the right message at the optimum moment – when a customer has done something that indicates interest or a need for more information. You can ensure your triggers and automated campaigns answer those potential drop-off points with perfectly timed and relevant content.
Proving that timing is everything, and following your customers’ lead is a lucrative strategy is travel company, Awaze. The brand tested out different send times of an abandoned browse campaign, testing 15 minute, 30 minute, and 60 minute delays. After one month of testing, there was a clear winner that sooner was better as the 15 minute variation saw higher conversion rates.
The brand updated its program to run at a 15 minute delay and then saw a 4% conversion rate from an abandoned browse automated email program and a 14% conversion rate from a cart abandonment email program.
“The abandonment emails are doing really well and we’re very pleased with the results. The conversion rates are much higher than our mass campaigns.”
Tina Calder, Head of Retention, Awaze
Automation programs do a great job of nurturing customers at different stages of the journey, and once they’re set up, they’ll run in the background while you’re busy with other priorities.
For travel marketers, good customer service is the key to a long and fruitful relationship. Marketing automation programs allow you to deliver an impeccable customer service experience, at scale.
Creating a pre-trip automation that outlines all the steps and information your travelers need to be aware of is an essential step to ensure a smooth customer experience. Likewise, a post-trip check-in can go a long way in boosting customer satisfaction. For travel companies that work at scale, automating these steps is essential for reliability and internal teams’ time management.
Dotdigital integrates with hundreds of world-class platforms and specialists to enhance your marketing and streamline workflows. Ensure a reliable data feed from your booking software, CRM, and anything else into Dotdigital.
Easily connect with travel-specific marketing agencies, CRM, and more who have experience with Dotdigital. To deliver an informed and seamless customer experience, you need to be able to access and understand every step in one place. With Dotdigital you can do just that and rest assured that your marketing messages are always accurate, reliable, and relevant.
Learn more about the Dotdigital and Adobe integration.
Learn more about the Dotdigital and Inspiretec integration.
You can learn more about Dotdigital’s host of integrations here.
All too often as marketers, we spend all our time and energy getting a campaign out into the world that the reporting takes a back seat. Reporting and analyzing campaigns may feel like the final step of the customer journey, but it should always be the start of the next one as you learn from every campaign.
This is especially true for travel marketers, as booking a trip is usually a big purchase, and the booking window can be quite a long time. When you take the time to analyze your marketing and see exactly what kind of communication resonates with your audience, you can tailor your future campaigns to appeal to them in a much stronger way. This will result in higher conversions and a stronger customer lifetime value as the customer knows your brand understands them and serves them well.
Dotdigital’s reporting and analytics dashboards are designed to show you the important parts without bogging you down in the details – but it’s always there if you want it. Essential campaign metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc. are shared in a digestible format so that you can see how your campaigns performed instantly.
Dotdigital’s customer dashboard pulls in customer data to group customers according to their purchasing behavior.
There are six distinct groups
Each persona is categorized into one of three stages in the customer lifecycle
You can drill down into each persona group to discover key metrics including
The Dotdigital persona movement report lets you see how your different customer segments are behaving and changing over time.
As well as understanding how your audience is behaving, you can easily create segments based on the persona movement report. For example, you can enroll customers who have just dropped from ‘recent’ to ‘inactive’ into an automated re-engagement campaign.
AI-powered reporting tools analyze reams of your customer’s data in the background, then show you the opportunities identified, ready for you to capitalize on. These predictive analytics give you the heads up on when to target customers based on their likely next move.
The different types of predictive analytics in Dotdigital
Predicted next purchase date is ideal for travel marketers as a lot of people have certain times of the year when they tend to book a trip. Our AI model uses recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) data and other machine learning techniques to predict when a customer is likely to purchase again. This gives you the go-ahead to know when to craft a tempting and personalized campaign, knowing you aren’t wasting your time.
Understanding where your revenue comes from is vital for the optimization of your marketing campaigns. Dotdigital’s advanced revenue attribution tool helps you identify which campaigns are driving customer action and converting into revenue.
The benefits of advanced revenue attribution
You can tap into Dotdigital’s advanced revenue attribution capabilities by installing our ROI tracking script or syncing your order data using our integrations, API, or an SFTP client. You can also view your revenue generation within the campaign report area. This will display the revenue attributed to each email or SMS marketing campaign.
Data privacy regulations are of paramount importance to you, so we have built them into everything we do. The Dotdigital data watchdog uses AI to run a complex set of algorithms and checks to predict, detect, and prevent abuse. By assessing and blocking problematic data, we’re protecting you from complaints and potential ISP blocklistings, and guarding your all-important delivery rates.
In terms of the data you store with us, Dotdigital is ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR-specific data processing agreements and EU Model Contract Clauses are in place between Dotdigital and its subsidiaries, as well as service providers processing data. We believe in data being secure, but never complicated. Rest assured that all data we hold is protected and secure, and know you’re able to action data subject requests in a timely fashion thanks to our logical and easy to navigate data reporting tools.
Sustainability is of ever growing importance to consumers and the travel industry is no stranger to sustainability based scrutiny.
At Dotdigital we make it easy for you to reduce your carbon footprint as the world’s first carbon-neutral cross-channel marketing automation platform – we’re also committed to being net-zero by 2030.
By offering travel marketers like you a carbon neutral option for your marketing automation, it’s one more thing off your to-do list as we take care of it for you. Dotdigital customers have access to a designed badge for their email footers to proudly showcase its carbon neutral credentials, thereby boosting your brand image to your customers with none of the legwork required.
Ultimately, to stand out from the competition, motivate new customers, and retain existing customers, you need a platform that empowers you to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Travel marketers need comprehensive data capture and reporting to enable hyper-personalized marketing, especially including location-based targeting to appeal to travelers directly. You also need to be able to trust the data you collect and know that it will reliably inform triggered campaigns such as pre-trip reminders, itinerary notifications, and so on. It’s crucial you keep your audience engaged and informed throughout their booking and travel experience to keep them coming back.
We know that travel isn’t something people tend to book in the spur of the moment. This is why a cross-channel approach is needed to maintain engagement during the consideration phase and then secure the booking. When you can easily keep your brand’s offering front-of-mind as your audience goes about their daily life, your brand is the one they will choose when they’re ready to complete the booking.
Dotdigital ticks all the boxes for travel marketers, from data capture at the start, to engaging and informative campaigns throughout, and simple but detailed reporting for you to ensure you’re always optimizing.