How Email Marketing Can Supercharge Your Watersport Business!

With so many types of marketing communications out there these days, email marketing gets often overlooked; however, it is one of the best ways for tour operators to stay in touch with your customers and to make them come back. In this blog, we’ll cover all the things you need to know about email marketing for growing your watersport business.

Why Tour Operators Choose Email Marketing

While other marketing strategies, such as growing your watersport business via Instagram or other social media networks, are good, email marketing lets you keep your customer communications personal, which is an essential aspect of your customer relationship. Many email service providers (ESP) can let you set a parameter (e.g., recipient’s first name) that gets changed automatically in each email you develop, according to the information provided. This email marketing feature triggers personalized communications, making your customers feel like you created an email specifically for them. Let’s look at some of the ways watersport operators can use email marketing to communicate with their guests.
 

#1: Keep Your Customers Updated on Their Booking Information

As we all know, in watersports, when it starts raining suddenly, or the equipment breaks down (e.g., jet skis or pontoon boats), a booking cancelation is inevitable. This is why it’s so important to keep vacationers in the loop about the changes in their reservations. Email marketing is the best way to inform your customers about the changes for 2 key reasons:

1. Email marketing is perceived as a formal and official way of confirming information.
2. If a customer forgets the information, they can always refer to it later as many times as needed.

#2: Send a Waiver to Sign

Emailing a waiver to your customer for filling out before their reservation time allows both tour operator and customer to skip taking time to fill out the form when they arrive and, instead, go straight to the water.
 

#3: Newsletter

Although we don’t encourage you to be persistent in your marketing communications with vacationers, as your customers are typically in town not longer than a few days, a newsletter can still be a nice addition to your marketing efforts. Some of the information that you can discuss in your newsletter can include the following:

1. Did you just add an unusual water-based activity to your offering? 
2. Did you start to consider attracting more seniors or families with kids?
3. Did you just add a new piece of watersport equipment (e.g., jet ski and/or pontoon boats) because you couldn’t figure out why your jet ski won’t start?
4. Did you find the best location for your jet ski rental business?
5. Did you launch a dolphin tour?

Let your customers know about all that via email, as it might be that exact missing piece they were looking for in your watersport business!
By the way, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing to the WaveRez newsletter, so you can not only have an example of a newsletter template to refer to at the beginning of each new month, you can also stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in all things watersports.
 

How to Collect Vacationer’s Contact Information

With email marketing, unlike with, say, social media, you can only send communications to certain people. A person needs to confirm that they consent to receive communications from you by signing a form of some sort. Here are some of the main ways tour operators obtain contact information.
 

Website Pop-Up Opt-In Form

When you enable an instant pop-up form on your website with an exclusive offer (e.g., 10% off the first booking of rental or tour), it can drive a vacationer’s incentive to share their contact information with you. You can set up a promo code using WaveRez, which then can be used by your customers to make a reservation.
 

Waiver

A waiver sent via email or handed out to your customer in person at your booking booth can include a question asking if they would like to receive email communications from you. Having your customer tick that box allows you to leverage email marketing techniques used by tour operators.
 

Newsletter Opt-in Form URL

Once you’re ready to start sending newsletter emails to your customers and prospects, be sure to set the URL that links to your newsletter opt-in form. You can post this link in the bios of your social media accounts, which can also be a great way to grow your watersport business via Instagram.
 

Email Marketing Techniques

When it comes to email marketing communications, there’s a certain type of information that tour operators collect from their guests. The key here is not to ask for too many details, but just enough for running your email marketing drip campaigns because of how cautious people get these days when it comes to sharing their personal data. Here are some examples of email marketing campaigns that watersport operators target at their customers.

Refer to Vacationers by Their First Name

Instead of calling an email recipient by simple “Dear customer” or “Hey you!”, be sure to use their first name. This can help make vacationers think you are communicating directly with them, not with just another contact in your list. Outreaching someone using their last name might be too formal considering how social travel, tourism, and watersports specifically, industries are.
 

Know When Their Birthdays Are

Knowing when your valued customer’s birthday is can do the trick to add some celebratory vibes to your email marketing campaigns. Just like you would offer a discount via a website pop-up opt-in form, the same can be applied in direct emails to the travelers. Not only can it boost a vacationer’s interest in your watersports business, but it also lets them feel special.
 

Be Aware of Tourist’s Demographics and How They Found Out About Your Business

Depending on who you are trying to reach out to, your communication style can vary. For example, families with kids who booked with you before may not be interested in the business announcement related to your efforts on promoting your watersport business to seniors. Additionally, the marketing channel they used to learn more about your business (e.g., Instagram vs. local newspaper) can set a tone for your email communications. For example, sometimes, referring to vacationers by their first name may not necessarily be the best idea, and using their last name can be better.
 

How to Learn Email Marketing Techniques

While there are many ways out there to learn more about email marketing techniques, the best way for us at WaveRez was through the licenses and certification programs. Platforms like LinkedIn Learning and HubSpot Academy offer a great set of courses to take your email marketing skills from 0 to 100%. By the way, HubSpot also has its own email marketing platform, which we use ourselves.
 

Managing Email Communications with Ease Using WaveRez

If this blog has convinced you to start using email marketing to grow your watersport business, consider using WaveRez to manage email communications with your customers. WaveRez lets you send email notifications and store your customer data in the same ecosystem! Check out the video tutorial below for details on how to easily send emails to your customers using our software solution for watersport operators:

To get more information about email communication control and other software features, schedule your free demo with our sales team to learn more about how WaveRez can help you grow your watersport business!