I recently was having a conversation with a dive shop owner who is a prospective client and was asking them about their efforts so far to build their online presence. If they have ever hired an SEO firm before, how old their website is, how big their social media followings are, and how big their email subscriber list is. He knew the questions to the first few questions, but said he had never considered building an email list.
Newsletters are incredibly valuable in the tourism industry for being able to reconnect with past clients as well as people who were interested in diving with you but had put it off until next year. Think about it. Someone is cruising the web and comes across your website. It peaks their interest. They say, “Hey, diving in Costa Rica or Rangiroa, or where ever, seems fantastic. I want to save up some money and then make that trip.” Six months later when they get some money saved up they hop unto google and search up diving in (insert your location here), and your site doesn’t come up in the top 3. Chances are they never find their way back to your site and well, you just made your competitor a customer.
On the other hand, if you have an opt-in form on your site and they sign up to the email newsletter and you make contact every month or so, well chances are they will remember your dive shop name instead of the location. If they don’t do that then they may just reply back to one of your newsletters and boom, they are yours!
There are multiple ways to implement these forms into your website seamlessly that aren’t pushy or distracting. Growing your email subscribers list will grow your dive shops brand as well as your business.
When you send out a news letter, is there some way you can ensure messages are delivered to everyone on the list, rather than being filtered to spam / trash folder.
When I’ve tried doing this, often our message isn’t received. Especially with people using Microsoft email addresses (hotmail, msn etc). Does this happen often?
Which mail service are you using? If it is mailchimp (Im sure others will have these same options as well. This is just what I am familiar with), make sure that you verify your domain with the proper txt records in your domains dns settings so that it appears that the emails are coming from your own domains address rather than being blasted off from email newsletter blasters server. As these send out millions of emails a day, many likely very spammy. This would be the first step. The second would be use the inbox subject line planner. Make sure that it is a good subject line which doesnt appear too spammy.
Finally, delivery is always better if your users have performed a double opt in to be included on your list (where they actually confirm their interest in signing up to the email list) rather than the business owner manually adding them yourself.
Hopefully this gives you a bit of a start to help lower the percent of emails which head to spam folders. Let me know if you are interested at all in help with your website or marketing efforts!