1.Coach: Attempting to gather 10-plus pieces of info about demographics and travel preferences up front. Travel delay! First Class: Using progressive profiling to gather data gradually and keep busy travelers moving quickly through the opt-in process.

A customer’s location, age, budget, hobbies and interests can play major roles in what kinds of messages will engage that person, so it can be tempting to ask for all this info and more when people subscribe to your email program.

Gathering data so you can deliver more relevant messages is an admirable goal, but resist the temptation to ask a dozen questions before you’ve established a relationship. Instead, require just a few of the most vital pieces of information up front and use a progressive Web forms builder to prioritise the list of questions you’d like to subsequently ask. Then, when customers visit your website or landing page at a later time, your marketing automation platform will trigger however many new questions you specified, enabling you to steadily gain deeper insight into their interests.

2. Coach: Failing to collect customer information during in-person interactions. First Class: Using offline interactions to collect relevant data.

New technology continues to bridge the gap between online and offline interactions, so use the occasions when customers are in your hotel lobby or at your airline gate to gather information by:

• Promoting email opt-ins via SMS
• Emailing hotel guests their receipts and including an opt-in offer in the message
• Making it easy for customers to share their contact information with you via iPads strategically located at the front desk or check-in counter

3. Coach: Greeting subscribers with a single barebones message confirming opt-in—or none at all. First Class: Delivering a multipart welcome series that says “Aloha!” and extols all the benefits of your travel or tourism program.

First impressions go a long way, which is why top-tier hotels greet guests by offering to help carry their luggage, asking how they can make their stay better, and providing an immaculately clean room complete with a mint on the pillow

The same goes for your messaging program: Tossing your customers into an email program ad hoc can be as disorienting as arriving at your hotel to discover that your room was double-booked and you’ve been moved from an oceanview room to one with a scenic view of the parking lot.

To get your relationship off on the right foot, send a multipart welcome series. Start off by:

• Thanking the subscriber for opting in
• Restating the content, frequency and types of messages you’ll send
• Linking to important or relevant content on your site and offering a discount if applicable

In follow-up messages, you can highlight top destinations, local attractions or top-notch amenities; highlight corporate social network sites; promote check-in incentives or loyalty programs; and invite them to update their preferences

4. Coach: Using Web tracking after opt-in to increase relevance. First Class: Tracking behaviour before the opt-in and engaging new customers from the very start.

If you’re tracking your customers’ behaviours on your website and using this information to send content that more closely aligns with their travel interests, you’re already ahead of the game. But why not use this same concept to connect with new subscribers right off the bat with relevant content? New Web tracking technology enables you to connect new subscribers to actions they took on your site before opting in

Now, instead of sending a generic email—or one with information that the customer has no interest in—you can increase your chances of connecting more quickly with an email picked out especially for him or her. Let’s say a prospective customer researching vacation destinations visits your site and browses family-friendly cruise options before opting in to your weekly deals newsletter. Great, right? But if you aren’t using Web tracking capabilities to connect a visitor’s previous behaviour on the site with his or her email address when the customer opts in, the first email you send might promote adults-only resorts—missing a major opportunity. But armed with this data, you can entice the visitor to book by touting vacation packages guaranteed to be fun for all ages.

5. Coach: Sending generic pre-check-in confirmation and instructions. First Class: Humanising it with personality and dynamic content. Bon voyage!

Travelling should be fun, so don’t be a buzz kill and deliver boring, generic, robotic content. Instead, pack your messages with a jolt of energy by using customer testimonials and reviews, employee photos, and helpful and educational personalised content. Air New Zealand, for example, showcases its brand personality by using dynamic content to populate each message with a photo of a flight crew member who will be on the recipient’s specific flight. Passenger reaction has been incredibly positive, with some customers even printing out the emails and showing them to the featured flight crew member while on board.

In addition, including helpful information about the recipient’s travel destination can increase engagement and encourage social sharing. Air New Zealand’s pre-flight emails include customised imagery such as local cultural events or popular delicacies, a weather update, and flight details along with the ability to share information with friends via Facebook and Twitter. The pre-flight emails have an average open rate of 69 percent and an average unique click rate of 38 percent, both well above industry averages.

6. Coach: Offering a limited preference center or no preference center at all. First Class: Providing an extensive preference center that includes multiple options.

When you’re on vacation, you want to be in control—and you want your toughest decision to be where to eat breakfast. So give customers the control they crave, providing a preference center that makes it easy for them to tell you what types of content they’re interested in receiving.

And with people growing increasingly channel-choosy, don’t forget to give them options for what channels you use to communicate with them. This is particularly pertinent to the travel and tourism industry. Customers may want to receive news on hot deals via Facebook or Twitter, travel confirmations through email, and delay notifications via SMS.

7. Coach: Haphazardly slapping social-sharing icons into emails and hoping for the best. First Class: Designing marketing programs around the concept of sharing, with strong call-outs throughout the message series.

People love to make other people jealous of their travel experiences—just check out the tweets, status updates and photos on Facebook and Twitter. Tap into this phenomenon by building campaigns that encourage sharing throughout and help you expand your message reach exponentially.

During the travel planning or research stage, send vacationrelated sales, discounts and promotions with a strong call-out to share to their social network. Once a customer has booked travel and you’re sending pre-trip messages such as itineraries and destination details, encourage social sharing here too—people love to share their excitement about upcoming travel.

And finally, follow up post-trip and encourage them to share reviews, experiences and photos via your corporate social network pages and their own—again, they’ll likely relish the chance to share their tip details.

8. Coach: Uh … what’s a local check-in program? First Class: Using local check-ins to upsell customers, provide tips and become a “virtual concierge.”

Who doesn’t like a little luxury and pampering? Do you have on-site services or upscale amenities you want your customers to try? With location-based marketing, a new way of marketing that enables companies to deliver highly relevant content to customers based on where they are in the real world, you can use check-ins to encourage usage of these services and amenities, such as sending a “Check in at our hotel to get a $10 off spa pass” message.

As with your email messaging mix, though, it doesn’t have to be all about deals and discounts. Providing tips upon check-in about how to best enjoy their travel experience is also a smart way to engage customers.

You can even use check-ins to become a virtual concierge. Welcome customers after they check in at your hotel with some suggestions for things to do in the area, or email customers when they check in at their airport and ask if they need directions.

9. Coach: Ending the relationship at the end of the trip—what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. First Class: Asking for a review, sending review confirmations and populating future emails with these reviews.

Travelers like to sound off about whether or not they experienced good service, and positive customer reviews can have an enormous impact on growing revenue. Despite this, many travel companies make little to no effort to encourage and use these reviews.

To help generate reviews, set up a trigger to deliver a review request message at a specified time period after the trip ends. Just by asking, you can get big results— one Silverpop client moved to an automated, personalised email request approach and grew its reviews from 5,000 to 50,000 in about two years, after taking four years to reach the 5,000 mark.

And don’t stop there. Follow up with a review-posted notification when the review goes live. Not only does this provide another touch point, but it boosts your trustworthiness by providing evidence that the review is public and offers an opportunity for customers to broadcast reviews or comments on social networks.

Finally, take these reviews and put them to use, populating future emails with the words of your customers. You’ll likely find that having your customers talk about your brand instantly humanises it in a way that even the best promotional copy can’t match.

10. Coach: Opt-out requests lead directly to … opt-out. First Class: Making opting out easy, but giving subscribers alternatives too.

Over time, there are tons of reasons why customers’ travel preferences may change: They moved to a new location, changed jobs, got married or had kids, took up new hobbies, etc. As an alternative to opting out, let subscribers update their travel interests/preferences, demographics, communication channel preferences and frequency.

In addition, consider that subscribers who have just completed a yearly vacation or semiannual business trip may not be planning on returning or traveling again for a few months, and may want to take a temporary break from your communications. Use new technology to maintain the relationship by enabling them to halt your correspondences for a specified time, at the end of which they’ll resume receiving your emails.