Background and challenge
It is a pattern we often see in the travel and leisure industry: guests or visitors have a wonderful holiday or day out, then simply disappear from sight. Yet this is exactly the group most likely to book again. They already know your brand and have created memories with it.
The big question for many marketing managers: How do you encourage repeat bookings at a logical, personal moment, without it requiring manual effort?
The solution: an automated anniversary campaign
When do you remind someone of their fantastic holiday? Exactly when they were feeling that same urge to book last year. We therefore implemented an anniversary campaign for several clients: an automated email sent approximately one year after the original booking.
Through the Wander Connect integration, the reservation system communicates seamlessly with the email platform. The campaign is only sent if no new booking has been made in the meantime.
The success factors of this campaign:
- Make it personal: In the leisure industry, you can show different visuals for camping guests than for accommodation guests, so people instantly recognise their own experience. You can apply the same logic for different seasons or different parks and campsites. In the travel industry, you can suggest comparable trips to new destinations to inspire guests to book again.
- Tap into people’s memories: An anniversary campaign is about evoking feeling, not listing features. Return guests do not need to be convinced about your facilities or booking conditions, as they have already booked before.
- Be careful with assumptions: Do not automatically say “Remember how great it was?” as their experience may not have been. A smarter approach: only send the campaign to guests with a positive NPS score. That way, you are targeting the audience most likely to make repeat bookings.
- Keep it short and action-driven The email should inspire and encourage recipients to click through to the website. After all, that is where bookings are made.
- Know your target audience: Look at your own booking data to understand when guests tend to rebook. AI can also help you quickly map booking behaviour by analysing booking date versus arrival date (always fully anonymised, of course). If your guests do not typically return every year, adjust the campaign timing accordingly.
The results
This campaign feels personal, relevant and perfectly timed and the numbers reflect that. Both CTR and average conversion rate outperform a standard newsletter.
The average results:
Click through rate
10-14%
Conversion rate
1 – 1,5%
What does this mean in practice?
Suppose an organisation has 5.000 unique bookers per year with an average booking value of €750. At a conversion rate of 1.3%, the anniversary campaign delivers:
(5.000 × 1.3%) × €750 = €48.750 in additional revenue per year.
Conclusion
What we see across multiple clients is no coincidence. When you remind guests or travellers of their previous stay or trip at exactly the right moment, you significantly increase the chance they will choose you again.
The anniversary campaign has become a cornerstone of a strong email strategy in the travel and leisure industry. You invest time once to set it up and after that, it consistently generates additional revenue and strengthens your relationship with existing guests.
All that is needed afterwards is monitoring the results and updating the content annually, so guests do not receive the same email year after year.
“Once set up, this campaign runs itself and it is indispensable in your email strategy.”
Want to learn more about how email marketing fits into the 5 stages of travel or are you curious what an anniversary campaign could do for your organisation? Get in touch with us!
