In this episode travel agent besties Sam, MK and Christie discuss three common struggles of email marketing- building your list, being consistent with emailing your list,  and coming up with new creative email ideas to send to your list. They also discuss ways to navigate each of these challenges and share a fun freebie to help with creativity at the end!

Christie briefly shares the top three struggles of email marketing that she, and other travel agents she talks to have with email marketing. She shares that building a list, staying consistent with email marketing and finding creative ways to talk to a subscriber list are the top three email marketing challenges travel agents face.

MK talks about one of her favorite types of lead magnets- a quiz! She shares that she’s had a which resort is right for you quiz out for about a year and it’s generated tons of great information that she’s been able to use to not only build her list, but also get tons of great information about the people on her email list so she can tailor and target her email marketing campaigns specifically for these people. 

Sam shares that there are tons of different types of lead magnets, and you’ve got lots of options other than a quiz. However, the ideal lead magnet for a travel agent is something that helps a client before they begin the journey of booking their vacation. She cautions against using things like a packing list as a lead magnet because you’re catching the consumer too late in their journey instead of at the beginning. 

MK talks about how considering your initial consultation questions may be a great way to brainstorm a freebie or lead magnet to offer. She discusses those early decisions that a client will need to make and how you can reverse engineer the process to really decide what your freebie is. Sam mentions that a freebie really offers that instant gratification we all know and love and so using that to your advantage is really important when coming up with a lead magnet. 

Sam talks about the importance of consistently emailing the list that you’ve built. She shares that this is really going to be different for everyone and is largely dependent on how often you feel you can consistently email your list and provide value. 

MK explains that the big reason they’re using the phrase consistency and not frequency is because it’s largely dependent on you and the amount of time you have to send out emails is going to vary based on other commitments. She also shares that she’s had to remind herself in her own email marketing journey that it’s better to start small and build than to start big, get overwhelmed and then freeze with nothing to say. She mentions that overwhelm leads her to a creativity freeze and asks Christie for tips to combat this. 

Christie shares that one of the big tools she uses to get out of creativity ruts is chatting through ideas with her travel agent besties. She shares that she will send them ideas and ask for their input and perspective on different ways to do things. She encourages listeners to find a community and invites them to join ours if they’re interested. 

She then shares that while it may be a bit controversial, she also will share her ideas with chatgpt and ask it to help her come up with ideas and things as well. She also shared that it helps her recognize ideas that may have already been in her brain, but may not have been fully fleshed out yet and that’s really helpful. 

Before You Plan the Magic is really excited to announce that they have a freebie just for you to help with your creativity- and it’s fifteen prompts you can put into chat gpt that will help with your email marketing.

Sam and Christie then talk about getting started with ChatGPT and what someone can do if they’re skeptical about using it. Christie shares that setting it up initially with your brand voice, ideal client etc. is going to be really helpful in getting it to give you answers you can use. She shares that if she does that and Sam does the same, because they gave it different information it will in turn give them different answers. 

MK and Christie discuss how this tool can take jumbled information and organize it in a succinct way- which is something they find really useful if they’re feeling overwhelmed or kind of lost in their email marketing. They both explain that they use it often for brain dumps and ask what to focus on or how to organize things. The tool isn’t replacing their knowledge and insights, it’s simply organizing the information.

Sam talks about what to do with the list of prompts and shares that we’re not suggesting you feed chatgpt a prompt and simply copy paste what it spits out. Christie shares her process for using the prompts and how the information inspires her to build her own based on what the prompt shares. 

MK mentions that she uses it as an outlining tool to help her determine what information she should be sharing about different things and shares that she wrote a whole email about a ride after a quick chatGPT outline conversation. 

Sam and MK then talk about how the tool really just helps them communicate more clearly and succinctly with their audience and is really a tool they use, but it doesn’t do the thinking for them. 

Thanks so much for listening to before you plan the magic! Want to connect with us? Connect with us on instagram at thehappiestthings_co. To get the 15 prompts for ChatGPT, click here and we’ll send them your way. 

Until next week! Sam, MK & Christie