Understanding Preferences in Tourism Email Marketing

Nowadays, advanced tools allow the personalization of email communication with tourism clients or prospects based on explicit (e.g. name, age, language, country) and implicit indicators (e.g. ranking of activity in the opening rate of the newsletter, browsing preferences, online preferences provided by cookies, etc.). However, knowing how audiences react to emails allows Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) to create content clusters for personalized communication. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the preferences on tourism email marketing of different audiences based on a specific explicit indicator, namely the language chosen by users to receive communications by a DMO. A content analysis on a longitudinal dataset based on 131 newsletter messages sent between 2018 and 2021 to more than 50′000 contacts by a DMO in Switzerland was performed. Results show that content should be adapted to different audiences speaking different languages instead of providing just a translation. Specifically, the German-speaking audience seems to be more inclined to messages that focus on winter sports and hiking, the Italian-speaking audience to news about hiking and information on COVID-19, the French-speaking audience to news about promotions, while the English-speaking audience to contents on discounts and COVID-19-related. These results provide an important contribution to studies on tourism personalization of communication in the context of email marketing, suggesting the role of content adaptation according to the language and cultural background of the audience. DMO managers can also benefit from this research in understanding how to address a similar study on their datasets and compare the emerged content clusters.