Dive Site Photo by permanently scatterbrained

Continuing with the Impact of Design series, I’d like to introduce our new addition with a focus on the travel industry. The travel industry is dependent upon many other industries to stay afloat, including: food, transportation, entertainment, hospitality and more. Many cities wouldn’t have income coming in if we didn’t have the ability to travel. Since this is such a large area of business, I’d like to discuss how design can help make it successful online.

Key Points of Design Focus

Exciting & Engaging Design Elements

When your viewing a travel website, what draws you into it to begin with? The colors, the way the images make you feel, the great prices displayed prominently? These are just to name a few. Whatever your business draw may be, your graphics should follow suit.

Prague Castle photo by mcost

For example, let’s say your travel website is focused on offering luxury castle stays in Prague. Your main focus is luxury and elegance. With your graphics, you want to make the site feel elegant and luxurious, the same way you want your customers to feel when they visit your castle. Show the details of the rooms, what their dining experience might look like, and any other elements that scream luxury. Use rich colors that allow these luxurious elements to take center stage. When listing the pricing, since this is probably a costly stay, be sure not to bring too much attention to it, but making sure it isn’t tough to find either.

You might want to consider using a video that walks the user through a visitor’s experience at the castle. Allowing them an opportunity to see themselves at the castle.

Finding the right balance and what is most and least important can be key when engaging your visitors.

Evaluating the Competition

How does your travel offerings and presentation compare with the competition? Before starting or re-evaluating your travel website, it’s important to see what others are doing first. Then, decide how you can do it better and more effectively and what you can add that they don’t offer.

For example, let’s say Travel Company A has a really cool and engaging Flash application running within their website. It allows their customers to click on a map and highlights the best reasons to visit that particular destination. How can you take this idea and make it one step better? Maybe graphically it isn’t very engaging as it is functional. Maybe you decide to showcase the best things to see in each area by using photographs alone within map pop-ups? Taking one more step to engage and intrigue the customer might make your business more successful.

Websites

Online Booking

Many travel sites have very intuitive booking systems that allow you to quickly book your entire vacation online in the comfort of your own home. With the many options that vacation packages can bring to the table, it’s important to focus on the user’s experience when designing.

UI (User Interface) designers are specifically trained in improving a user’s experience by making the completion of one task as seamless as possible. With travel, there are quite a few options to take into account. If you are running a business, which offers vacation packages with transportation, lodging and activities there are quite a few combinations that could be put together. Making those choices fun, simple and engaging to sort through isn’t always easy.

A great solution would be to group options by the type of travelers you commonly encounter. Such as the budget-savvy traveler, the luxury traveler, the extreme adventurist, the water lover, etc. Intelligently grouping certain options will help guide your users through your website and make booking a vacation just as relaxing as being on it!

Here’s a great example of a website grouping unusual hotels by type:

If your UI and/or web designer is able to test the site within a focus group, take advantage of that. It’s important when planning out a large, complex site with many options to test the usability with those that might be in your target market. This way you’ll find any glaring complexities right away before time and money has been put building a confusing, hard-to-follow travel site.

Here are a few examples of Travel websites that utilize online grouping and booking systems effectively:

Online Booking | Royal Caribbean

Contiki Travel for Ages 18-35

Tablet Hotels | Hotel Search

Photography

Quality & Amount

When we’re talking about travel, most people want as many visuals as possible when they are spending their hard earned money on a vacation. When you haven’t been to a country before, you want to make sure it looks like a place you can see yourself enjoying. Keyword here is “see”. If you can only read about it, it probably won’t be nearly as appealing as a travel website who offers lots of visuals. This could cause your business to move elsewhere.

When you show photography, give a description of where and what is happening in the snapshot. The more information you can give your customers the better. Display photographs of many different parts of the area and even some of the local residential areas. This helps bring the area’s culture to the mix as well.

Food is also a great item to have on display. Many travelers look to try new cuisine and showcasing some of the region’s specialties could be a great crowd pleaser as well.

Up-to-date Photography

When your showcasing photography, make sure the photos are somewhat up-to-date. Many elements can alter an area’s appearances. You want to make sure your photographs are telling a truthful story and what they see is actually what they will get. Dating the photographs in the descriptions/captions might be a good way to be more upfront with your customers.

Email Marketing

Travel Promotions

During tough economic times, many consumers aren’t spending the money on vacations and extra, unnecessary purchases. A great way for your designer to help promote good value in the travel business is to design email promotions. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your customers and promote your services at a discounted rate.

Maybe you have a tough time selling trips to warm destinations during a particular time of year. Email is a great way to promote discounts easily and directly to your customers and design plays a big part in the success of these messages.

When consumers aren’t out searching for a specific destination, photography in emails can be a great way to put these areas on showcase. Make the destination look it’s best and explain why the special offer should be taken advantage of. Just because your customer’s aren’t visiting your site, doesn’t mean they aren’t dreaming of a vacation. Maybe they can’t afford it or aren’t sure where they can go on a few dollars.

Here is an example of a promotional travel email I recently received that I found to be well done.

Intriguing Email Design/Marketing | Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines | Click to View Whole Email

Use design to promote the offer in an exciting manner that is also optimized properly for email. A great tip for your designer is to use both HTML text and images as shown in the above example. This way, if you customer doesn’t have images enabled in their email provider’s inbox view, they will still be able to see the special offer, enticing them to show the images. If you only use images in the email design, the efforts might not be as effective in this situation. For more best email practices and examples check out Email Designs that Will Rock Your Inbox.

Travel Website Resources from Around the Web

10 Best Designed State Travel Sites

37 of the Best Web Designs from the Travel Industry

Top 10 Designed Travel Websites

More from The Impact of Design Series

The Impact of Design: Restaurant Business

The Impact of Design: Online Retail

Email design is a very important part of any email campaign – if not the most important. Where certain elements are placed, which offers are presented and what imagery is used can all be huge influencing factors in how your email campaign is going to perform. Over the past two months I’ve rounded up a few email designs. Here are a few I’ve found are most successful and why.

Cater to your customer's curiosity.

Cater to your Customer’s Curiosity

The Banana Republic does an excellent job offering up a mystery amount of savings. This idea is a great way to get customers to click on the email and bring them to the website where they can then be enticed by more products and their awaiting offer. What I found somewhat clever as well was the fact that you didn’t see what the offer was until you found your items, proceeded to the checkout and then entered the promotion code in. In theory this idea is great because it gets the consumer to look at the different items and get as far as entering in their billing information. But, it could be frustrating to the customer who isn’t  looking to purchase, but is soley enticed by the awaiting offer.

I also thought it was smart to show the customer what they might be saving on their purchase. A chance at 500 dollars at their favorite retail store is a great way to bring the customer to your website.

Come up with a catchy, clever idea to entice your customers! Everyone loves cupcakes.

Clever Concept

This email made me laugh which in turn got me to send it along to other people. Simply put, a clever concept is going to help your email campaign tremendously. Having a plan before creating an email will show your customers you really do have something special to show them. Give them a reason to sign-up for your emails.

Details are very important to any type of design. I especially love how this marketing team took the name of each panty and turned it into a frosting to bring the whole concept together. Great work! This naming technique not only is cute and playful, but it also gives the product more personality. They are no longer just free lacy underwear.

Always a great idea to remind you customers that there great deals are ending soon

Email Reminders

Borders consistently reminds their customers about sale deadlines that are approaching. With the many things happening in your daily life along with the list of emails that need replies,  chances are, you probably won’t remember that great deal you saw while sipping your morning coffee. We all need reminders, and this is a great way to put some urgency behind the offer as well.

Valuable tips and product details are key.

Content is King

Length isn’t a factor anymore when it comes to email design. Many users are used to scrolling on websites and the same is true for emails. So give your customers something worth reading. Tell them about your products likes Aveda does in the example above. Why should they click through to your website? What can you offer them that can improve their life and make them look forward to hearing from you? Retailers walk a fine-line between spamming and providing valuable information to their customers. Which side of the line are you on? Make sure your putting some thought behind your email campaigns. Customers want to know why your products are better than your competition. Tell them why.

Show examples of sale product, while focusing on percentages off.

Sale Product Focus

When promoting your sale items, prove to your customer that your sale items do in fact offer value.  A good offer drives this example from PetSmart and follows with many different items that might appeal to various pet owners. And even better, they are all on sale. More often than not I see sale emails with the top percentage off and no sale items featured. When you think sale items, what immediately comes to mind? Unwanted items. Products that are overstocked and are not selling as well as you’ve expected them to. The goal is to make these items seem more appealing and to at least showcase products, rather than solely a top percentage off. If your customers don’t see a few of the products offered on sale they won’t feel as much of an urgency to visit your site.

Certain customers who don’t have much money to spend are still going to be looking for items on sale. With this in mind, you will see results when simply using a percentage off. But, to reach a larger customer base, using both products and a percentage (like this example) will boost clicks even more.

Appeal to your customers senses! Yum!

Sensory Tactics

If your business sells food products keep these key elements in mind when emailing your customers. Visuals are key when it comes to food. If it looks good, there’s a good chance it tastes great too! Cold Stone does a great job of highlighting the interior of their fudge brownie ice cream cake which adds to the overall appeal of their product and brand name.

Photography is key when appealing to your customer’s senses. You want your product to look it’s best and highlight it’s tastiest features. Descriptions of the product are also important, especially if the key ingredients aren’t visible. This could include organic and natural products or special ingredients only available from your company for example.

Cold Stone also does a great job of connecting delicious product with their gift cards for the holidays. Do take advantage of holidays. Customers expect promotions and deals during certain times of the year. Give them what they are looking for otherwise your competition is going step-up and give them discounts when you are not. Pay attention to the competition as much as possible. Sign-up for their emails and see what they are doing.

More Great Email Marketing & Design Resources

20 Email Design Best Practices and Resources for Beginners

Useful Web Design E-Mail Newsletters

Photo by Grethe Boe

This has been a debatable topic since emailing became more common practice in the advertising/marketing world. But, if you were to decide one over the other, which is more effective? There are many factors that go into figuring this out. What is your target market? Age also comes into play, especially for emailing. If you have a larger amount of older customers they might not have a computer or utilize email as someone in the 18-50 age group. What is the purpose of the piece? Do you want to promote a sale or is your promotion a group of different items such as a web-kit? Here are a few pros and cons to each. Make sure you have your target market in mind when determining what choice you should make.

Advantages of Print

- Directly to customer
- Can take it anywhere
- Can share it with anyone
- No hardware restrictions (IE. Computer/Internet)
- You can hold it and feel it – More memorable

Disadvantages of Print

- More expensive
- Not as easily updated

Advantages of Email

-Easily updated
-Cheap compared to print
-Can send out many emails compared to print pieces (depends on your market)

Disadvantages of Email

-Not everyone has email
-Hard to compete (depending on your target market) with other email senders (a huge amount of retailers utilize email marketing)
-Spam filters and emails bouncing (will the email reach your customer?)
-Can be considered less personal than something a person would hold in their hands

Types of Emails (good reasons to email your customer)

Newsletters – Content focused.
Promotional – Sales & Specials.
New Product & Services – Focused on what new items/services you have to offer your customers.
Survey – Ask your customer how you are doing! (Always good to give them something in return for their time).
Fun & Interactive – Games & Video focused.
Forum/Conversational – Have a forum on your site? Send emails on current discussions to get users involved.
Contests – Giveaways always get customers attention! Request a review of the product for a winning entry if desired.

Remember!
Always give your customers the feeling that they are gaining something by being on your email list. Mix it up a little bit! Try different types of emails or features in your newsletters. Otherwise your viewers are going to get bored and simply delete them!

Have any questions regarding email marketing? Give me a shout I’d be glad to give you suggestions or help you design a email template you can use to keep in touch with your customers.