Email is still king even for social media-obsessed millennials

Travel companies should ramp up their email marketing as email is still the preferred way of nearly a third of millennials across the Asia Pacific in receiving travel recommendations or updates.

Findings of Journey of Me Insights: What Asia Pacific Millennial Travelers Want revealed that 31% of travellers ages 18 to 30 years old prefer getting communication via email. This is followed by receiving travel updates through social media with 23%.

However, in Thailand and Indonesia, millennials prefer social media as their main communication channel with 50% and 34%, respectively.

Power of email marketing

Agency Analytics published the same result last year, email drives more customer engagement, click-throughs, and conversions.

The article continued by saying that email marketing has the highest ROI. The median ROI for email is 122%. The following are some of the reasons that support the aforementioned findings:

People check email more frequently – More than half of internet users check their email first thing in the morning, even before looking at Facebook, doing a Google search, or even checking the weather. 9 out of 10 email users check their inbox at least once a day. Chances of your recipients seeing the message are high.

Email has a bigger base – Compared to Facebook with 1.9 billion users, there are 3.7 billion email users worldwide. Moreover, email has been around forever making it a more effective channel to reach potential clients.

Geared towards business – People use social media for entertainment like sharing photos, playing games, and chatting with friends. Email, on the other hand, is geared more towards business that gives it an edge when it comes to marketing.

More personal and targeted – While social media work great for spreading the word, email, when done correctly, is more personal and intimate. Moreover, one can curate messages depending on the recipient to make it more personal.

Cheap travellers

The research findings also revealed that millennials like to travel at a cheaper cost. 42% of APAC millennials say they often use ride-sharing apps like Uber when they travel. 35% say they frequently choose economy services on their flights and hotels.

Millennials make up 45% of the Asia Pacific’s population, and 60% of this group worldwide are expected to live in 2020. Therefore, it is a market of its own that is hard to ignore.

The study was conducted by Amadeus in collaboration with YouGov across 14 markets in the Asia Pacific including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

Understanding millennials through research like this make it easier for travel companies to create campaigns and messages.