Working in the travel niche is fundamentally different from classic ecommerce or SaaS. Users aren't in a constant purchase cycle — travel is an event with clear boundaries, and it rarely becomes an impulse decision. The average pause between bookings is 312 days. Even the most dedicated travelers, with a history of seven or more bookings, come back for a new tour roughly once every five months.
So how do you stay visible to the customer during that time and turn newsletters into a stable revenue source? In this case study, experts from the Promodo agency share their experience building a comprehensive retention strategy for FREETOUR.com.
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Task |
Implement triggers for every stage of the customer journey and turn promotional newsletters into a stable revenue source. |
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Solution |
Build a full retention infrastructure, manually validate the database, warm up the domain, and launch automated lifecycle workflows. |
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Results |
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About the Project
FREETOUR.com is a platform that connects travelers with local guides. The service offers search and booking for free walking tours, budget tours, and experiences around the world.
Starting Point
In the travel niche, travelers tend to keep emails with useful ideas or recommendations, so they can return to them when planning their next trip. However, at the start of the project, the brand's email communication was limited to basic transactional messages — booking confirmations or cancellation notices. There were no other types of newsletters, including promotional or trigger-based ones.
Given these specifics, the Promodo team was tasked with building a digital customer journey — from the first introduction to the platform to staying engaged with the customer after their trip. The goal was to turn email marketing into an organic part of the customer experience and the main driver of repeat bookings.
Solution
To achieve these goals, the team moved away from scattered newsletters and toward a single, unified communication logic. They also set up triggers and built the technical foundation for further scaling.
Building the Retention Infrastructure
Successful email marketing starts with a clean database, so work on the project began with the following steps:
- Audited the contact database and manually validated the data. This helped preserve a strong Postmaster reputation and minimize the risk of the domain being flagged as spam.
- Set up an account in Yespo CDP and defined technical requirements for syncing data between the website, mobile app, and CRM.
Since the team was working with massive volumes of historical data (databases from 2023–2024 totaling 257,000 and 308,000 contacts respectively), domain warm-up was gradual and took three months. Thanks to segmentation, planned sending waves, and regular performance monitoring, the team was able to scale sending volume without risking blocks or damage to sender reputation.
The client's database now holds 480,000 contacts, 74% of which are active. Every month, FREETOUR.com sends over 1,000,000 emails through Yespo, with the open rate on promotional newsletters consistently holding above 50%.
Building User Lifecycle Workflows
The average repeat-order cycle in the travel niche is close to a year. To keep the brand from disappearing from the customer's radar during that time, Promodo set up automated newsletters designed to guide new users toward their first tour booking, maintain interest during the off-season, or win back "sleeping" travelers.
Workflows launched:
Welcome series — a welcome email, a questionnaire for data collection (used for further segmentation), and a motivational email for new users who haven't booked yet.
Reactivation — triggered for subscribers who haven't opened emails in over 3 months. Includes a referral link that generates a discount on a paid tour.
- Booking reminders
- Birthday greetings
- Motivation to move up loyalty program tiers.
Alongside the triggers, the team launched a system of regular promotional campaigns, which now generate 80% of revenue from the email channel.
The best-performing campaigns are seasonal collections (Oktoberfest, Christmas markets, Halloween) and "Top tours/cities of the month" newsletters. Given the platform's specifics — where many offers are free tours based on voluntary tips to the guide — converting these informational newsletters into real revenue became one of the project's key achievements.
To keep engagement high without burning out the database with sales-only content, marketers mix promotional messages with emotional content. The audience regularly receives:
- alternative trip formats (warm & cozy travel, evening tours);
- interesting stories from local guides;
- food tour collections;
- information about partner integrations.
Analytics and Hypothesis Testing
Work on the FREETOUR.com project has been running as an ongoing consulting engagement for almost a year now. At this stage, the main goal of Promodo's retention team is to automate all communications as much as possible (including promotional campaigns) in order to free up resources for deeper analytics and continuous hypothesis testing.
Through regular data analysis in the CDP system, the team identified several interesting patterns in traveler behavior:
- Users want ready-made solutions
Early on, marketers noticed that the audience responded very weakly to emails with surveys or questionnaires. So instead of asking travelers about their preferences, the team started offering them ready-made ideas backed by social proof. Now the best-performing and highest-converting newsletters are the ones featuring reviews from other travelers and "Top tours/cities of the month" collections.
- Email in travel is a long-acting tool
The team recorded cases where customers successfully booked spring tours in March by clicking a link from a December email. Now all thematic newsletters launch at least 7–10 days before the event, giving users time to think it over.
Results
The Promodo team successfully optimized the retention system and integrated it seamlessly with the client's product. But this is only the first stage. The next step for FREETOUR.com is building a full omnichannel ecosystem. Upcoming plans include: deeper behavioral personalization, implementation of recommendation mechanics, and syncing the email channel with push notifications — further increasing the value of the brand's communication with travelers.