Three short emails in the first week, then an ongoing stream of things worth reading that mostly are not about you. One email delivers what they asked for, another two days later asks what they thought, and one at day five asks about their last trip. Most advisors send the first one and nothing after it, which is why their list goes quiet.
We had Ely Delaney in to teach this on our October 1, 2026 CATT session, "Maximizing Your New Lead Engagement." He wrote The Follow-Up Code and he has been building these sequences since before the tools existed to automate them. What follows is his method, applied to a travel business.
If you have a list sitting there that you have never emailed, that is usually the fastest thing to fix in a business. Book a free business audit and we will look at what you already have.
Email is not dead, which is not the same as saying yours is working
Ely's line on this is blunt. Email is not dead, your emails are just bad. He puts the industry return at somewhere around thirty-six to forty-two dollars for every dollar spent, against roughly three for social media, and his argument is that advisors who say email does not work for them have usually only ever sent the kind of email they themselves would delete.
Those are figures Ely cited on the call, not measured CATT results or a forecast for your agency. Track your own replies and conversations rather than building a revenue target from an industry average.
The platform is not the problem either. He is clear that whatever you already have will do the job, whether that is a proper CRM or something simpler, and that nobody has ever fixed a follow-up problem by switching software. What changes the outcome is how the emails are written and how often they sound like a person rather than a company.
For a closer look at the platforms that can hold your client records and communication, see our guide to the best CRM for travel advisors.
The four stages before anyone books anything
Ely breaks the path into four, and it is worth knowing which stage you are actually stuck at before you start rewriting emails.
Attention is anything that puts you in front of people. Posting, speaking, podcasts, networking. At this point they are a lead, which in his definition is simply a person with a pulse who could use what you do.
Capture is the moment they raise a hand and give you an email address. Now they are a prospect, and the thing that moves them across that line is usually a specific, useful download rather than a newsletter signup box.
Nurture is everything between that moment and the moment they are ready, and it is the stage almost everyone skips.
Conversion is the conversation. If nurture has done its job, this part is much shorter than people expect.
Most advisors are working hard at attention and ignoring nurture entirely, which is why the effort does not convert.
What the download should actually be
Not a newsletter signup. Something specific enough that a person wants it before they trust you.
Ely's travel examples on the call were good ones: the five biggest tourist traps people fall into when booking a vacation and what to do instead, or the five biggest mistakes people make when hiring a travel agent. Both work because they promise something useful and slightly contrarian, and neither requires you to already have a reputation.
He is also a fan of delivering it as a short email course rather than a PDF, so a five-point guide becomes five emails over five days. That is more advanced, but it trains the habit of opening your email from day one, which is the whole game.
One caveat he raised, and it is worth repeating because Oliver asked him about the Growth Check directly: quizzes do not work for everybody. Ely said plainly that he personally will not do them, because he wants the information rather than the assessment, and that some portion of your audience feels the same. His advice was to test one against a simple guide rather than assume, which your CRM can do for you.
If you are still choosing the download itself, our lead magnet guide walks through how to choose a focused topic and deliver it well.
The sequence, email by email
From a download to a conversation
Immediately
Deliver exactly what they requested.
Day 2
Ask what stood out and invite a reply.
Day 5
Ask about their last travel-planning experience.
Ongoing
Share useful evergreen recommendations.
Email one, immediately. Thank them, deliver the thing, and keep it short. Ely makes a point about this one that is easy to miss: you are training them. If the first email arrives fast and contains exactly what was promised, you have taught them that opening your email is worth it. If it arrives three days later wrapped in a pitch, you have taught them the opposite and you will not get that back.
Email two, forty-eight hours later. This is a soft one. What did you think, what stood out, what questions do you have? Tell them they can reply and that you read every one personally, and mean it. Then a light line at the bottom offering a conversation if they want one, usually as a PS with a calendar link rather than a button in the middle of the page.
Email three, around day five. This is the one Ely called the game changer, and it is the one nearly nobody sends. You ask them what their last experience was actually like. What happened the last time they booked a trip, worked with an advisor, or tried to plan something themselves?
The reason it works is not politeness. People tell you exactly what went wrong, and in doing so they hand you the objection you would otherwise have had to guess at. Someone who tells you their last advisor took four days to reply has told you what to emphasize for the rest of the relationship, without you asking a single sales question.
Then the long game. After the first three, the sequence becomes an ongoing stream of things worth reading. Ely's rule is that most of it should not be yours. Book recommendations, a podcast worth an hour, something you read that changed how you think about a destination, a resource that saves someone time. He told a story on the call about a subscriber who got a book recommendation from him on a Thursday, bought it on Friday, read it over the weekend, and wrote back on Monday to say she had been close to giving up on her business before reading it. That email was not selling anything.
The Email Nurture Starter includes three email templates and an evergreen sequence planner for this automated download sequence. For a separate job, the Follow-Up Formula is a companion guide to following up with someone who has already made a live inquiry.
Why he does not like newsletters
This came up more than once and it is worth understanding, because most advisors reach for a newsletter first.
A newsletter goes out the same day in the same format to everybody, which makes it feel like a broadcast. It also tends to be about you. Here is where we are speaking, here is the new offer, here is a testimonial. Ely's objection is that nobody opens their inbox hoping for an update on your month.
The alternative he teaches is evergreen. Something written once that still has value whether the person reads it today, next month or in five years, delivered on a schedule that varies rather than landing every Tuesday at nine. Seven days, then ten, then five. Morning sometimes, afternoon others. The irregularity is deliberate, because a predictable send pattern is what makes something feel automated.
He does allow newsletters a place if they are genuinely educational. The problem is that most are not.
How to write them so they get read
Three rules from the session that are easy to apply tonight.
Never let a paragraph run past four sentences. Ely ghostwrites for clients and this is the constraint he works to, because a wall of text loses people before the first full stop.
Write it as though you just opened your email and typed it to one person. No header image, no columns, no branded template. The closer it looks to a normal email, the more likely it is to be read like one.
Keep it short enough to skim and still make sense. He was direct about the reason: everybody is reading on a phone with half their attention, and anything that looks like work gets archived.
Build it once
The point of all this is that you do it once. Ely described building what he calls an ultimate follow-up system for clients, where a sequence runs for two or three years and keeps producing replies long after it was written.
One of his clients ran a property investing school and was sending long, intense, pitchy emails constantly. The fix was not more emails. It was rewriting them into short, conversational, genuinely useful ones and then letting the system run.
If you have something to promote alongside an evergreen sequence, his trick is to nominate two days a week that never carry a regular email. If the system wants to send on one of those days it pushes to the next. Then your promotion goes out on a clear day and still feels separate from the personal stuff.
Not sure whether your follow-up is the weak point or something earlier in the chain? The Growth Check takes about three minutes and names the area to work on first.
Common questions
How many emails should be in a travel agent nurture sequence?
Three in the first week does the heavy lifting: delivery, a check-in at forty-eight hours, and the question about their last experience at around day five. After that, an ongoing evergreen stream rather than a fixed number.
What should the first email after a download say?
Thank them, deliver what was promised, and stop. The job of email one is to prove that opening your email is worth the effort, and a pitch at that stage undoes it.
Does email marketing still work for travel agents?
It can, when people have asked to hear from you and the emails are useful. Ely Delaney's session emphasized short, conversational messages rather than long promotions. Measure replies and relevant conversations in your own list; an industry return figure is not a forecast for your business.
What email platform should a travel advisor use?
Start with whatever you already have, provided it supports the sequence, unsubscribe handling and the permissions you need. That might be a CRM, a dedicated email tool, or your host's system. Changing platforms does not replace writing useful emails.
How often should I email my list?
Often enough not to be forgotten, within the expectations you set at signup. Ely teaches varying the spacing of useful evergreen messages rather than sending the same promotion every week. Watch replies and unsubscribes, and adjust.
Should I send a newsletter?
Only if it is genuinely educational. A newsletter can be useful, but updates about your business alone give a new reader little reason to keep opening it. Keep the reader's questions at the center.
Talk to us
If you have a list and no sequence, you are sitting on the cheapest growth available to you. If you want a second opinion on what to send and in what order, that is a short conversation.
Book a free business audit, or start with the free resources if you would rather build it yourself.
Oliver and Alexandra Catt run Coaching Agents Through Travel, a coaching community for independent travel advisors in the US and Canada. Oliver led Learning and Development for Unique Vacations, the worldwide representative for Sandals and Beaches Resorts. Alexandra ran the Unique Vacations contact center in Grenada and built a six-figure travel agency.