The travel industry has been impacted by mobile’s rapid surge in popularity with over 70% of US travelers now using their mobile devices for travel-related research. The digital channels preferred by travel customers when researching have largely transitioned to mobile. As a result, many customers are booking their travel in a way that makes sense on a smartphone, and a way marketers often neglect: over the phone. In fact, thanks to the surging popularity of mobile and click-to-call, 44% of travel bookings occur over the phone.

To take advantage of the mobile phenomenon, marketers need call attribution technology to account for the leads that convert over the phone and attribute them back to the mobile source that drove the call. This gives you the power to optimize for call conversions the same way you do for web conversions.

Travel marketers must embrace the call channel to truly understand and optimize ROI from their most valuable mobile channels for both customer acquisition and retention.

Today’s Most Valuable Mobile Channels for Travel Marketers

Travel marketers have been pouring ad dollars into digital as more consumers use these channels to research and book travel plans. However, now that 92% of U.S. consumers own a mobile device, these channels have gone mobile. According to a new survey report from Performance Horizon, travel marketers find the following channels to have the biggest impact on customer acquisition and retention.

Organic search takes the top spot. 78% of respondents believe it’s a primary driver of travel customer acquisition. It comes as no surprise that, as of Q2 of 2016, mobile devices are driving 46% of overall organic search engine visits. Travel marketers need to optimize their website and organic landing pages for mobile visitors. Try taking advantage of tools like Google’s AMP project to move up in the rankings.

Pro Tip: To capitalize on mobile visitors make sure your organic landing pages have a prominently displayed phone number, making it easy for the customer to convert.

Paid search is seen by 69% of travel marketers as a top acquisition channel. Consumers spend a lot of time in search engines and a huge portion of that time is on mobile devices. This has given travel marketers a huge boost. 69% of leisure travelers use a smartphone to search for travel ideas during their spare time. It’s crucial for travel marketers to capitalize on those mobile searchers with paid search campaigns.

Pro Tip: Make it easy for mobile searches to talk to you by adding call extensions to your Google search ads or running call-only ads.

Acquisition & Retention: Email Marketing

71% of respondents said email marketing is a primary driver for customer acquisition, making it the second most valuable travel marketing channel. Marketers have been pouring tons of resources and budget into mobile email, and for good reason. According to Litmus, mobile email opens rose to 56% this year while desktop remained at 19%.

In the travel industry, email marketing is the king of customer retention channels. 81% of survey respondents named this as a primary retention channel. Email is omnipresent by nature. We know that over half of all emails are read on a mobile device, but understanding that Americans spend an average of 6 hours a day using email puts that into a whole different perspective. And with consumers spending over 3 hours a day reading email on a mobile device, travel marketers have to be present in their inboxes to retain customers.

Pro Tip: Mobile email provides a direct path to consumers and their conversion path should be just as direct. Placing a phone number in your emails provides a clear conversion path that will increase bookings from your email campaigns.

Retention: Social Media Marketing

Social media has become a powerful marketing channel for businesses to stay in touch with consumers. 63% of travel marketers surveyed believe it’s driving customer retention. Through social media your brand can be inserted into your customers’ feeds using fun messaging and attractive visuals. With 56.5% of Facebook users accessing the platform exclusively via mobile, travel brands need to ensure their social media marketing is mobile friendly.

Pro Tip: Driving calls from social media has never been easier. Travel marketers should be using Facebook’s “Call Now” buttons on their ads to automatically connect social media users with your company.

Optimizing for call conversions will have a big impact for travel marketers. Take HotelsCorp, for example. With call attribution and analytics technology, HotelsCorp was able to generate 83% more calls and 71% more bookings from paid search while simultaneously cutting costs by 10%. Now imagine the impact attribution customer calls would have on your CPA and ROI.