Everyone needs an elevator pitch

My shtick is marketing, not sales but a big part of being and staying in business is selling yourself, your service and your company. 

What is an elevator pitch?

Think of the elevator pitch as your personal 20-second television commercial. An easy to understand and concisely delivered summary designed to promote you and your services to potential clients. It should impress your listener enough to stay lodged in his mind, and open up the door for questions and a future transaction.  In spite of its name, the elevator pitch can be used anywhere your time is limited or where you don’t want to become a bore, such as a cocktail party or golf tournament or other social events that provide the opportunity for potential clients. Regardless of circumstances, it should take no longer than an elevator ride to the top floor of a 5 story building — hence the name.  

Here’s why you need one. Whether at a cocktail party or in your office, when talking to a new person you have a limited amount of time to create an impression so don’t waste it on trivial comments. Get to the point! Impress upon your listener in very few words that you are the one they ought to be dealing with for their travel arrangements. Once you got it pat, it will be remarkably easy to successfully introduce your pitch as most people want to talk about travel – be glad you’re not an insurance agent or a chimney sweep. 

To prepare your elevator pitch you need to form the ideas that you want to incorporate. Write them down, it should run no more than about 100 words. Read it aloud to yourself and make sure it sounds natural, not stilted or worse, a shopping list of services. You don’t need to memorize it word for word, but having a firm sense of its structure and key points will keep the impact and the words flowing smoothly.

The successful elevator pitch isn’t a job interview. It is important to paint a broad portrait of your service but the key is to outline the potential benefits to your listener. What’s in it for him/her? If you gear your pitch towards the listener’s needs, you’re more likely to gain their trust. My approach is to suggest a possible benefit and I immediately back it up with a sentence explaining how I can create that outcome. As a travel agent, you might try something like… “I make sure that my clients get the best service available, I have direct access to the heads of Customer Service with most of the cruise lines,”

In the example above, you quickly made it clear that you know your market, are well connected and able to deliver more than your competition. With a little work, you can create a compelling statement that ensures you are remembered but first, make sure you understand clearly what your USP (unique selling proposition) is – what makes you different and better than your competition or online booking service. 

Remember that this is not about selling a holiday, you are selling you and your company long-term so skip the details and stick to the essentials. Let your enthusiasm show, be dynamic use action words and don’t forget to close with a call to action. “I would love to help you enjoy your holidays more; can I give you a call?” If the contact information is not immediately forthcoming, don’t get pushy, back off and give them your business card and ask them to contact you when they are ready for a “good and professional” travel agent/service. 

When I am successful in getting contact information I ALWAYS make it a point to email them in the morning, thank them for their attention and ask if it would be ok to place their name on my mailing list. Play your cards right, exude success, be courteous, and soft-sell yourself, chances are you’ll do business.

Here’s my elevator pitch, let me know what you think… 

Opening hook: “We’re a pretty unique marketing organization developed specifically to aid the travel industry to make money by keeping and developing new clients in creative ways. 

Backing up the statement: We spent a lot of time figuring out the needs of the community and subsequently, we developed the appropriate technology and our full-service approach.  

Showing our credentials: Now, we use those tools to custom tailor solutions to each customer – we’re doing quite well making sure that our clients are able to compete in today’s market. Remember NAME, it’s cheaper to keep a client than to develop a new one! 

Soft-sell closing: Can I give you a call in the next few days to talk about your needs?” 

Enjoy the rest of the summer and behave,

Best

Frank

Another technology passed you by? Well… maybe not (yet).

Travel agents are just getting round to collecting emails for marketing purposes and now the guru’s are telling us email is dying and being replaced by RSS! For those of you that read this geeky stuff you have probably noticed that every article starts with a lengthy and detailed explanation of what RSS is and by the time you get to the point of the article you are fast asleep.

So lets not go there! Check RSS out at http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english  and view the 2 minute video. Its all you’ll need to get it!

So why should you care? Because it’s going to affect the travel industry and how we currently do business online. What it really means in travel terms is that your customer can subscribe to their favourite travel websites (probably three to five) and every time the website is updated, that information is fed to their ‘reader’. That way, instead of having to go visit the site or be peppered by hundreds of email updates, they receive a feed, stay up to date and read it when they want to.

I believe that over time, (1-3 years?), barring the invention of a better mousetrap, RSS will become the cleanest and most efficient way to communicate and customers will subscribe only to what interests them and unsubscribe from the rest. Still awake?

I don’t believe RSS will replace email altogether but in my opinion it represents some major changes. For example, it will adversely affect website visits and therefore change is coming for those of you that either sell of buy travel advertising based on visits. As an online marketing company our greatest enemy is spam and bugs. RSS eliminates this problem but it also further shifts the balance of power to the customer by limiting access. As a rule, when customers go RSS they unsubscribe from most other subscription based email.

Wakey wakey… what better time than now to harp, yet again, on the mantra of most of my marketing articles, Travelwatch website, blogs…  “the consumer is sitting in the drivers seat so the importance of the ‘relationship’ between you and your customer should be your number one priority.”

Develop and keep on developing your email list.  I can’t say this enough. If (or as) email begins to loose its direct marketing power as we know it today, ensuring that your customers are interested in what you have to say is best achieved by email. The ability to develop and maintain customer interest is an art, as part of our Touch™ program we hammer the point home that ‘because your clients are not always buying, you shouldn’t always be selling’! Stay in constant contact; make it fresh, interesting, educational and yes send them product/price deals but just not ALL the time. If you don’t have the time to do it then hire someone to do it for you but make sure you are front and center when your clients decide on an RSS reader for their travel information.

behave,

Frank

Social Newtorking, or just more of the same

What’s all this ‘Social Networking’ buzz about, we’ve been doing this forever!

According to Wikipedia a Social Network is a structure made of individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of relations and serviced by specialized software. In general, social networking services, such as MySpace and Facebook, allow users to create their own profile, upload a picture of themselves and can often create “friendships” with other users. In most social networking services, both users must confirm that they are friends before they are linked. These ‘Social Sites’ are now spilling over to the business world and many industries ar paying attention.

In the travel industry, we have long believed that one of the primary motivating factors in a client’s decision to travel to a destination/resort/hotel is influenced by what their friends say.  Think about the times you’ve used word of mouth to help you hire a contractor or pick a new restaurant. Chances are you’ve made some of those decisions based solely on the thumbs-up from a trusted friend. Even to this day, travel discussions at a cocktail party are almost compulsory chit chat. Couples and individuals recount their experiences and give opinions about a trip and the listeners carefully store away the comments for future reference.

We in travel therefore, see Social Networking as yet another techie label on something that has been happening for a long time. But is it.

New travel related Social Networking sites are starting to pop up with regular frequency. The sites are essentially forums for consumers to aggregate their knowledge to an already information packed website. The site then hopes to capture the client with booking tools and incentives at the very moment he is being influenced by the forums. Trip Advisor is arguably the best known; it claims more than 5 million reviews and more than 20 million unique monthly visitors worldwide. Trip Advisor now features various online booking services but it continues to be owned by Expedia.

Call me a cynic (Cynic!) but it seems to me, the more of these sites get created, the harder it is to keep things honest. It would be an easy matter for me to get all my hotel staff to write raving reviews of my hotel and post them, who’s to say who “Tracey from Toronto” is. I also get concerned about membership data going array but these are my personal issues and by no means do they necessarily reflect on Trip Advisor (I’d hate to get them mad at me), I simply question the concept of getting advice from strangers.

If you wanted to learn to fly a plane, would you go online and get consensus from strangers on how to do it or, go find an expert and take lessons. As my buddy likes to say “I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.”

So, back to the travel expert.

Let’s just say your marketing budget is not quite up there, how do you play the word of mouth game. Advertising copy might entice and editorial coverage might persuade, but word of mouth recommendation as we’ve discussed, more often is more effective than both put together.

Nothing, absolutely nothing works as well as chatting directly with your clients and asking for referrals. Try 5 calls a day, if your clients believe in you they’ll be happy to give you names and numbers. Just make sure you follow up and you can be up 10-15 new possibilities by the end of the day. Oh, by the way, do us all a favour, don’t have someone else call and don’t call at dinner time, you’ll be toast in no time!

Don’t like being that direct? Try building a questionnaire. It gives you a reason to contact your clients and it shows that you care and want to improve your business by asking their opinion. Call your clients or email them and ask for the answers you need to improve your services. In closing be sure to ask them for referral numbers or emails. Oh by the way… it just so happens we have an online questionnaire service. (I know… shameless!)

Behave

Frank

For Immediate Release

As readers of my blog, I wanted you to be the first to be aware of a marketing partnership that my company Travelwatch and Baxter Travel Media (BTM) have put together.

What this means to you is that through BTM, I’ll be able to gather even more information and statistics critical to the marketing of a travel business and be able to share my learnings and ideas with you through this blog and through an upcoming monthly column that I will be writing in Travel Press.

Please read our media release below…

Baxter Travel Media, Travelwatch launch marketing partnership
2007-04-04
Baxter Travel Media (BTM) and Travelwatch have entered into a marketing partnership that will see Travelwatch deploy Customer Marketing Manager (CMM) — a simplified, low-cost Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for the North American travel trade.

“Travelwatch has a great suite of products and we’re pleased to be working with them to provide our customers with a set of affordable online marketing tools,” commented David McClung, president of Baxter Travel Media. “It’s a good fit for us. Travelwatch will enhance the tools already available in Travel Agent Central at www.travelpress.com.”

He added, “Our strength has always been our agent and supplier partners. What Travelwatch adds to the mix is an effective and seamless way for agents to enhance their relationship with their customer and conversely, provides a vehicle for suppliers to work more closely with agents.”

Travelwatch president Frank Orlando’s explanation of the Customer Marketing Manager solution is more succinct: “It’s B through B to C.”

Under the agreement, BTM and Travelwatch will be working co-operatively to market the Customer Marketing Manager solution to the travel trade across Canada. “Travelwatch delivers a simple three-step system that’s designed to initiate, build and strengthen the retail travel agent’s relationship with their customer by providing a range of ‘self-service to fully-managed’ e-marketing tools,” said Travelwatch’s Orlando.

Agents and suppliers will be able to learn more about and gain access to CMM and other Travelwatch services through BTM’s print and digital format publications (Canadian Travel Press and Travel Courier); via reciprocal links between www.travelpress.com and www.travelwatch.ca; on the double-daily news service, Press Today; and through BTM’s push e-mail product, Travel Alert.

“I think we are beginning to see a balance being struck between online and traditional travel services. We enable the traditional agent and supplier model to use the Internet as a tool to enhance its services to a level presently unachievable by today’s online-only business model. In my opinion, a personal relationship between client and a professional counsellor will beat client and computer any day,” continued Orlando.

To launch their new partnership, the industry is being offered a 30-day free trial of the Travelwatch product. Visit either www.travelwatch.ca or www.travelpress.com for more information.
 

Urban Legend

For quite some time now we’ve been hearing that most people choose to research their holidays online yet book them through a travel agent. For travel agents in our industry, it can almost be classified as an urban legend, one of those bits of news that you love to quote but are afraid to really research just in case it’s not true.

Well rest assured; it seems it is still true … to a degree.

Last week I came across some research from Forrester Research that helps us understand the reasons and most puzzling if technology is so quick to evolve, why consumers continue to resist booking online.

Forrester polled about 5,330 North American consumers in the last quarter of 2006 to determine exactly what prevents them from putting their faith in online travel sites and making the reservation. The top-three most common reasons include:

Credit Card Security
Specifically, the number of consumers concerned with submitting their credit card information online has doubled. About 9% cited this reason in Forrester’s 2005 poll and in 2006 16%. Bunch of red flags here because that number had been steadily dropping over the years but recently the media has been featuring more sophisticated identity theft attacks so the issue is back.

Limited Usability
Web travelers cited limited capabilities with the online reservation system as a reason for booking offline. About 25% in 2006 and 19% in 2005 cited “an inability to make a special request, such as asking for a particular type of room or model of a car.” This in my opinion is fixable to a point. Technology can and will continue to be developed to handle these non-standard requests but ‘travel’ is made up of myriad variations and choices so technology, in the foreseeable future, will never be able to capture the tiny nuances that only a human can understand or fulfil.

Poor Site Performance
According to Forrester’s survey, “one in five web travelers cites this as a reason for booking travel offline,” which is why the research firm recommends online sites make performance and usability a top priority in 2007.

Interestingly enough, the report went on to quote that one-third of respondents said, “They’d just prefer to deal with people when booking travel.”

So it seems that the death of the travel agent and its replacement by the booking engine is still a long way off, better technology may solve the top three reasons but never I suspect, the need for people to interact, receive and provide opinions.

But the thing is…technology is constantly improving…are you?

Behave,
Frank

No Comment

In my last blog I asked for your comments on…  “Let’s say that tour-suppliers decided to provide no commissions, just nets fares. How would you market yourself?” 

As you may have noticed by my stats, my blog is fairly well read so, was it apathy or was it lack of strategy that generated no comments.? A bit of both I suspect, the apathy part I’m used to from our industry but the lack of strategy, I may be able to help with. 

While it is easy to come to the conclusion that in a no commission environment (net fares) the battle for the customer will be decided by price, I would argue that if you are still in business you have already found the way to battle the large discounters in the tour field by developing your USP (unique selling proposition). But are you sure that your customers are aware of it? 

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I subscribe to the belief that keeping in touch with your customer is the best way to remind them that you exist and the surest way to have them refer to you as ‘My Travel Agent’ the same way they say ‘my accountant’ or my doctor’ (see Bob is my Travel Agent).  I’m running into many of you that agree with me but are so busy with everyday issues and don’t know where to start, that you just let it slide to another day. 

Recently, Travelwatch was chosen to provide database and email services for a new customer. The supplier chose Travelwatch because of our ability to communicate with consumers ‘through’ a partner travel agent. I call this process B through B to C. (BtrB2C?). Fundamentally, this supplier can offer specific travel deals to consumers delivered under the individual agency’s name thereby successfully driving business to the agent’s door with very little effort on the agents part.  

All the agents had to do was provide an up-to-date and relevant client list for the process to work. These are large travel agencies with a considerable number of years of experience behind them so I was surprised by the huge effort and time it took them to assemble their client lists.   I compared this to people in the real estate and financial institutions who when asked to supply their client lists, can provide them in seconds!

Frankly, I’m not sure whether I’m more disappointed with our industry’s indifference towards this issue than I am with their inability to execute. I put together a few steps to help you get started with your customer list and a few hints on how to grow it that I’ll be happy to share with you, just drop me a line and I’ll send them to you… no charge. 

Behave, Frank

What Does and Does Not Work Online

Here are some interesting results regarding what does and does not work online.

I’m referring to a anual report created by Ad:Tech & MarketingSherpa that asks  online marketers what marketing tactics worked for them in 2006 and what they expected to concentrate their time and spending on, in the months ahead.

It’s important to keep in mind that the sample consisted of the early-adopters that form part of the audience that the publishers of the report cater to. As a result, responses were skewed accordingly and (to me at least) reveal results from very savvy and experienced online marketers. The bottom line is that marketers expect overall online spending to rise slightly from 47% of the budget in 2006 to 49% in 2007.

Large online travel retailers and travel suppliers I’m sure represent themselves well within this group but when the marketers were asked what worked best — and worst — the results got interesting for the more traditional travel suppliers and retailers entering the online marketing realm.

Let’s have a quick look at the top 4 best performing and put them into perspective:

Paid search ads: Under the Google AdWords pricing system initiated last year, travel is arguably the most competitive and expensive market to advertise to. AdWords that used to cost a maximum of $10 are now upwards of $70 to $100. I haven’t had a look at Yahoo but I expect the same.

Let’s skip to number 3 for a moment. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It comes in two forms. Paid, using the tools above and Organic. Organic, means embedding the right (best?)keywords in your site or Blog, and waiting for the search engines to pick you up through their normal processes. SEO  showed the biggest jump in 2006 but to put this in perspective, we just completed our new site (Travelwatch) and we put over 400 hours of SEO and text editing towards an organic solution. The next 6 months will tell.

SEO professionals can charge up to $300 per hour however most won’t touch retail travel because it’s too competitive. I decided to go with it only because I deal in the B2B market. Business to Business is a much smaller world and decent positioning is easier to get.

However, if you are stuck on going down this road, I have seen good results in the $75 to $100 per hour range. Still, a very big nut if youre in the retail world.

Number 4, Behavioural Targeting: if you know me, are a Touch customer or a reader of my Blog, you know my thoughts on segmenting. Check the right banner for September and  see: Segment Shmegment!. Additionally, notice the difference from 05 to 06 within the chart, it drops two points.

Finally number 2: It should be pretty obvious by now that your Email House List is by far your best value, it produces sales and costs next to nothing! The downside? Well… unfortunately, you have to make a plan, discipline yourself and do it!

You wouldn’t believe the conversations I have every day. “Well…I really should look at it”. “I don’t really have time and  my customers know me anyway…” and of course my favourite “I don’t really have any emails just customer addresses” (send them a letter and ask them for it or hire a student to call them all, for ….sakes!)

So “Where’s the money going in 2007?” Search marketing and e-mail marketing to house lists are in the lead for this year, while e-mailing to third-party lists is only going to be used by 13% of the respondents.

I hate to finish on a sour note but here’s a final horrible thought for you. Let’s say that Canadian tour-operators decided to go the way of the UK and provide no commissions, just nets. How would you market yourself?
I’d love to hear from you on this…

Behave
Frank
 

Belated Resolutions

I’ve been a bad boy! I didn’t even bother to wish everyone happy holidays and here we are… mid-January already!

Ok, here’s a quickie, my suggestions for your top 5 Travel eMail Marketing Resolutions:

1. Put a guest sign up book on your counter and ask everyone for their emails. (Don’t forget to save them in your database every night and send them a thank you note the next day).
2. Create a calendar of email campaigns for Jan/Feb/Mar and put it on the bulleting board so you don’t forget to do it!
3. Touch your customers every 10 days or so!
4. Take a small sample of your client list and try different emails, subject lines and content. See where you get the biggest response.
5. Every time you get a bounced email, call the recipient and ask for their new email and while you’re at it, ask if they’re going anywhere soon.

Trust them, follow them and you’ll be rich beyond your wildest dreams – well, how about you’ll have a better year than last year.

By the way, the deadline for our new, very expensive, fancy, SEO (search engine optimized) website was Dec 8. Don’t you love those technology deadlines…Hopefully we’ll have it done this weekend! More on that in a later Blog.

And finally… please accept my wishes for a great new year filled with revenue and void of hassles!
Behave,
Frank

Last of the boring stuff!

Last week I wrote about why it makes sense to outsource your eMarketing to a professional company. But let’s say that you want to send out just a few emails and you don’t want to hire Travelwatch to do it. Here are a few tips to use so you don’t get stuck in spam filters. No guarantees… but its somewhere to start.

• Don’t try to be ‘tricksy’ and dump a bunch of names as a
   cc or a bcc. Your ISP will only deliver to the first 50 addresses. The remaining addresses will be ignored, sorry!
• Ensure the fonts are a standard size and try not to vary the size of fonts within the email.
• Colors in images don’t really matter, but the colors of text and links should be limited to black and blue.
• SUBJECT LINES: Subject lines should never sound like spam, so stay away from the hard sell and don’t fool recipients into opening
   the email by making the subject line sound like a reply or a personal message between friends. In particular, your subject line should stay away from: 
   o Swear words 
   o Sex 
   o Money 
   o Profit 
   o Special 
   o Girls 
   o Power 
   o Powerful 
   o Discount 
   o Over 18 
   o Your debt 
   o $ signs or other currency values 
   o Exclamation marks!
   o Click here (use visit the site or follow this link)
  o Go here 
  o A series of symbols or punctuation marks (#*!)
  o The excessive use of punctuation “…???”
   o Don’t use CAPS
   o Spelling errors
   o Grammatical errors

• And finally, consider Text only – I send my periodic touch emails on behalf of my travel agent customers as text and not HTML for a few reasons…I think it’s more professional, the graphics are wasted on people that receive their mail in text (approx 33%), it often makes a mess when sent to a blackberrys and there is a larger chance of getting stuck in email filters.
  That’s it! I’m happy to announce that Michelle and I are off to Huatulco for a week starting Friday. We can’t wait although
  Paco won’t be too happy to see us go!

behave,
Frank

This is really boring stuff…

I caution you, reading this is about as much fun as chewing on tin foil but it falls into the ‘you need to know’ category.

So…why would I run a business that sends emails on travel agents’ behalf when they can do it on their own for free?

1. Because they don’t! (Most of the ones that tell you they do are either exaggerating or sending sporadic blasts because they’ve read that email is cheap marketing)
    
2. Because if you send more than a few dozen emails at a time, they generally don’t reach the intended client and the ones that do, are generally labeled as SPAM.
    
3. Because the agents that have thought it through and have welcomed direct e-marketing as part of their marketing strategies know you can’t execute effectively from your office computer without spending money and dedicating time and resources.
    
4. Because it’s not your core business. You sell travel.
    

I don’t often do this but… this is an 8 second Travelwatch commercial. “We jointly (with you) design email campaigns, we deliver the campaign properly with measurable results and we price our products based on the realities of the retail travel industry.”

But let’s say you don’t believe me and you’re going to do it in-house rather than outsource it. Here’s what you’re up against.

All e-mail sent via the Internet is routed through ‘port 25’ (computer talk) so when you send an email through your computer, it always uses port 25 to transmit data. Most large North American ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – i.e. AT&T, EarthLink, Bell Canada, Rogers etc…) block ‘Port 25’ so no bulk/multi emails can be sent from a single computer. They’re not just being nasty to you, blocking the port is part of your ISP’s arsenal to fight spam unfortunately; it tends to punish the innocent along with the spammers.

But my messages are getting out you say! Yes they are, but without you knowing it, your email is actually being sent by your ISP’s servers and most large numbers of emails sent by a single address get dropped into a black hole and neither you nor your intended receiver are aware that it never got delivered.

But wait, there’s more…

Another weapon in the anti-spam arsenal are the black lists. These lists stop email from being delivered if the sending address has previously been identified as sending spam. This can be as innocent as the kid next door sending 10,000 invitations to his birthday party. I don’t want to get into technical detail but suffice it to say that you can be using a black list address and not be aware because these (IP) computer addresses are in most cases grouped and arbitrarily assigned by your ISP.

And finally there’s corporate or personal anti-spam software. This is a tough one because the parameters can be changed by individuals so the software can label your messages as spam and your e-mail ends up in a folder that will probably never be read or is totally deleted.

So, the Port 25 and Black list issues can be dealt with by using companies like mine or by doing proper research on your ISP but the anti-spam software can be mostly bypassed by developing a few simple habits that I will tell you about next week.

Stay tuned and behave,

Frank