Hi everyone I’m back!
Don’t ever take 4 days holidays, you just start to ‘relax’ and bang! Back at work – Like a junkie back in rehab!
I got in this dire condition by launching Travelwatch and going nuclear on our travel budget. Last year Michelle and I took the month of June and rode around Italy from head-to-toe on a brand new Ducati ST3. This year – four days…yea, I’m whining.
“Valentino” Ducati ST3
So… I’m about ready to launch a 10 question survey to thousands of travel agents. The questions revolve mainly around marketing. One question asks: Do you use email marketing to stay in touch with your customers? I won’t guess what the percentage of yes vs. no’s will be, but I’ll bet you that everyone that says ‘no’ will be because they don’t have an e-mailing list. That’s right… in today’s travel industry! These are the same agents that complain that the online agencies are stealing their business!
Let me help if I can. You either do not have a client list at all or, you have a client list (in some cases quite extensive) but you don’t have email addresses. Let’s deal with this latter one now. Take the time one afternoon and search for every customer name and address you have on business cards, index cards, the back office system, excel sheets, etc. Take your lowest paid employee or hire a student to input all names and addresses, etc. in one single Excel sheet. Excel is by far the easiest program to translate this data into more sophisticated forms better suited for marketing. But that comes later.
Once you have a decent list take all the ones with no email address and write them a letter. Remind them that at some point they were in contact with your agency, give them a present if you have one (percentage off your booking fee, fridge magnets, or stale candy, whatever) but most importantly ask them for their business, their email and their permission to use it. Include your e-mail address and a PREPAID return envelope and sit back and wait. Another way to approach this task is to do it by telephone (updating our records bla, bla, bla) but be careful, put your very best senior people on this as this is very close to cold calling and one wrong word, you’ve blown it forever. My opinion? Use the letter it’s more effective and the rejection hurts less. I hate rejection!
The ‘no’ list guys… later…
Behave
Frank
Categories: Uncategorized
I know, I promised to write about travel advertising but this is more interesting. This may seem like old news to some of you but I just discovered ‘tagging’. No ,not the graffiti kind, but the web 2.0 kind - its a terrific tool for travel and for those of us with increasing memory lapses.
If you want the long version I encourage you to read an excellent article by John Bray at PhocusWright (if you can get past their self-serving habit of coining new names and catchy phrases at every opportunity) but I digress, where was I, right, here’s the link http://www.travelindustrywire.com/article23532.html.
If you prefer the short version, tagging is a way to bookmark or identify a web page for later use. You get to write yourself a little note as to why you tagged the page to begin with and its available to you when you need it with one click. It’s great for travel as the tags can be shared so, as an example, if you were doing research for a customer on say Venezuela, you can search ‘Travel Venezuela’ and see what other people have bookmarked. You end up getting to what you need a lot faster than googling it and going through the 15 million pages.
I use a service called delicious (www.delicious.com) it’s free, the toolbar is easy to download (just say yes to every question) and you’ll amaze your friends and customers by quickly being able to find sometime totally useless trivia.
Just like i do!
Michelle, Paco (wheaten/poodle cross) and I are off for a few days to recharge, I’ll take pics of the monster fish I’ll catch… be good.
Frank
Categories: Uncategorized
The embodiment of futility isn’t it!
Well here’s another, the silly season is about to start. Winter travel – when the (big?) retail travel numbers are made and the ‘catalogue ads’ start. Here’s what most of it will look like:
Cancun $1199
Puerto Vallarta $899
Jamaica – all inclusive $1999
Bla Bla – $399
Great stuff isn’t it? If you are going down that route I hope you have some major supplier co-op dollars because the only thing you are doing is marketing their product in the hopes that a customer will pick YOU over another ad with the same or lower price. The supplier always gets the business, through your agency or another, doesn’t matter.
And it gets even more frustrating. Any perception customers may have towards your niche or unique selling proposition, goes right out the window because you just told them your service is the same as everyone else’s in that newspaper. The only comparison is price and as a rule, you have very little control over that.
Can we get a little more creative please? I’m no ad writer but let’s assume that we are a couple of girls or a small group of friends in their mid-twenties, arguably in the more price sensitive portion of the market, and you saw these two ads. Which would you pick?
Cancun $1199
Or
Our Cancun vacations have been scientifically designed to attract maximum attention from the opposite sex! They include a 2 page guide to Cancun nightlife written by Skanka, our resident disco-hound.
I bet that you’re going to get way more traffic from the second one! Get creative! Next blog: Carpet-bombing your e-mailing list with a copy of your home page! Yawn…
Categories: Uncategorized
