As a small business – or SME ( tour operators with turnovers of £50m qualify for this bracket!) marketing budgets are the hardest to set. The real reason for this is that there are a myriad of ways that customers find you and casting your net out is an expensive exercise.
Going back a few years, social media and Facebook in particular was the talk of the town. Spend efforts getting likes and then posting updates to Facebook ensured that your clients and potential customers saw exactly what you were posting and talking about. It was going to be free marketing. But Facebook changed the rules and another rule change came in Jan 2015 when Facebook officially announced that it was going to limit the number of ‘promotion posts’ that appeared in user newsfeeds. That’s bad news for any travel brand.
Social marketing analysts now say that an email marketing relationship is 50 x more valuable than a Facebook like. It grows for those subscribers that you now open your content and email marketing systems have great analytics built in so that you can focus on those email subscribers that participate in your content.
So for 2015 – your should be focusing on getting your email marketing right, with limited time and budgets this is the only marketing that you absolutely have to do but engagement is not as simple as just having an email address. It is about having a meaningful relationship with your potential client so that yo can be sure that they won’t unsubscribe from your emails. Treat them like Royalty!
Opportunities to email your potential clients:
- using Tripquote to quote for their holiday
- signing them up to Pre and Post departure upsell emails
- send them a post holiday survey
- Send them targetted marketing emails with offers using LateCards email marketing based on their next holiday preferences ( that are known from them having submitted their post holiday questionnaire )
In amongst all these emails you will also want to make sure that you post to social media channels so that these same users also get to see your content in these channels, but don’t do social media over email marketing, it won’t drive anywhere near the sales that you can with targeted email marketing.
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