A Time for some Spring Cleaning
Steve • January 21, 2021
What a difference a month makes
I spoke to one of our clients this week and I thought he summed up where we are with Covid 19
In December 2020 we could hear clients talking about wanting to book holidays
In January 2021 – we can see them at the door
…hopefully by March 2021 they will feel happy to come through the [metaphorical] door.
It can still feel incredibly painful and these are still unsettling times. But as my client indicated, we know that there is pent up demand – it’s partly a waiting game ( until people feel safe to book), but it’s also a great time to do some spring cleaning ( because who ever has a chance to do that in a normal year!)
Muster Positivity - it'll pay off
The one good thing about these unsettling times is that the difficulty we most commonly hear sited as the thing holding businesses back in marketing has been solved! ‘Not enough time’ is no longer an issue so the most proactive thing we can do is to muster our positivity and put this unwelcome free time into action. You will be so glad you did later.
- Write a small marketing plan – month by month. Try to project forward based on your booking patterns as to how busy you might be and how you will manage the enquiries.
- Ensure that you get the enquiries! For sure there will be discounting and intense competition this year and next.
How can you be sure that you will get the enquiries and bookings?
7 Actions You Can Take To Boost The Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing
An easy win to start the ball rolling is to give your email list a spring clean. It doesn’t cost you any money to do this and you’ll reap the rewards with more targeted emails to ensure you stay ‘top of mind’ for any subscriber on your list to book their next holiday.
- Quality not quantity counts here so don’t be afraid to delete any old addresses gathering dust. If you’ve got a really big list not showing much engagement for example, maybe you could reduce the size and save some money on your email system at the same time.
- Make sure your list is up to date – have you added all your booking contacts? what about enquiries?
- Refresh your GDPR compliance. Check privacy statement. Make sure your permissions are up to date.
- Review your email capture systems. Is every enquiry as well as bookings making it on your list? Do you need to train staff to get this process in motion? Next week will talk in more depth about lead capture systems.
- Should you be segmenting? Emails are great, targetted emails are even better. Clients and Enquiries should be distinguished between. Do you have a VIP list you could create from your top bookers that you may want to send separate offers to? Are they couples or families? You don’t want to risk sending a honeymoon email to your family bookers!
- Delve into the help pages of your email marketing system to understand it better. e.g. Can you create drip campaigns to save time? here’s how to do it on our system.
- Design drip campaigns for Welcome emails, honeymooners, etc
If you need help with Email marketing – drop us a line. We provide everything from an email marketing system, to monthly templates and a ‘Done for You Service’ at only £25/month where we will manage your email marketing for you. That’s a whole heap cheaper than employing someone direct.
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It’s been a great week, let’s grab a coffee and catch up … Well… other than political ethics, inflation etc! … sometimes the sun shines both in the real world and metaphorically, and this has been a good week. In today’s update … Reviews, good for business, and good for the soul Why I love …
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What’s this post about ? How Julian Richer’s business tactics selling electronics parallels how Retail Travel Agents can market themselves effectively. There aren’t many retailers that compare easily to selling travel – infrequent, high value purchases. So it’s not easy to find examples of how other industries are tackling issues similar to our own and …
How to avoid the online asteroid …. business lessons from Julian Richer Read More »
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In these difficult times – it’s very easy to look at other businesses and wonder if they have not got a better business model to you. In this paper – we are looking at: Travel Agent Website vs Travel Blogger site 1. Making Money Travel Agent Site A Travel Agent site is primarily used …
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Introduction The Covid 19 pandemic not only shut down the travel industry, but also ended a number of travel agents businesses. But it wasn’t just about not selling holidays. How did Hayes Travel survive the pandemic ( and hoover up some smaller agents who could not afford to keep going)? How is Trailfinders such a …
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Apple has always been about customer privacy. In the latest IOS update, users will have to accept whether they want their activity tracked by Apps like Facebook that collect their data. Why is this change in transparency important? Because surveys suggest, and Facebook acknowledges, that up to 80% of users will say no. (bbc.co.uk) and…. 80% …
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When will Travel Restart? For those of you who watched Amazing Hotels, Life Beyond the Lobby last night it was a reminder of what life was like travelling without masks. But also just how important hotels like Jade Mountain are to local communities. Built by hand with no machinery and employing over 500 local St …
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Why Plan? Very few small travel businesses sit down at the beginning of the year to plan out their email marketing. There are loads of excuses…usually along the lines of ‘no time’ and ‘no resource’ or ‘don’t know how to’. The truth is, if you don’t plan, you won’t be consistent in your email marketing. …
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Hurray – it’s 2021 , and yes, despite the recent lockdown (let’s face it, we all knew it was coming) I’m really looking forward to 2021. Why? For one – It is not going to be as bad as 2020! We all hope the vaccine will return us to normal, but the reality is that …
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2020 Changes As they say in showbiz, that’s a wrap. Phew! we all got to the end of 2020.No, the news at the end wasn’t good with a more infectious strain of the virus, but let’s keep positive. We do have a vaccine which is being rolled out. So yes, I think the start of …
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The key to getting good at videos is of course practise, but in my experience, making it as easy as possible to create a video is equally important. If it takes a long time to set up a shoot it’s easy to always find an excuse to not bother! Ideally you want to be able to set up and record a video in 30 minutes. The iPhone has an auto focus that means you only need one of you to record ( DSLR camera’s require focussing making the whole process more fiddly for one person) which is a bonus – so after much trial and error I always use an iPhone now. I’m going to take you through how I created the video below using just my iPhone – let’s first take a look at the finished product.