The larger your business, the more resource you’ll have to throw at marketing automation. But you’ll also have a more complicated business. But this is for the smallest of Travel Agents ( including home workers). Look at this in stages – so that you set up some basic automation ( e.g. automated content for your website, a CRM and basic welcome drip email campaigns). Once set up they work on their own and you can relax in the knowledge that you are nurturing all leads automatically ( which if you are a team of 1 is important to do!)

A common misconception is that you’ll get leads on autopilot. Sorry – that never happens with any software. It only works if you already have systems in place to get a steady flow of leads. We know now that getting a lead is one thing, persuading them to buy is quite another. Marketing Automation helps the process of convincing the lead to buy from you.

Think of it this way. If you have a website with no content ( or worse, out of date content) and no email subscribe capture form, what are the chances that any random person landing on your site will pick up the phone? Close to 0%! Contrast that with a site with content, proving you can provide the service and type of holidays that the user is interested in, together with enquiry forms and email capture ( which then drip welcome emails to subscribers to further ‘warm them up’) and what do you think the chances are? There is no hard and fast percentage, because that will depend on what you add to your site – but it will be greater than the original example, that’s for sure!

Not really, but it helps to have your whole team behind it. The Travel Industry has many very experienced sellers, but many are quite phobic when it comes to how online marketing can help a business. 

Marketing automation is your friend that is trying to ensure that the potential customer knows exactly what you do and how you can help. the more your whole team understands this, the better it will work.

It’s easy to want to get carried away with triggering emails to potential clients. Making sure that the emails are relevant is paramount and so we advise to keep things simple at the beginning. You’ll have time to segment your contact lists and be more granular in your marketing once you get going. 

But overall, it’s not just about the online experience. With so much travel sold offline, it’s important to have systems ( such as the Travel CRM) that record contacts online behaviour and enable offline staff to have a full picture ( e.g. by enabling front line staff to update email segments when they speak to a contact). So ensuring your whole team understand what you are trying to achieve and what messages are being sent will improve the overall representation of your contact. 

This will depend on the stage you are at with your business and the level of expertise within your business to implement marketing automation.

For smaller businesses, our research shows the best way to implement successfully is ensuring you choose a provider who understands your business and the funnel you have in converting leads. 

You should also look at cost. It’s better to implement something properly rather than trying to buy something expensive and then sharing a login because additional licenses are too expensive. Also think about support and the level of support you could expect to receive. That could be the difference between a successful implementation or not.