Ideas for a Tour Company

Email marketing, regardless of the industry is still a Great way to increase sales. You will probably hear otherwise from those opposing email marketing. Yet, I will give you a rather easy way to figure it out on your own. If email marketing were not a good way to increase sales and drive old customers back, then how come BIG name stores like Gap, Banana, Victoria's Secret, and MANY others, send constant emails, with discount coupons, and online sales? This is just a perfect example that email marketing is STILL very popular and very effective. As long as you can use creativity and ingenuity.

Absolutely! Get them to offer some free content to draw leads.

The thing most people don't understand about the value of optin is you are beginning the sales cycle with the customer coming to you instead of you going to the customer! For any offline business this is GOLD! Customers chasing them!

Email marketing is ok for this. You can also use social networking websites to get more bookings. Join local groups and provide information about the agency and hat different services they are offering, make good relationship, give them time, listen what others are saying and keep regular touch with them.

Definitely there will be some conversions.

hommi,

What sort of products (tours) does your client run? I've got a tourism background - operations management and marketing. Depending on what they do (i.e. does the company run the tours themselves or do they outsource to other operators?), I may have some suggestions for you.

hommi, sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

Sounds like a similar setup to the company I was managing.

Here's what I would do -

1. Most tours have at least one punter who takes a video camera. Offer the person a discount on their next tour if you can use their footage. 3 or 4 loads of footage and you'll have more than enough material to put up a 5 minute clip on youtube promoting each tour. Think of it like you would a TV commercial. Package the "spam" content the client doesn't like into the youtube vid using annotations which link to the email address or even an opt-in system if you want to go with the whole "preferred customers" deal. . Because folks who find your youtube clip are people who are searching for things to do in that particular area, you'll have a list built in no time. (Moving) pictures tell a thousand words. Obviously embed the vids in the site somewhere too. If one of the guides can tote a handycam around and capture a couple of testimonials from travellers you can do a similar thing. Seeing footage of someone pumped up and talking about the awesome tour they just went on is far more valuable than a dozen written testimonials.

2. Offer "preferred traveller" status to any punters who refer someone else who then buys a tour.

3. Have the client's best guides sit down and put together a 5 page PDF with some photos and a narrative describing a typical tour from the tour guide's perspective. I.e. how great it is to be able to introduce travellers to the natural beauty/history/whatever of BLAH, add a little about what punters will experience, etc. without giving away all the secrets to the competition.. Make this available from the website and then add a printout to any hard copy brochures she sends out.

4. Contact local, provincial and national newspapers and magazines with interesting stories which as a by-product, promote the company and the tours.

Make sure the email address is heavily promoted in order to build a list. When phone enquiries come it, have admin staff capture email addresses. Your client will likely change her mind about promoting "specials" when she sees the size of the list you've built. The "Preferred traveller" system is something I would try to convince her to implement. Great for return business and new bookings alike.

If she won't budge, then I'd suggest just go with the video and an informative download or two.

Hope it helps.

A wonderful new method I have been using is video marketing, using short (2-3 min.) videos answering the most often asked questions asked by the businesses customers. Nothing fancy. Include the phone number at the bottom of the video throught the video and adding the website address also.

The trick in marketing these videos lies in the mass distribution to all of the video sites and tagging the videos with lontail keywords including the city where the business is located. (i.e. tour company denver, tour companies in denver, etc.)

The key is researching the most sought after keywords in the niche and then adding the city name in front of or at the end of the keyword. I is amasing how fast these videos will rank on the search engines - usually within 48 hours.

More and more people are now using internet search to locate local business. It is the new 8th woner!

Good Luck!