The travel industry is highly reliant on personalization – people want to travel to places that interest them or offer something they want, whether it’s great views, fantastic beaches, or other tourist attractions. If you want to succeed in the travel sector, you must appeal to your customers’ wants and interests. And this is where marketing automation steps in the game.
Whether you run a travel agency, a booking system, or even a hotel, you need to resonate with your customers’ and guests’ desires to get more bookings. Let’s use a simple example: Mark is a typical employee in a large corporation. The last few months have been extremely stressful for him, he’s tired, and all that he dreams about right now is going somewhere warm where he can just relax on the beach or by the pool and enjoy an all-inclusive stay.
Now, suppose you run a travel agency, and you have Mark in your database. Do you think that offer to visit busy city like London or Paris will be attractive to Mark? Probably not, this is not what he’s interested in at the moment. Only an offer that speaks to Mark’s desire to rest on a beach will be successful and result in a booking.
Oftentimes, that’s the case with many tourists. Granted, some of them will be willing to go “anywhere” just for the sole purpose of travel. However, there is also a large group that has very specified needs or interests when it comes to traveling. People who are just like Mark.
If you want to resonate with such an audience, you need one and very important thing – a personalized offer.
How to personalize offers in the travel industry
This is not always easy; after all, there are no objective parameters that say that a given person wants to visit Rome and the Rocky Mountains. That’s why you need to rely on data that’s available to you. What are your options?
First off, you can track your prospect’s activity on your website. If you have a person who’s browsing offers with trips to warm countries, you can use this input to provide them with a special offer comprising such a destination, perhaps with an all-inclusive option.
When it comes to personalization, the more you know about a given customer, the better. You will be able to offer more personalized offers to people who have already booked with you in the past, signed up for a newsletter, or visited your website at least a few times before. In such a scenario, your offers can be almost fully tailored to a given person’s interests and behavior patterns.
However, even if we’re talking about the first visit on your website, you can still track the activity of this given customer and provide them with an offer that aligns with what they’re viewing or reading about.
In order to achieve this goal, you can use two of our features – recommendation frames and contact database management.
RECOMMENDATION FRAMES FOR THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY
Thanks to our recommendation frames, you can display personalized offers for flights, trips, and bookings. Because our frames have access to your customers’ and visitors’ activity, the offers and content they display can be tailored to a given person’s interests and previous activity on your website.
So, for instance, if you have a potential customer who is clearly interested in visiting a warm, Southern European country, recommendation frames will display offers featuring such countries, thus increasing the chance of booking with your company.
There is one more thing that’s worth mentioning. Recommendation frames can be used to display all types of content, not just offers. So, getting back to our warm countries example, your recommendation frames can direct your customer to a blog post featuring TOP5 travel destinations in the Southern Europe. And then, such a blog post can contain links to the best offers matching your prospect’s criteria.
CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION
As we mentioned before, the more you know about your customers, the better offers you can show them. That’s why we recommend adding one more tool to your personalization strategy, and that is customer segmentation. Segmenting customers into different segments based on their characteristics allows you to create better, more personalized offers at scale. Because it is very likely there’s more than one “Mark” in your company. If you have a whole group of people with similar interests, why not provide them all with the same or similar offers?
Customer segmentation also comes in handy when it comes to the parameters of ordered trips. Again, let’s use a simple example. If you have several customers who always book trips for four people, you can draw a conclusion it’s a family that always travels together. Showing such a customer a one-person last-minute offer to visit the Canary Islands is most likely not a very good idea; it’s not that kind of a traveler.
Understanding what segment each customer and prospect belongs to will allow you to provide them with more tailored offers and increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts as a result. This is where collecting customer data comes in handy. With iPresso, you can freely collect all the relevant customer data, store it in one place, and even create attributes (custom fields) with different types and quantities of data. This way, you can keep all the customer information in one place, ready to use for marketing and personalization purposes.
Wrapping up
Do you want to sell more trips and bookings in your travel company? Make the most of personalization and customer segmentation. With these two strategies, you will be able to provide customers with more tailored offers, which can result in more trips/flights/rooms sold. iPresso will help you with these efforts as we have all the technical solutions you need to put both strategies to work.
If you’d like to see how iPresso can aid your marketing efforts, start with a free 30-day trial access to our platform.
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