Cross selling and upselling are two of the most effective sales strategies. They are especially helpful in the travel industry where there is always something else you can offer to increase the value of the order or booking. If you run a hotel, a travel agency, or a booking platform, you can use both strategies to grow your sales significantly. Let’s see how you can do so with iPresso.
This is a typical situation in this sector: A customer books a flight and a hotel. At this point, depending on the type of business you run, you can provide them with several additional or upgraded services to make their trip/stay a more pleasant one.
If you run a booking platform, you can offer them a rental car, a travel insurance, or even some guided tours. If you run a hotel, you can offer your customer to upgrade to a better hotel room or to add more meals to their package. If you run a bus company or an airline, you can offer them better seats or priority boarding. The list goes on. Traveling these days can be both exciting and comfortable, and travel companies have many tools allowing them to entice someone to spend a little more on their vacation.
This is where upselling and cross-selling step in the game. Both strategies are very similar:
- Cross-selling is all about offering your customers some complementary services (e.g., travel insurance with their flight)
- Upselling is about providing upgraded or better version of the service they ordered (e.g., seats with more legroom in the front of the plane)
If you want to make the most of these techniques, you probably could use an automated strategy allowing you do benefit from upselling and cross-selling at scale. That’s what we offer at iPresso.
Upselling and cross-selling in the travel industry with iPresso: 4 tools
We want to show you four tools in our marketing automation platform that will help you make the most of both strategies. All of these tools are relatively easy to implement and they don’t require advanced technical or coding knowledge on your part.
CONTACT FORMS
They are frequently the first stop on the way to becoming your customers. People frequently have many questions about their trip/stay, and making it easy for them to reach you gives you more opportunities to close the deal and increase its value.
Here’s an example: A customer asks you about the availability of the one-person hotel room in a specific time period. You can reply that unfortunately such a hotel room is not available in the specified period, but you can offer a two-person hotel room for just a slightly higher price. Many customers, especially those who need to travel in the specified period, will decide to go with the slightly more expensive option.
If you hadn’t such a convenient contact form on your website, the customer would probably never reach out, and instead of selling a more expensive hotel room you’d end up with a lost opportunity.
You can use our contact forms to create quick and convenient web forms allowing you to:
- Build a contact database
- Collect customer opinions
- Improve customer service and communication with customers
- Enhance your lead generation efforts
If you operate in the travel industry, our forms can be used to facilitate bookings, collect information about traveler preferences, and quickly contact customers if they have questions or need help.
MARKETING AUTOMATION SCENARIOS
Their primary goal is to guide your customers and prospects down the sales funnel, from the initial interest to final booking (ideally with the use of cross-selling or upselling). With our MA scenarios feature, you can create several different scenarios that include different forms of communication (e.g., push notifications, text messages, or emails) and reactions to actions taken by your customers on your website. MA scenarios are based on scripted lists of actions performed by your customers and reactions from your company’s website/customer service, ultimately leading to an intended outcome.
To give you an example, if you have a prospect who’s looking at the trips to Egypt, you can set a scenario that will trigger a push notification with upgraded offers in this country. Marketing automation scenarios are incredibly useful. In fact, you can also use them to:
- Rescue abandoned booking processes
- Remind your guests about upcoming visits/trips
- Inform customers about new offers/deals
- Send personalized travel offers
RECOMMENDATION FRAMES
Our personalized recommendation frames can significantly enhance upselling and cross-selling opportunities in the travel industry by presenting your customers with offers tailored to their unique preferences and travel behaviors.
For instance, when a user books a flight, the system can analyze their previous travel history, interests, and browsing patterns to suggest premium seating options, extra baggage, or priority boarding as upsell opportunities. This personalized approach not only increases the likelihood of a customer opting for these additional services but also enhances their overall travel experience by addressing their specific needs and preferences.
Our recommendation frames can improve your cross-selling and upselling efforts by offering complementary services and upgraded products that align with a given customer’s travel plans. For example, if a user books a trip to Paris, the system can suggest related experiences such as guided city tours or museum passes (naturally, if that’s something you offer).
CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION: CONTACT DATABASE MANAGEMENT
By utilizing our contact database management, you can create custom attributes to organize and analyze customer data efficiently. This allows you to segment customers based on various criteria such as travel frequency, destinations, or preferences. It can also be used to identify people in your database who are potentially willing to spend more money on their trip/vacation.
For example, frequent business travelers can be targeted with upgraded offers for premium seating, priority boarding, or exclusive lounge access, thus supporting your upselling efforts. This well-organized data ensures that you can effectively identify and target specific customer groups with tailored offers that meet their unique needs and allow you to increase the value of each order. The same is true when you have customers who have booked expensive trips in the past.
Wrapping up
If you operate in the travel sector, upselling and cross-selling will allow you to increase sales, even without significant investments in marketing efforts. We invite you to use our platform to support your sales efforts! If you’d like to see how iPresso works in your company, feel free to use our free trial period access. For 30 days, you’ll be able to test various features of our system (we have over 20 of them!) thus streamlining different aspects of your company’s marketing, analytics, and sales.
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