Working in seasonal industries like travel and hospitality is challenging, to say the least. You’ve either got tons of people making reservations on your site or hardly any, forcing you to constantly review your marketing budget spending. The good news is it doesn’t always have to be like this. What I’m about to show you is how you can increase your travel website bookings throughout the whole year, with the use of marketing automation.
Why bother with the technology
Let’s first look at the why, not the how. Why bother about any of the tools like email marketing, marketing automation, social media, and what not? The answer is quite simple.
We’re all people. We’re physically not able to be in the office 24/7. We’ve got hobbies, friends, families, and whether you believe it or not – we even sometimes need to catch up on sleep. It’s also not efficient to hire more people to get them to do everything you’re doing, if it’s something a simple piece of software could do instead. Especially if it’s at a fraction of the cost of employing someone new.
Marketing automation, just like the name implies, is meant to help you become more efficient by automating some of your recurring marketing activities. Which ones exactly? I’ll talk about that in the next section.
Is it worth it though? Marketing automation messages have long been praised for delivering an even higher engagement rates than email. And email marketing has been rated as the most effective online marketing channel in our recent study.
Of course, these channels can’t be separated. You have to sync them, and make them work together. Let’s now dive into the ways travel and hospitality industries can benefit from using email and marketing automation technology to increase website bookings all year round.
10 steps to increasing travel website bookings:
-
Onboard new users and track their behaviour
First of all, I’m going to assume that you’re already building an email list.
Now if you’re building a list, it’s most probably through an online form where a user has to fill in their contact details, such as email, name, and maybe their city. That’s some data to start with.
