Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
To adapt to changing consumer demand, travel companies need to make themselves easy to access where consumers spend most of their time — on their mobile devices. In a 2021 study, 63 percent of travelers reported that it is extremely important to use a smartphone when planning or booking a trip.
Today, the mobile experience is just as necessary as the website experience. On your mobile site, visitors should perform the same tasks, such as researching your business and booking a service, as they can on the desktop version.
When building the mobile version of your website, make sure that any vital information, like your services, amenities, pricing, and contact information, is easily found, ideally within just a few taps.
Communicate via SMS
With over 5 billion people subscribed to mobile services, SMS is a powerful communication tool that can help you reach a global audience. Compared to email, SMS has an extremely high open rate of 98 percent, so your customers are much more likely to read text messages from your business. A successful SMS strategy will drive engagement and growth while improving the customer experience.
Digital marketing plans are oriented towards making the customer experience as seamless and straightforward as possible, and SMS marketing can streamline many parts of the customer journey. For example, an SMS marketing platform can automatically send text messages to confirm reservations and remind guests about upcoming trips. In addition, guests can easily change their reservations or submit cancellation requests by responding to a message, further automating the process.
SMS marketing is also an effective tool for requesting reviews from your guests. Consider starting with a short text asking them to rate their overall experience on a scale of 1 to 10. Because submitting a response is as simple as responding to the message, guests are likely to give you at least some feedback. Finally, don’t forget to include a call to action for guests to fill out a survey if they are interested.
Automate With Chatbots
Chatbots enhance the customer experience by automating customer service to save time and money. Chatbots can streamline your communications by responding to customer inquiries 24/7, even when your team isn’t online, providing consistent, high-quality customer service any time, any place.
For example, you can create scripts so your chatbot can quickly answer common questions about pricing, availability, event packages, and much more. When you receive a message from a customer with a frequently asked question, the chatbot can respond almost immediately, improving customer satisfaction.
Some chatbots use artificial intelligence to automate entire conversations with customers, providing a more personalized interaction and better problem solving. For example, if an AI-powered chatbot doesn’t know the answer, it will hand over the conversation to a human customer service agent, enabling your team to spend more time on complex or specific inquiries.
Today, chatbots are available on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and more, making it easy for your customers to reach your business on the communication channel of their choice.
Create Customer Segments
An effective customer segmentation strategy can increase customer engagement and boost the ROI of your tourism marketing tactics. Simply put, customer segmentation is the practice of dividing your audience into groups based on shared characteristics, interests, or behaviors. By segmenting your customer base, you can create marketing messages designed for your target audience.
Personalized content marketing built around consumers’ unique interests is proven to increase customer engagement. For example, in tour operation marketing, it can be helpful to segment your audience into domestic and international guests, who typically have different travel preferences.
You can also segment your customers based on demographics, such as income or marital status, to share marketing messages that are more likely to engage them.
Chat Globally With OTT Apps
OTT (over-the-top) messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat have become hugely popular worldwide. For example, WhatsApp has over 2 billion active users worldwide. If you want to reach a global audience with your tourism and travel marketing efforts, then getting started with OTT messaging apps is the first step.
OTT messaging apps go beyond standard SMS messaging to enable businesses to create rich, interactive content that drives customer engagement. For example, companies that use Facebook Messenger for marketing have 70 percent higher open rates than email campaigns.
OTT messaging apps like WhatsApp include powerful features like verified business profiles, message templates, and built-in calls to action that make it easy to start conversations with users around the globe.
Get Social
With omnichannel marketing, your business can reach a wider audience while maintaining a cohesive brand and consistent marketing messaging. In addition to mobile messaging apps, successful strategies also use social media channels to include tourist destination marketing, products and service offerings, and much more.
Social advertising can be a powerful tool that helps your business reach customers on as many platforms as possible. By leveraging the customer data you already have, you can retarget website visitors with hyper-relevant ads on their preferred social media channels. Social media also makes it easier for businesses to better understand changing consumer expectations to improve their travel and tourism products overall.
Use Mobile Marketing Cloud to Boost Your Travel Business
Travel and tourism marketing is all about reaching a global audience. The most successful tourism marketing strategies create superior customer experiences that not only increase sales but drive engagement and build long-lasting relationships.
CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud is an omnichannel customer engagement solution that enables businesses to shift to mobile marketing while quickly scaling up and optimizing their tourism marketing mix. Our software collects customer data in real-time, allowing you to create relevant, personalized marketing campaigns for your target audiences.
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