Whether you’re trying to sell a trip to the Bahamas or enhance your guest’s stay in your hotel, SMS messaging services are steadily becoming the tool of choice for reaching your customers.
The reason is clear. For many travelers who lack immediate access to their email account, the best way to reach them is through their mobile device. It makes it easy to communicate gate changes, in-flight offers, destination highlights, and local offers. Travel agents, hotels, airlines, and others in the travel industry are all implementing text marketing services to keep in close contact with their clientele. Here are four tactics you should be using if you are in the travel industry.
Travel Industry SMS: Build Your Brand…and Your Contact List
There are a few ways businesses build up their contact list. First, they use information from existing customers, or contacts that have expressed interest in their service in the past. Beyond that, your options are limited to buying lists which may or may not be effective. There’s really no way to qualify the people on the list before you buy.
However, with effective business text messaging SMS marketing, you can have your prospects give you their number. Consider marketing a contest to your target demographic through social media for a free night’s stay in a hotel to anyone who texts STAY FREE to your number. Over the course of the contest, you’ll have built up a phone list of people who are both interested in staying in a hotel and match your target demographic.
Travel Industry SMS: For Most it was Just a Snowy Day
Turn cold, snowy days into business opportunities. Effective digital marketing looks for a customer when they are at their most desperate moment, and then places the solution to their problem one click away. On those days when it seems summer may take forever to come back, send out text messages promoting your sunniest vacation destinations.
This isn’t a technique that is limited to winter months. In the summer, when kids are on vacation, send out messages to desperate moms and dads for a weekend away from the kids, or offer a fantastic family vacation package. In all of these instances, you’ll be utilizing one of the most important elements of SMS marketing, by delivering the right message at the right time.
Build Relationships…and Upsell Added Services
Text messages allow you to create a virtual concierge service directly in your customer’s pocket. Update your guests about their check-in times, reservation information, and any changes to their itinerary. If your database includes your guest’s preferences, offer bar and restaurant recommendations, or present upsell services such as shoe shines, show tickets, or spa services.
Advanced SMS service providers, including MessageWhiz, can create marketing packages that include triggers, which generates an SMS message in reaction to specific events. For example, hotels can set up a trigger that asks guests while they’re in the pre-boarding process at the airport if they’d like the hotel to arrange pick-up service when they land or arrange for meals in their room when they arrive. Triggered SMS messaging creates unlimited ways for travel service providers to enhance their guests’ stays.
Last Minute Deals
Few things get the adrenaline pumping like a last-minute getaway with a special price. Excite your customers by updating them on exclusive deals only available for your SMS customers.
SMS messaging is perfectly designed to deliver last minute deals. While most email messages are ignored, SMS messages are opened within minutes of delivery, meaning SMS is a much better medium for delivering deals which require fast-acting customers to take advantage of.
Talk to us to discover how MessageWhiz can help you deliver vacation destinations to your customers.
