Travel Agency Tribes Email Marketing

If you’re reading this, you know the drill. A client comes into your office, emails, or calls you. You find out what they want, then you send them a quote. Hopefully, they spend some money booking with you. Profit!

But what percentage of those customers actually end up booking with you?

It seems more and more that most of them end up comparing your quote online, then booking there if its even a few dollars less. Am I hitting a soft spot in the pit of your stomach right now? Did you just slump your shoulders in agreement?

Travel Agents provide a much better booking experience for their customers. But the internet has so many ways to book travel now, that its almost crazy how we manage to succeed as Agents.

Lets talk about two ways in which we can bring more value to a customer.

Give a Free Travel Guide

As we speak, there are many free travel guides online. WikiVoyages and WikiTravel are two of the largest. Their information is actually Creative Commons, so you can use it.

Here’s a simple step, find the guide for your client’s destination and print it out to a PDF. As soon as you complete the initial contact, email that PDF to your client. Say how happy you were to have them. Explain that the guide can help them learn more about the destination.

Not many other Travel Agents would ever go beyond the quote. You will. And you'll win.

Pro Tip. Save the PDF’s to a Dropbox folder so your fellow agents can send them. Makes it easy to refer back to them later.

Curated Destination Information

This one is a little harder, because you have to do some research. On your blog (you should have one), make a post with the top 10 travel articles you can find for a destination shortly after your client requests a quote.

Don’t try to make 100 such pages ahead of time, unless you can hire someone or have the time.

Put a call to action (phone, email, contact link) at the bottom of the blog so visitors can contact you.

Now send a link for that page to your client.

Pro Tip. Make another blog post that lists all of these. Call it “[Agency Name] Destination Picks” (or something unique to you).

Now a few things brilliant things just happened here.

You just started slowly making some really great pages that are just great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now people researching trips can find your articles in Google.

You helped your customer with much needed research.

Finally, Drip it Out!

All of this is great for one time emails. But as we like to beat over your head, you really need to be reaching out to your customers at least 12 times so they can get to know you and see your value.

You can get all sophisticated and automate this process using AWeber or Mailchimp.

Or you could just Contact Us to do it for you.

We can drip out a guide, chapter by chapter each day via email, and we have tons of curated destination information already in our databases ready for just this purpose.

If you were on the receiving end of a quote, wouldn’t you like to see more?

Get up and get started.