This is the second blog in a series on using text as a travel and/or hospitality brand. Find Part One here and Part Three here.
The core of why travel and hospitality brands should care about text for them and their travelers and guests falls within four main buckets: sales are shifting to mobile, the sends are simple, it provides travel and hospitality marketers with a less saturated channel to reach consumers, and it offers the high performance of owned-channel marketing.
Easily, one of the best things about adding text as a channel right now is that it’s being
underutilized by many travel and hospitality brands. Companies that use text message marketing have a much higher chance of getting in front of their target customers because they won’t be exclusively competing in bid-based channels. Text message marketing isn’t as crowded as email, and travel marketers should move quickly to take advantage of that.
Marketing through your owned channels lets you reach customers without being reliant on the increasing cost associated with players like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Moreover, owned-channels often perform better than display or CPC. Texts have traditionally also performed incredibly well — seeing click-through rates in the double digits and onsite conversion rates ranging from 3-7%.
- 5-15% submission rates for onsite captures
- 10-13% click-through rates on all sends
- 3-7% onsite conversion rates
But the key to having a successful text program can also lie in a technology called identity resolution.
Using identification technology in a text program
Identification is the engine that drives the success of text marketing. In fact, it’s the key driver of success for all owned-channel marketing. By identifying your site visitors, you’ll be able to understand the specific actions they took while browsing every webpage you own. With this information, you’ll be able to move past batch-and-blast marketing practices by creating hypergranulated audience segments that allow you to send one-to-one messages that are personalized to where the consumer is in the sales funnel. Look for a vendor that gives you these identity resolution capabilities. Once in place, you can ensure you’re creating scalable, one-to-one text messages that drive true performance for your brand.
How to drive these one-to-one opt-ins
One struggle that travel and hospitality marketers often face is the ability to sustain and grow an active CRM list. With proper onsite identification technology in place, it’s easy. Look for identification technology that goes beyond cookies to help you recognize your customers and new prospects during their visit. Once in place, you can then automate onsite experiences to capture both emails and phone numbers. To have a truly effective opt-in strategy, you shouldn’t just be focusing on text but rather on all your owned channels.
But growing both lists doesn’t mean text and email should be run by separate point solutions. You can’t have strong capture rates across channels while maintaining a good user experience if different vendors are running separate campaigns.
In fact, marketers can make a big mistake by having their text vendors manage email capture. Most won’t validate if emails are already on your list and they won’t recognize users who are already subscribed either. This creates an annoying experience, especially when offering discounts to your current customers. You need one partner across channels who can recognize your email subscribers and deploy a series of experiences that talk to each other. It should be about maximizing revenue per unique user in a premium, non-disruptive way. So, take advantage of the scale in marketable opt-ins that texts provide by working with a vendor who gives you the ability to mix and match your strategies between both email and text. This will give your site visitors more choice between how they receive marketing messages from you, improving your onsite experience, and growing your lists for both channels.
Scaling triggered messaging
Once you’ve begun identifying more visitors, you’ll be able to automatically scale triggered messages based on the actions they took on your site. And there are a ton of different text triggers that the modern travel marketer can utilize. Welcome messages are table stakes and require no personalization. Identification scales your product abandonment and cart abandonment triggers that remind your site visitors to come back and complete that trip purchase. Additionally, you can use text triggers to send reminders around things like seasonal deals or offers that a customer may want to book before the offer expires.
When running your text campaigns, don’t work with a vendor that promises you the cart without giving you the horse to get you anywhere. It’s true that having the ability to personalize all of your marketing messages is important but scale will be impossible unless you work with a triggered messaging partner that can get your messages out to the right customer, with the right message, at the right time.
Automating performance with on-demand
The foundation of any strong batch-and-blast program is awareness of everyone’s stage in your customer lifecycle. Separating your prospects and your customers is the most basic element. For an efficient program that avoids ballooning costs, you also need to know who is currently shopping, who isn’t, and who is becoming a churn risk. But you can’t effectively target active or inactive users if you can’t recognize your site traffic at scale—you’ll have no idea who is inactive or active. Once you do recognize this traffic, you can automate on-demand messages that increase send volume at key lifecycle moments so you can minimize costly list-wide sends.
Here are a few segments we suggest to get you started:
Prospect vs. Customer: On major list-wide sends, remind prospects of their first-time discount while keeping a customer send promo-free. And consider your time-to repurchase. If a customer won’t reasonably be traveling for another few months (vacationer vs. business traveler), suppress them from your customer segment.
High-Intent Mop-Up: Every week, send a message to prospects who took deep-funnel actions 3-4 weeks ago without returning.
Sale/Promo High-Intent Mop-up: To apply targeted urgency on the last day of a promotion, send a blast to all users who engaged with the promo without converting.
High vs. Low Intent: Try targeting those mid-intent users who made it as far as the scheduling page, but didn’t add to cart.
Win-Back: Send a special promo to previous customers who haven’t visited in several months. Bonus: Combine it with a Wunderkind coupon bar for continuity on-site!
Get a Review: If you have a review platform, use text to drive participation. Build a segment of users who purchased in the last 8-14 days and ask for their feedback and send something every week.
Big Spenders: Target users who have a large purchase history with special access.
Once you have this in place, you’ll be able to more effectively scale your owned-channel outreach by automating triggered messages that are sent to site visitors as they qualify for your different audience segments. And this is important because unlike display, social media, or other top-of-funnel channels it’s important to personalize all of your outreach through text. This is because the message goes directly to the person—right on the device they use most often. Essentially, to avoid giving your consumers a sour taste in their mouths, personalization will be key.
Explore the next post in the series, Part Three, or download The Definitive Guide for Text for Travel & Hospitality below.