This is the first blog in a series on using text as a travel and/or hospitality brand. Find Part Two here and Part Three here.
As competition intensifies on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, the cost of advertising continues to rise while returns diminish. Conversion rates on social channels are declining, forcing brands to spend more just to meet their goals. With third-party platforms becoming increasingly expensive and less effective, travel and hospitality marketers must shift their focus to owned channels to stay competitive.
Email has historically been the primary owned-channel for many marketers, including travel and hospitality. This is because brands who did attempt text marketing years ago didn’t have the ubiquity of internet-enabled smartphones. They were doomed to fail on the channel. However, the cautionary tale of text marketing is a thing of the past as user behavior has officially caught up. Airlines are one example of winning the text marketing game. From texts alerting flyers of gate changes to boarding alerts, they’re using this channel for important messaging that travelers find really useful. However, smart travel and hospitality marketers should also be capitalizing on this channel to increase bookings and grow revenue.
In this series, we’ll explore some of the best tips and tricks for travel and hospitality marketers utilizing text as a channel. Let’s start with the basics.
A quick background on the basics of text
Text message marketing allows for text messages to be sent to mobile devices. To run a text program at scale, travel and hospitality marketers need to use short codes — a 5- or 6-digit number that can send messages at 100x the scale of a normal phone number. They can be used exclusively by one brand. Now, let’s discuss all of the players involved with sending text messages for brands.
Texting vendors
These are the companies that provide you with all the features and functionality you need to launch and manage your texting programs. Here’s everything that these vendors do:
- Provide a platform that marketers can use to send messages.
- Help grow your list in a compliant way and manage your unsubscribes.
- Get you a short code. They’ll manage your application with the aggregators and carriers by outlining your marketing program, explaining how users can sign-up, and breaking down the program’s terms so the carriers know it will be compliant with their governing body (the CTIA) and the law (the TCPA).
- Help you manage compliance with audit trails.
Aggregators
Aggregators provision short codes and get messages to the right people. When you send a message to 500,000 customers, they ensure the messages are routed to the right carriers quickly.
Mobile carriers
Carriers are the ones who actually deliver your text messages to mobile devices. They can also shut down a short code if they feel your program isn’t compliant.
Why your texting program can become expensive
It’s much more expensive to send a text than an email. Even if you’re only paying your text messaging vendor, the aggregator and carrier also charge fees. You may be looking at a vendor’s platform fee, aggregator fees for hosting the short code and routing messages, and carrier fees for delivering the messages.
Because it’s so costly to send these messages, it’s critical for marketers to ensure their text messaging program is generating new revenue, not just moving revenue from existing marketing channels into this new one.
This is why it’s so important to work with a partner that can show you how text is adding incremental revenue to your business that wouldn’t have existed had this messaging type not been sent to consumers. Costs can be higher, as you can see above, but the performance is often much higher than other marketing strategies as well. Working with a partner that ensures you maintain an eye on incrementality will ensure you see this high performance without any of the costly drawbacks.
Explore the next post in the series, Part Two, or download The Definitive Guide for Text for Travel & Hospitality below.