"The rise of the online [travel] agency is bringing new opportunity, especially for sellers of more complex vacation packages. Costs are low to open an online travel site, so many new competitors are expected" -Forbes Online
Welcome back from the weekend! Because I'm sure you're all wistfully recalling your 4th of July getaways, (and already forgetting the traffic you had to endure to get there... ah, selective amnesia is good to us) I thought it was fitting to focus the weekly Industry Shoutout blog post on travel and leisure. According to the New York Times, travel and tourism grow 1 to 1.5 points faster than the global economy does, making travel services a hot industry with a projected 5-year annual growth rate of over 4%.
"Options are many and customer loyalty is at a premium," says Adam Weissenberg in an interview with Deloitte. "Ensur[ing] superior customer engagement and personalized experience remains a key focus area."
Customer engagement? Personalization? Sounds like inbound to me! Weissenberg goes on to emphasize the growing importance of social media and analytics in building trusting customer relationships and learning about customer preferences within the travel industry, which is exactly what inbound marketing focuses on.
With the rise of travel booking sites like Expedia, it's clear that trip planning has become a predominantly online process. But while you may be tempted to use paid advertising for your travel website, pay-per-click is not necessarily the best choice for attracting more potential customers! In fact, a HubSpot case study shows how an online travel agency increased its sales revenue by 129% when it traded PPC for inbound.
Tenon Tours is an online booking site for trips in Ireland and the UK. Before working with HubSpot, they were managing leads by shared documents and Excel spreadsheets, a manual approach that was not only time-consuming but was also incapable of storing the information necessary for nurturing those leads. Tenon was paying for PPC advertising, but with a relatively low conversion rate, they were shelling out about $20 per lead — not exactly cost-effective.
Then Tenon decided to invest in HubSpot. They began to create relevant, educational content for visitors, like travel tips and information about Irish culture, and started to learn about their customers' preferences by using the analytics tools. They created different buyer personas (travel agents vs. visitors, for example) so that they could target solutions to the appropriate parties, and segmented leads for email campaigns with Smart Lists based on which tours different leads were interested in. Most effectively, they took trip itineraries that had previously been fully available and turned them into CTAs, which lead visitors to a landing page if they want to download full itineraries. It worked — this inbound method alone now accounts for 33.5% of Tenon's conversions.
With inbound, Tenon has not only witnessed a notable increase in sales revenue, but has also generated a 504% increase in lead volume and a 54% increase in site visitors.
Want to learn how to do the same for your travel agency? Download our free guide to inbound marketing best practices!
