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Keeping Your Customers Engaged In A Travel Ban
As tempting as it would be to dial down the marketing in times when bookings aren’t possible, amping up your efforts when your customers are in desperate need of an escape – even if only to daydream – is the perfect way to keep that lust for travel burning, with your brand’s name sitting comfortably at the top of the list when they’re ready to book. Here’s how four Feefo customers adapted their marketing to keep their customers engaged.
How do you keep travel in your customer’s minds when they’re stuck inside four walls? Inspiring your customers during times of restrictions can be a challenge, but if done effectively, can make sure they think of you and the experiences you can offer when restrictions are eased.
Lisa Fitzell, Managing Director at Elegant Resorts, tells us how they kept their customers engaged and inspired throughout lockdown by shifting their focus. “At times, when booking levels were low, it wasn’t about trading. It was more about inspiration and keeping dreams alive. We’ve had to change our strategy throughout the pandemic.” Lisa goes on to explain how Elegant Resorts managed to elevate their customer experience, without taking their customers out of their homes. “One of our biggest successes has been our events. We’ll send our clients a gift, so they might have a hamper of cheese and wine for instance, for an event all about Greece. We’ll then go live to the resorts, and walk our customers around, explain the protocols that are in place, and what travel looks like at the moment.”
By throwing these events, Elegant Resorts don’t just give their customers a top-notch customer experience of the most tailored kind, they also fire up their imaginations, offer incredible, personal customer service, provide a space for likeminded jet-setters to get social – and perhaps most importantly – give them the opportunity to share the incredible experiences they’ve had with the company.
Don’t get us wrong – we know that the travel industry has been using photo and video content long before quarantine forced us all onto the likes of Instagram and TikTok, but a shift in strategies, resource and budgets has meant that both creative and user-generated content (UGC) plays a major role in keeping travel customers engaged and inspired in this travel lull. With daily usage of YouTube and TikTok growing by 15% over the pandemic, and Facebook and Instagram usage shooting up by a huge 40%, creating content for these channels means you have a good chance it will get seen by the masses. We’ve seen our customers use photo and video content to not only inspire their customers, but also to make an emotional connection, and help rebuild trust with this visual social proof.
Feefo customer, Expedia, have taken to their social channels to do just that, with their Instagram stories providing customers with everything from inspiring virtual tours to faraway lands and lists of the ten most searched post-lockdown destinations to their timely #WorkFromHere hashtag, in which they suggest ideal destinations to take your office elsewhere.
Visual social proof can go a long way towards eradicating any doubts from nervous travellers, and Eurocamp’s addition of customer feedback to their social images is an effective way of validating a post-pandemic booking. Using customer feedback can give your customers the gentle nudge they need when confidence is low – and if you’re already collecting customer feedback, you’re sitting on a goldmine of social proof just waiting to be utilised.
If you think that keeping your customers engaged throughout this pandemic is about selling to them, then unfortunately you may be missing the mark. Right now, your efforts should be focused on making sure that your customers feel safe and reassured. In the short term, this shift in purpose will help strengthen your relationships and build trust with your customers, which, of course, later down the line could translate into bookings as they view you as a reliable, transparent business who were a reassuring voice in times of uncertainty. A huge 78% consumers believe that throughout the crisis, brands should be helping in their everyday lives, and 8% say they should stop advertising altogether – proof that now more than ever, you need to be more considerate than ever when it comes to engaging with your customers.
Your customers have changed, as have their priorities, and now is not the time to appear tone deaf. Pete Brudenll, Marketing Director at CV Villas, tells us about how they felt the need to adapt their tone to accommodate the new concerns of their customers. “We’ve taken a softer, more content-led approach to a lot of our media channels. We’ve tried to remain quite neutral, as well as being current. Our tone of voice has defintely changed. Our CV promise (our way of providing customer protection for future travel plans) and the flexibility and security we offer has become a lot more prominent in our marketing, and we feel that is going to be more and more important”.
Travelling may have ground to a halt for now, but when it comes to communicating with your customers, now is not the time to put your foot on the brakes – in fact, you should be more connected to your customers than ever before.
Prepare to learn about your new customer base
International travel may remain uncertain, but when the rush comes you need to be prepared to make the most of it. Whatever insight you’re hoping to get from your customers, we can help.
At Feefo, we make it easy to collect the feedback and insight you need to improve your customer experience and build a better business. Our platform has lots of great tools, including Campaign Manager Tool, which allows you to ask for feedback at every stage of the customer journey. You can even tailor your campaigns to different types of customers.
By personalising your messages when asking for feedback, and by asking for more specific feedback, you could hugely increase the number of reviews you collect, which will give you so much value insight into your business. One Feefo client managed to use Campaign Manager Tool to increase feedback response rates by 331%!
If you’d like to give Feefo a try, we have an offer exclusive to ITT Members. Join Feefo today and get our Campaign Manager Tool for free for six months! To claim this offer, just call our sales team on 020 3196 8098 and quote ‘ITT2021’.