One of the new ways to market your travel business is by the use of
email. Fast delivery is the key to a successful campaign. The first
thing you need to do is to get permission to send these emails by
having an opt-in describing the future content of your mails and the
other is to have an opt-out in the actual emails that you send to
prospective clients. You should follow guidelines set out by mailbox
providers to ensure that your emails get past their spam blockers.
Have you ever heard the term SEO (search engine optimization)? If
you haven’t, you should sit up and take notice, especially if you have
your own web site. SEO is a broad term which encompasses various
methods of optimization including conducting sometimes exhaustive
keyword research and the improving hyperlinks that link back to your
own web site. For a travel web site, the best back links would be from
other travel related web sites.
If you have your own travel web site you should spend some time
spreading your links across the internet by submitting your URL
(universal resource locator) to as many travel and holiday web
directories as possible. You can also link to other related travel
sites and reciprocate this by linking back to them, though it is always
better to have a one way link that points to your site.
One of the most important features a travel company needs on their
web site is the capability for users to search for holidays, flights;
cruises etc and be able to book them online. Any travel web site worth
its salt now has these features and their number of sales reflects
this. More that 80% of travelers who plan their holidays make their
bookings online. See
http://www.barrheadtravel.co.uk
for an example. These back-end programs though are not for the novice
web programmer to construct and unless you are used to producing server
code I suggest you outsource for this complexity of programming.
Blogs are the latest thing to hit the internet. These can be a very
potent marketing tool that can reach out to new customers. People love
to be told travel stories and blogs allow you and others to post new
content and update it quickly.
Podcasts are yet another way to reach your customers. Podcasts can
contain video and audio so you could shorten or use sections of your
promotional holiday video and make it available for download by the
millions of people who own an iPod.
In brief, if you are in the travel industry, if you don’t embrace
all the technology that is at your disposal, you may be left behind.
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