Last fall, we launched the App Store, the travel industry’s first marketplace specifically for tour and activity operators.
Today, there are over 40 apps ranging from marketing to analytics and operations,
Earlier this week, we wrote about some of our newest automated marketing growth tools.
In this post, we’re going to highlight seven more growth tools and how you can use them to market your business.
Get more 5-star customer reviews with TripAdvisor Review Express
Tripadvisor reviews can help you improve your search ranking, build trust with potential customers and generate more sales.
TripAdvisor Review Express is a free platform that allows you to send emails asking for reviews to every single customer after purchase. You can set this up once in your Xola dashboard and it will automagically send these emails (including reminder emails) moving forward.
On average, companies, who use TripAdvisor Review Express, see a 28% increase in reviews.
All you need is your guests’ names and email addresses and Xola’s integration will automatically pass this information to TripAdvisor Review Express.
The best part if you have all guests sign a waiver, you can send these review emails to everyone in a party and not just the person who made the booking.
For example, if you own an escape room that books a lot of team retreats and they all sign a digital waiver, then you can send all of their names and emails to Tripadvisor Review Express. They’ll all get a follow-up email asking to leave a review.
Generate more revenue with gift certificates
Gift cards aren’t just for the busy holiday season. In 2015, consumers spent $130 billion on gift cards. From birthdays to special occasions like graduation, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and anniversaries, gift cards can be a great way to increase revenue.
According to our data, only 25.9% of the money spent on gifts is redeemed within six months.
There’s a significant amount of gift cards that never get redeemed at all (Free money!)
For example, if you own a zipline tour business. You could run a gift campaign that incentivizes people to buy gift cards for their friends and families’ upcoming birthdays.
Increase average order value by selling packages
Another way to sell more is by bundling or packaging two or more experiences and offering it to customers as a package. Within your dashboard, you can also add fixed and relative discounts to packages in order to make these deals more attractive to customers.
Pro Tip: You can use XolaBot to automate and sell even more packages. Check out this guide to learn how to do this.
Recover lost revenue with abandoned booking recovery
Did you know the travel industry has the highest abandoned cart rate at 82%? With our Abandoned Booking Recovery – including a customizable abandoned booking email and Resume Booking – you can turn more website visitors into customers by re-engaging them at checkout and off-site.
One Houston escape room saw a 25% increase in revenue from recovered bookings.
Pro Tip: Check out this guide to learn some best practices for customizing your abandoned booking emails.
Grow your business with affiliate partnerships
From hotel concierges and your local Tourism Bureau to local attractions, travel bloggers, and Instagram influencers, partnerships can increase brand awareness and drive more sales.
In fact, 81% of brands are using affiliate marketing in some capacity.
Once you have an affiliate or two, you can easily track their sales and partner commissions right within your Xola dashboard.
Get a bird’s eye view of your most profitable listings, days and times
What are your most profitable and least profitable listings? What time slots fill up first? Which tours are consistently operating at under 50% capacity?
You can find out the answers to all these questions and more using our Capacity Utilization Report. This allows you to see what percentage of your time slots were booked for any given listing over any period of time.
When you are armed with this information, it allows you to make smarter decisions when it comes to growing your business. For example, if you know that your Sunday 7 am tours are consistently operating at under 30% capacity and you are losing money on it, you might choose to either move that tour to a more popular timeslot or perhaps run a lightning deal for that tour to incentivize your most price-sensitive customers to book one of your underutilized slots.
Measure your marketing campaigns with Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Fortunately, it is easy for you to track all of your paid ad campaigns within Xola using the Facebook Pixel integration (for Facebook ads) and/or Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking (for all other ad campaigns).
This allows you to gain visibility into every website booking, including the experience(s) booked, the order value, the number of guests, how much they bought, etc.
Once you have this tracking pixel installed, it will pass the data onto Google Analytics or your analytics software of choice.
Pro Tip: If you are looking for help setting up and using Google Analytics, check out this guide.
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From abandoned booking recovery and Tripadvisor Review Express to gift certificates and custom conversion tracking, these are seven tools that you can use to sell more experiences and grow your business.
For more information about any of these features, explore the App Store here.
