Many of us in travel are utilising new marketing techniques and new technology brings opportunities to grow businesses.
But fast and loose practices can end up being a zero-sum game, annoying consumers and reducing real opportunity for everyone involved.
NB: This a personal opinion by Joel Brandon-Bravo, managing director for Travelzoo in the UK.
Take something which is my core business, acquiring and managing an email base.
To many consumer businesses, this is a key part of building a cost-effective direct channel.
Despite the hype around social media, it still lags way behind email marketing as an effective sales channel.
However in the race to do that, it’s easy to not comply with the EU email directive which, in short, states:
"You cannot transmit, or instigate the transmission of, unsolicited marketing material by electronic mail to an individual subscriber unless they have previously notified you, the sender, that they consent, for the time being, to receiving such communications."
Crucially, it’s not just about staying compliant; it’s also about retaining the integrity of your email sends, and maintaining credibility with your email subscribers.
It’s frightening how many companies play fast and loose with the legislation.
I recently bought a light for my bike at a well-known cycle store.
The sales assistant asked for my email and when asked why, he said it was purely for the purposes of the guarantee.
I waited for the "would you like to receive promotions" question, but it never came.
What did come, unsurprisingly, were the weekly emails which duly started arriving with offers on bikes.
The problem
This experience is not unique – restaurants, bars, shops – they are all playing this game and not being clear about why they want your email address.
You buy something and are promptly rewarded with a stream of generic marketing communications, and that’s despite no opt-in, or even opt-out, to receive future communications.
Aside from the compliance issue, if people didn’t opt in they are likely to block your emails or mark them as spam.
Then, all the potentially responsive and willing recipients will equally find the messages disappearing into spam folders, negating the value of the whole list.
The more companies do this, the less people will engage with emails across the board, diminishing the value of the channel.
Giving users the option to manage the frequency, range and types of content will only lead to higher overall engagement.
After all, if you can keep them on a monthly list, rather than a weekly one, surely that’s better than losing them altogether?
The amount of times I’m offered this option when unsubscribing is still minimal.
Search issues
Another race to the bottom is in play in the universe of paid search advertising.
Costs continue to be prohibitive for many businesses to deliver ROI when it comes to display or PPC.
Bidding on other companies’ brands as a traffic-driving strategy is another area where the race to the bottom leaves no winners (except Google, as if they need our help).
We have a policy of not bidding on anyone else’s brand and ask those that bid on ours to desist.
This mutual respect, even among our competitors, allows us to bring end users to our sites when they are explicitly looking for us.
It then means we are able to bring them via search engines to our site for free, or for a small amount if we want to redirect them to specific pages for a small brand CPC un-hyped via bidding.
It’s another example of where a free-for-all, in an attempt to drive down acquisition costs, simply raises them for everyone.
Conversely, mutual compliance as best practice rewards those that manage to build loyalty around their own brand.
One example I often site is OTAs bidding on hoteliers’ brands.
Some of the big global chains are trying to push back on OTAs attempting to buy their existing customers and then sell them back on commission.
Surely a company that has built loyalty, and has the end user looking for their brand or property specifically, shouldn’t have to compete with one of their own distribution partners to outbid each other for that booking, which is not an incremental one for the brand.
Distressed marketing
Another practice that I think will start to wear thin is panic selling. By that I mean falsely driving conversions through misinformation.
A Which? report last year criticised the travel industry for promoting expiry dates for sales when the price remained low or dropped further still after the sale period ended.
Yet it’s tempting when you look at the likes of Booking.com and easyJet’s growth to follow their lead.
We’ve all seen the site overlays claiming: "Only one room/seat left at this price" or "15 people are looking at this right now".
- If they are dynamically connecting to a hotels PMS or CMS and a revenue manager makes more of their inventory available, then was that really true?
- It may be effective, but is it honest?
- Will that brand be trusted if a user returns two days later to find the room or airline seat still available?
Last year at Travelzoo we removed the countdown from our UK hotel and Local Deals.
Sometimes deals sold out faster than expected; therefore we’d given our members a false impression of how long the deal would be available.
Or the deal didn’t sell as quickly as we thought, or the hotel made more rooms available, and we ended up extending the deal beyond the date we had claimed it would end.
Either way the clock became at best unreliable and at worst deceptive. So we got rid of it.
Did conversion rates plummet? No, they didn’t.
We do field calls in our service centre asking how long it will be live and we give an honest answer: we don’t know, when they’re gone they’re gone.
The Top versus The Bottom
Finally, and at the risk of joining the chorus of broken records, we as an industry need to do much more to make the experience on mobile more consumer-focused.
Here’s where the race to the top will yield winners.
Far too often an information page or conversion path which is adequate on desktop becomes incomprehensible or impossible on a mobile.
The reason Travelzoo is migrating our hotel business from driving bookings direct to hotels, to pushing it to our own booking engine instead, is so that we can simplify this process.
This enables one-click purchase for those that have given us permission to save their payment methods and eliminates the need to fill in card details and a verification code on a tiny handheld screen.
Hotels have begun testing taking a reservation with just an email address rather than requiring a full booking – better to capture the booking than lose it due to poor UX.
Early results suggest that no-show rates and cancellations are no higher than when full details are completed.
So for me it’s all about honesty and simplicity. I don’t claim that Travelzoo have it all right, all of the time.
Indeed we are well aware of the never-ending work involved in achieving that.
But I believe retaining our integrity is what will drive growth for us and anyone else who wants to play the same game.
NB: This a personal opinion by Joel Brandon-Bravo, managing director for Travelzoo in the UK.
NB2:Race and panic images via Shutterstock.