While the offseason provides an opportunity for rest and repair, it is also a crucial time to lay the groundwork for success in the upcoming peak season. It is a great time to pause and strategize for growth. Below you will find the six key strategies that growing enterprises have in common during their off-season.
Table of Contents
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Cash Flow
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Review and Adjust Offerings
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Group Sales
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Targeted Marketing
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Additional Sales Channels
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Embrace Technology
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1. Keep Cash Flow Coming in
Even though trips aren’t going out, generating pre-season income helps lay the groundwork for a successful operating cycle. Consumers purchase up to $1 Trillion in gifts around the holidays, creating some good news for the activity and tour industry: Millennials are indicating that 52% of their holiday spending is on experience-related purchases, compared with 39% for older consumers. Vacations in general are on track to see a 27 percent increase in consumer spending between 2015 and 2019, the strongest growth of any spending category. Trends are indicating that consumers are desiring experiences that they can enjoy with their family and friends over purchasing more ‘stuff’. This is a great reason to promote the experiences that your business has to offer throughout the year. Even though we just went through the busiest time of the year for gift purchases, there are still opportunities to begin selling gift certificates and gift cards.
Gift Cards and Gift Certificates are both must-have offerings during holidays such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, but should be promoted differently. A gift card is an amount purchased that will go toward the total amount of an invoice. To promote a gift card is to promote your overall business. A gift certificate, on the other hand, is great for promoting specific packages, activities, offerings or events. Gift cards and certificates have remained the most requested holiday gift for 9 years in a row; showing that people prefer to receive a gift that they can redeem at their leisure. Moreover, 65% of gift card holders spend an extra 38% beyond the value of the card and 6-10% percent of gift cards/certificates will never be redeemed. This shows that these types of sales equate to a larger profit margin than selling your service directly to the end-user. Advanced payments are also beneficial to your business as it may cover expenses, improvements or capital investments in your off-season. Here are three tips for selling gifts in the off-season:
Create Urgency
When a sense of urgency or scarcity is created in an ad, let’s say a Facebook ad, typically it encourages people to not “put off” checking into your offering. Utilizing keywords that promote urgency or expirations will improve conversion rates, as you can see in this article: (https://adespresso.com/academy/blog/how-important-is-urgency-in-facebook-ads/)
Target Your Promotions
Consider taking some time to hone in on the exact target audience you want your promotions to be seen by. Your target should be influenced by the activity you are promoting, as well as the holiday or time of year you are promoting it. Facebook is making targeting easier and easier for businesses to do these days and is a great platform for businesses who are targeting travelers, as it is the platform most often used for people sharing their experiences. Check out this article on 10 ways to target travelers with Facebook.
Create Irresistible Packages
If winter is your low season, brainstorm ways to entice customers to purchase a package from you even though they might not redeem the actual activity for months. Is there something branded that you can bundle with the trip that will be enjoyable to open during the holidays? Engraved Hydro Flasks or other merchandise that feature your brand or logo are a great example of this. https://www.hydroflask.com/all-products
Even when not developing holiday sales, bundling is a great way of driving revenue. Bundling, or packaging, is when you sell a package or set of services for a lower price than they would charge if the customer bought all of them separately. By focusing on a package deal, the consumer is likely to focus on the total experiential value and try features that they may not have otherwise. The same applies to group sales.
2. Simplify your offerings
This might seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many businesses struggle at this fundamental step. Keep it simple. Offer clarity to your customers in regards to your offerings, pricing, policies, etc. What does your business do? Who is your ideal customer? What is your core competence?
Studies have shown that too many choices in products and prices can slow down, or even discourage, the purchasing process. Pricing structure and the value applied to products play a major role in whether you customer decides to buy or not.
According to research out of Yale, if two similar items are priced the same, consumers are inclined to defer their decision (not purchase) instead of taking action. In one experiment, researchers offered participants the choice to buy one of two different packs of gum, each priced at 64 cents, or pass and keep the money. Only 46 percent made a purchase. On the other hand, when the packs of gum each had a unique price—62 cents and 64 cents—more than 77 percent of consumers chose to buy a pack, demonstrating that using price to differentiate actually increases consumer inclination to purchase.
How might this philosophy help or apply to your tours, lessons, and package offerings? If you try to market and offer something for every single person who might show up, in the end you may be defeating yourself. Rather than offering 1 hour, 2 hour, 3 hour, 4 hour and full day trips – consider: half day vs. full day. If you haven’t before, try this experiment: look at your offerings and try to cut out 5 things from it. What does that look like? You might find it’s a relief both operationally and for your customers!
3. Group Sales
Group sales have proven to be one of the most stable channels to drive revenue at experienced-based operations. These types of reservations create value because they typically fall outside the normal variability we face (i.e. weather, consumer demand and behaviors, and more). And, according to Harvard Business Review, the opportunity is not insignificant. Corporations alone are spending hundreds of millions in off-site meetings annually in the US. Add in school groups, churches, government organizations, birthday parties, bachelorette weekends, etc., and you have a considerable pool of potential revenue to target.
There are several ways you can approach groups and bundled packages. In some cases, you might be looking at discounted pricing to fill up a low demand day like a weekday or shoulder season day. For other groups, you might charge near retail value if it’s important for that group to come on a weekend when you’d typically be busy anyway. And some are in the middle. A birthday party or school group, for example, might be looked at as a loss leader. The driving philosophy for generating group sales is that you are attracting new, repeat customers. The data shows that the average birthday party has 10 kids, about half of which have never been with you before. This means you’ve now reached five NEW families who, if the experience is positive, will be back on their own to visit.
4. Targeted Marketing
According to Mashable, adults in the U.S. spend about 11 hours per day with access to digital media. During that time, consumers go to search engines and start doing research, or think about something we might want to purchase. With so many consumers using the internet to find information, read reviews, and ultimately buy something, it is vital for businesses use the advertising tools at their fingertips to find their future customers with this data. Does your business have a niche in the market? Do you offer something unique for bachelor/bachelorette groups? Are you especially kid friendly? The data exists to help segment your promotional tactics and plan your approach to group sales and marketing efforts in general. Not only will it help promote business in existing market segments, it will secure new inbound customers and markets as well.
That being said, don’t forget about the basic, tried and true form of marketing: EMAIL. At the Flybook, we see this working first-hand and help to enhance the success of our tour operators’ marketing email campaigns. It’s important to segment your client database and have it integrated with your email marketing provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact.
As an example, one Flybook operator ran a campaign last year that garnered $50,000 in off-season pre-sales between the months of October and December. They sent a total of 13,000 emails for three locations in the month of October, and 80 percent of the sales resulted from those emails. This was far removed from their peak season and was revenue they wouldn’t have otherwise recognized. One method used in the campaign, which was mentioned above, was applying a deadline for customers to buy at the best price. They actually employed multiple deadlines with tiered discounts, the largest of which only being available until the end of October. It worked: 70 percent of sales came within two days of the deadline expiring.
5. Develop Additional Sales Channels
In addition to group sales, local re-sellers and partners can help drive sales and attract new clients that may have otherwise booked elsewhere. You may already have personal or business relationships with other companies in your area, and it is important to nurture those connections while continuously exploring new opportunities.
For existing partners or re-sellers, hosting industry partner events or offering discounts to those individuals can help strengthen their loyalty and connection to your brand, improving the chances that they’ll send others your way. When it comes to attracting new partnerships, sponsoring local events is a great way to get your name out and build your brand identity within the local economy. Hotel concierges, local travel agents, and visitor center employees have possible highest degrees of in-person interaction with many operators’ target markets and can become considerable sales tools for your business. Whether they are incentivized through commissions or are just enthusiastic about your company, cultivating those relationships should start in the off-season and can set the stage for an increase in reservations when peak season hits. The next step is to provide them with tools to make the referral booking process as easy as possible. Ask the Flybook how we can help with that!
6. Embrace Technology for Business Operations
If you are still managing your business with an outdated reservation system, or heaven forbid a pad of paper and pencil, then you are limiting your ability to grow as a business, and you are wasting a ton of your precious time and energy with inefficiencies while letting potential revenue go unrealized.
Having technological tools at your disposal to help automate and simplify client relationships, marketing, and reservations allows operators to attract new business with minimal effort. Not only do these tools improve and streamline operations during busy times, but they can play an integral role in attracting potential clients, understanding past performance, and generating revenue when business is slow.
Every company is unique in their needs and operational pains. At the Flybook we earn our value by matching your company pains with a proven solution. Companies that make the leap into the embracing arms of technology and The Flybook don’t turn around and go back to way things were. They love how it opens their energy to growing the business, not just sustaining it.
