With the festivities finished and cold weather everywhere, the lull at the start of the year known as the January Blues means many consumers turn to plans of winter sun or begin dreaming of sunnier climates. As a travel company now’s the time to capitalise on consumer desire and convert customers during the January peaks.
Here are five essential tactics to make sure you’re prepared.
Begin by engaging with users that have purchased from you previously or that have shown interest in your website and offers. There are two key approaches to do this:
Start promoting your January offers as early as possible to your existing email subscribers through your email marketing campaigns. Consider the following:
Retargeting provides the ideal platform to re-engage with interested users with personalised and tailored ads.
You may consider providing these users with a wider sales message to increase brand and sales awareness, however, drilling down to relevant products, hotels and destinations through product remarketing will ensure a more personal experience for each user.
Remember, when done well Retargeting has the potential to perform 10x stronger than standard digital display ads. The more personalised the ad, the higher the performance.
When sales are running and customers are booking, nothing stays the same.
Inventory gets snapped up, offers change, availability drops, and daily sales will be running across popular destinations. Put simply, it’s too hard for your internal teams to continually track every single change. It’s therefore impossible to manually keep your digital display ads up-to-date.
The automation provided by In-feed ads is critical to keep your sales relevant and your team efficient during peaks. Simply by doing the work once and connecting your inventory to your digital display advertising through a live-feed, every single ad you’re running will automatically be up-to-date to reflect any changes to inventory levels, offers or deals. Crucially, these updates happen in real time providing two huge benefits in a consistently accurate customer experience and no wasted advertising budget.
Make no mistake, if you get your advertising strategy right and your sales really stand out against the competition, your website is going to experience an upsurge in traffic. You may have experienced some learnings during Black Friday and Cyber Monday and acting upon these areas of improvements is crucial to be ready to take advantage of the January sales.
Essential checks include, for the following:
It’s also essential to conduct infrastructure stress tests and continually monitor this.
Booking a holiday at this time of year is all about escapism. It’s about dreaming of far flung destinations that are nothing like the weather at home.
Research is therefore key. Consumers want to be inspired. They wish to delve deep into a destination and dream of what it will be like to spend their summer there, before getting into the details of how they can make it a reality.
You have a range of tactics to get in front of these customers with your deals for specific locations as they’re researching those same destinations:
Nothing spurs on the decision to book a holiday like a turn for the worse in the weather at home. If customers are likely to make a snap decision in line with their changing mindset and feelings about the weather, it’s important for your success during peaks to be agile enough to cater to it.
Flexibility in this manner requires the use of Dynamic Creative to ensure your ad creative changes in line with external events like the weather and showcases a tempting holiday scenario.
Secondly, consider using Geotargeting to engage with your target demographic in those precise areas where the weather is the worst.
Remember, your marketing should always be prepared for a change in the weather.
Contact us today to learn how Fluid Ads can revolutionise your digital advertising during January peaks.