A highly profitable area of campsite and accommodation business strategy is retaining repeat custom.
For every customer gained you lose money from your efforts in potential customers lost.
In other words, no business out there converts 100% of all their potential business.
Even the biggest brand names in the world have competition:
- iPhone has Samsung
- McDonald’s has BurgerKing
- Nike had Adidas
etc…plus, there are hundreds of other brands too which make up the entire marketplace.
This means companies must accept that for every £1 or $1 spent attracting new customers, there will be some customers which prefer to go elsewhere.
With a well honed marketing engine, successful businesses can pretty much pin down their customer conversion rate (e.g. potential customers attracted divided by actual new customers gained multiplied by 100) down to a fine figure.
Taking businesses like your campsite, industry averages on conversion rate might be 5%.
i.e. for every 100 website visitors gained via Google search, your campsite business website would gain 5 new customer bookings.
And if the costs of attracting 100 potential new customers is say £300.00 and the sales revenue gained from 5 new customers was £500…
…then the gross profit is £200.00 from 5 customers, or £40.00 per new customer.
HOWEVER, if you do a great job of pleasing your clientele, they’ll book again. And keep booking.
So the job of attracting a new customer pays you back £40.00 after their 1st booking.
Then, say, £100.00 for every subsequent booking thereafter – without any further cost of ‘acquisition’ (cost of attracting them).
Another 10 bookings with you grossing £1,000.00 increasing your returns by 25,000%
Major profit.
But how do you keep you clientele coming back in a more predictable pattern?
There are some industry standard methods that are known to grind out the results without causing annoyance, if done well.
In a nutshell, it comes down to target automated marketing communications.
In other words, maintaining a relevant conversation with your audience members.
Now, certainly is not a one size fits all approach of spraying down your mailing list subscribers with spammy mailshots until they surrender.
But rather choosing well appointed moments of interaction to build on the commercial value to offer.
Nurturing the trust and appreciation via technology.
Here are 4 methods used successfully by market leading businesses to increase their repeat customer bookings:
Reviews
Asking a customer for a review following their recent visit is a great reason to stay in touch after their booking.
Not only does it demonstrate care of duty as a business owner both to them and other customers,
But it’s also a very persuasive piece of collateral that if gained will increase your new bookings too.
With the aid of a customer relationship management software, you can easily programme an automated review request email that does the job of asking for you.
Say, every 20 customers asked, you get a review.
You can quickly gain a catalogue of valuable customer reviews with very little effort spend.
CRM
A customer relationship software is a great investment for you campsite business.
It’s essentially a digital database that you put all you useful customer information into.
Each customer has a profile and helps you stay on top of managing communications with each audience member.
A CRM will help you communicate either en-masse and also 1-to-1 with customers.
Recorded information detailing your customers’ interaction with your business will provide relevant insights to guide you in more profitable future interactions.
Pitch booked, amenities used, make-up of guest party etc…
…are all details that will help you better align a relevant array of offerings, next time around for a more mutually valuable outcome.
Email Marketing
Piggybacking off your CRM should be a fully featured email marketing software.
Why?
- 29% of marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel (25% for social media, 22% for SEO, and 25% for content marketing).
- 93% of B2B marketers use email channel for distributing content.
- 72% of customers prefer email as their main channel for business communication.
(Source: Snov.io)
It’s well-evidenced, the if you want to stimulate repeat bookings amongst your current audience – it’s best to use email.
It’s the most effective, welcomed and popular repeat business sales channel as used in industry.
Social Media
Last of all, but not least by any measure, is social media.
The world’s #1 ‘technologically-enabled’ method of sharing social and personal communication used by anyone (a sweeping statement, but probably not far off).
According to Forbes, 81% of consumers’ purchasing choices are influenced by their friends’ posts on social media.
(Source: Social Media Today)
Also…
21% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that they can reach on social media.
(Source: Sprout Social)
Couple this with the average daily usage figures of social media:
(Source: Oberlo.com)
…and we can quickly begin to see the commercial potential provided by this communication channel.
Keeping conversation with an engaged audience via social media gives plenty of opportunity for your campsite to remain ‘top of the mind’ for many prospective and existing customers.
Ultimately, a great way of stimulating repeat bookings.