Businesses who just assume that their regular customers will just walk into their premises and shout “serve me” are long gone. The border closures have left tourist and hospitality businesses in New Zealand’s tourist hot spots literally begging Kiwis to fill the gap.
To some extent they have because New Zealanders who would have otherwise travelled abroad have instead taken their holidays within New Zealand due to limited options for travel mainly due to the quarantine fee of three thousand dollars on their return.
For many in the tourist hotspots local tourism as much as it is appreciated is not sufficient to keep their head above water but those who are able to ride out the drought repeat business it extremely important.
If tourist operators think that they can just take their customers on the ride of their lifetime whether it is jumping out of a moving plane, walking on the glaciers, quad biking, or bungee jumping and then not have any further contact with them again then they are missing out on repeat business.
Every customer probably knows at least one hundred people.
Those people are potential customers which come from repeat business.
In order to keep your regular customers it is important to keep your customers informed. That means communicating with them regularly.
Communication is the key to any relationship; it encourages customer loyalty for without communication a relationship is doomed.
An autoresponder enables you to send a bunch of emails to people on your list in one hit for a minimal cost.
You can reach potential customers from all corners of the earth with a few clicks but until covid is a thing of the past the domestic market has to be nurtured and key to this is an autoresponder.
It may be true that once a bucket list item is ticked, that’s it, travellers will try something else but people do visit the same place more than once; take Queenstown as an example. The South Island tourist resort gets an influx of visitors during the ski season. Many of whom are regular visitors to Queenstown. Therefore, it makes sense to keep past and present customers informed of events coming up.
An autoresponder gives recipients the opportunity to opt out of mailings if they no longer wish to receive them.
It is the fear of missing out on something that stops people from clicking on the “unsubscribe” link and that is the whole purpose of tourist activities; to give customers the experience of a lifetime, one that they will never forget.
That old saying, “Don’t die wondering” will bring people out of their shell and that is what tourism is all about. Selling experiences that will become tomorrow’s memories.