A big part of running a successful business is understanding your customer. This informs your marketing and sales strategies, the content you produce and even the strategies you decide to take to expand and grow your business.
That's how customer data comes in handy. With a multitude of ways to collect valuable customer data, companies who don't consistently collect customer data lose out on extremely valuable sources of information.
Building a clear picture of your customers
One of the top reasons to learn more about your customers is to understand them better. A clear idea of your customer helps you build a customer persona or a customer avatar, which in turn, can give you greater clarity when crafting marketing and sales messages.
Questions to ask:
- Demographics: Age, gender and where are they from?
- What other activities do they like to do while on holiday?
- Did they travel alone? Or with a partner, friends or family?
Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies
If you've captured the attention of an ideal customer through your website or on a busy street in your destination, ideally, you'd want to know why they chose your company and how you can continue to attract more customers like them.
Questions to ask:
- How did you hear about us?
- Would you refer us to friends or family?
- Why did you pick us instead of another company?
Using customer data to inform business decisions
In our recent webinar with Antony Lias, COO of SANDEMANs NEW Europe, he highlighted that hoarding data for the long-term is not a valuable exercise. Instead, if you go through the trouble of collecting customer data, you should review it, analyse it and interrogate it to arrive at valuable and meaningful findings for your business.
Questions to ask:
- Creating new products that would suit your customer base
- Up-selling customers on similar products to generate ancillary revenue
- How can you generate loyalty?
- Looking to expand your business? Where would you find similar travellers and replicate similar conditions for success?
How to collect customer information
To collect information with TrekkSoft, you can use Guest Custom Fields to add questions at checkout, or after payment has been made. However, be wary of the number of questions you ask (no more than 5) and keep your questions short and succinct.
To collected customer data at the point of booking, simply head over the Design and Pages and select Custom Fields. Under the Guest tab, add your questions and list your answers where needed.
This is what your customers will see at checkout, before payment.
If you decide to add more custom fields after a booking and payment is confirmed, you can do so by checking "Visibility" when setting up your custom field. This means that your questions will appear on your "thank you" pages, i.e. the page customers land on after they've completed booking and payment, to get their feedback. This way, you avoid unnecessary friction during the booking process, reducing the chances of customers abandoning the long and tedious booking process.
This is what it will look like after a booking is completed.
I would recommend you review your customer data at least once a month. To do so, go to Guests and Buyers and view the Trip Guests tab to find all your customer data. You can export this for further analysis.
You can also use our automatic post-trip emails to send out post-tour surveys asking customers about their experiences. Simply add a link to Google Forms or Survey Monkey and you're good to go!
Finally, Survey Monkey also allows you to add a pop-up to specific pages on your website. You could embed this on your homepage to ask site visitors what they think of your website, or embed this to your "thank you" pages.
A note about GDPR
Finally, collecting customer data comes with a few strings attached. Remember to ask for consent in your booking forms, and let people know what their data will be used for. If you're unsure about GDPR dos and don'ts, we've created a checklist to get you started.
Interested in a booking system? Let us help you out.
