Four Email Marketing Tips Revisited

davek | May 16, 2012 - 10:56 AM

Just attended a webinar on “Email Marketing Secrets”, hosted by Jason Falls of Social Fresh Media. Actually, there were no secrets, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to repeat the obvious. Following are their Four “Secrets”, mixing their – and my own – commentary:

Social Fresh Media - Good Source for Social Marketing Advice

1. Make it easy and obvious to sign up. Your business need to grow/maintain your list, since normal churn means a significant number will drop out over the year. Don’t hide the sign up form, and give reason why they should sign up. Also, don’t forget to use off-line methods to gather the lists, as long as it is permission based. As another speaker once said two years ago, “Growing your list should be most website’s 2nd priority.” In this new Facebook-centric era, this could also be your Facebook pages second priority as well.

2. Use follow-up “Remails”. That is to say, if people don’t respond to your email (e.g. non-opened, or no purchase) send them a second email a few days afterwards. Change up the Subject line. In the sample they gave, “Just for you, save 15%’ became “Last Chance, save 15%”. You can also look to change the content somewhat, since people often preview emails without officially opening them.

3. Send Timely,Targeted and Valuable Content. As another speaker once declared: “Deliver to the promise of why they signed up.” If your website and Facebook sign-up say that that subscribers will receive special offers, send special offers. If it promises news, send newsy items.

4. Break the rules. There is a lot of collected knowledge on what emailers should and shouldn’t do to gain addresses, and what should be done in the emails. However – as long as it is legal – your company might want to experiment with currently unpopular methods such as pop-ups, using a different ”voice” in emails etc.

Not mentioned in the webinar is that it is good to experiment with a small subset of your visitors / subscribers before doing this. You don’t want to accidentally irritate subscribers. This is just another way to use A/B testing to increase results.

Posted in Tech Tip - Email, Tech Tip - Social Media, Tech Tip - Website | Leave a comment

Electric Good News for SLO County Tourism Statistics

davek | April 23, 2012 - 1:03 PM
Great Tourism Stats for SLO County

Enjoy a "full glass" of tourism news for SLO County

Finally, some flat-out good tourism news for SLO County.

Previous months – and years – of Smith Travel Research reports (STR or “star”) have shown that while SLO Tourism fell less than other regions in California during the recent recession, other areas – notably Santa Barbara, Napa and Sonoma wine regions snapped back even faster. So while things were trending up in SLO, other areas were up even more.

The March 2012 STR report, published by  California Tourism, is pure good news. The key statistic of “Revenue per Available Room” (RevPAR) was up 9.7% for California as a whole, but up 18.5% for SLO – handily beating Napa (+10.7%), Sonoma (+8.9%) and Santa Barbara (+10.6%). Only Monterey (+ 20.2%) did marginally better.

The Year to Date Stats received a positive boost from this great March. SLO County RevPar is up 13.3 %, beating Monterey’s 13.1% increase, Santa Barbara’s 4.2%, Napa’s 8.3% and Santa Rosa/Sonoma’s 11.9% increase.

Admittedly, two special factors are part of the cause. The recent “outage” at PGE (aka scheduled generator repair and maintenance) has once again brought its usual flood of temporary workers into SLO County.  The second special factor is the construction of the solar power generator in the Carrizo Plains, which has has brought its own flood of workers to at least one major hotel in the county. Here’s hoping for a great Spring and Summer tourist season!

Posted in SLO County Lodging | Comments Off

Interesting Tourism Stats for February

davek | March 28, 2012 - 3:03 PM

The Smith Travel Research stats for February 2012 (published by VisitCalifornia) once again paint a mixed picture.

For the YTD through February, the entire state has seen an increase of 7.7% in RevPAR (“Revenue Per Available Room” – the main metric used in the hotel industry). SLO County is up by 10.0%, and Monterey is up 9.0%. Strangely, Santa Barbara is only up .5% over the period.

Several regions have had double digit increases YTD – but only one of which is in Southern California (Anaheim/Santa Ana – up 12.1%). All the other regions with major increases are in the Bay Area: Oakland (+16.4%), San Francisco itself (+16.8%), San Jose/Santa Cruz (+15.9%) and Santa Rosa (+13.5%). A quick look at airline passenger traffic into the major Clifornia airports show that San Francisco Airport is the only one to report double digit increases in 2012.

So for whatever reason, the Bay area is the current star destination in California for business and tourism travel. Perhaps the fact that SLO is closer to this “center of the action” is helping its tourism compared to Santa Barbara. Of course, local SLO hoteliers are reporting that the current PG&E “outage” at Diablo Canyon AND the Solar Farm construction in the Carizzo Plains is also helping achieve “heads in beds” . The weather YTD (much better than last year) may also be helping, but then we would expect to see Santa Barbara share a similar increase.

Posted in Blog: Central Coast Tourism Industry, SLO County Lodging | Comments Off

Pinterest + And Your Great Website Photos = ??

davek | March 8, 2012 - 7:26 PM
Pinterest Graphic

Help People find you using Pinterest

There’s a new kid on the block of the Social Media world: Pinterest. This site  – Pinterest.com – has quickly become very popular.

Pinterest is a site to see photos of what is of interest to people, and other registered users (free) can then then “pin” what they like and share these with their friends and “followers”. These can be photos on the site, or photos from other sources, including websites.

The site has quickly surged in popularity, with millions of visits a month, and integration into Facebook pages.  I will admit that I still don’t quite “get” what Pinterest is about. However, I did “get” the fact that when I signed up and gave it access to my Facebook friends list, a goodly portion were already registered on Pinterest -noteworthy, only two of which were men.

Pinterest does have a “Travel” interest section, and of course, women are the main deciders of where the couple / family will visit. So for those in the travel industry, this is a very interesting trend to watch, and at least experiment with using.

As mentioned in a seminar by the San Luis Obispo firm of Collaboration, websites should make sure that their copyrighted photos are watermarked, to protect copyrights.

However, I would go a step further. A quick glance of Pinterest will indicate dozens of beautiful travel photos, with absolutely no indication as to where they were taken.

So do your destination /  hotel / winery / restaurant  a favor. If you have great large photos on your website that people might be interested in sharing / “pinning”, consider placing discrete – but readable – text about where it is onto the photo. You want Pinterest users to share it – make it easy for the followers to find you  if they do.

Posted in Tech Tip - Social Media, Uncategorized | Comments Off

The New Interactive Facebook Business Pages – Making Websites Obsolete?

davek | March 7, 2012 - 1:37 PM
Facebook Logo

Logo For Facebook

Facebook – with now over 800 million users worldwide – has just announced major changes to business pages. Whether you like it or not, the changes go into effect on March 30 – unless you implement them earlier. These are your only two choices.

In my opinion, the Facebook changes could literally make many standard business websites obsolete. By encouraging frequent easily-made updates, Facebook will make static websites obsolete. All to often, most websites are rarely updated and offer no interaction capability with viewers.

For a detailed and official synopsis of the changes, go to the following 8-page PDF provided by Facebook: http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Pages_Product_Guide_022812.pdf

Some Highlights of the impending changes:

* Much larger page size, and greater emphasis on photos. Large photo (851 x 315 pixels) across the top, and icon inset (180 x 180 pixels) that will carry over to internal pages (at 50 x 50 pixels). “Highlighted” posts (controlled by the page administrators) will go across the full page size. Others posts will be about half this width – still much larger than seen up to now.

* Ability to “pin” a key post to the top of the timeline – but for only one week. Then you need to post a new one as it gets dropped back into the timeline of comments. These key posts can be / should be special offers, news, announcements etc.

* Ability to add your business history to the timeline – whether this history is real or not is up to you. For a humorous faux history of a product, go to www.Facebook.com/OldSpice and look at their beginning in 1938. For a real history, go to www.Facebook.com/Tiffany in the 1832.

* More emphasis on additional tab pages, now renamed as “apps”. Possiblilities include Deals page, hotel reservation page, events page etc. These apps are often free (for base versions) from independent developers.

* Ability for page administrators to control -page by page- if users can post comments.

* Greater message availability and controls. Businesses can now respond (though not initiate) up to two messages to people that message the business, and the messages will be private. (Great way to handle customer complaints.) Businesses can also hide negative comments from their business page, thought they will still appear in the person’s own personal page.

* Much of the current admin statistics will be available to the public , e.g. how many people visited your page, how your posts are doing etc.! You can see how well your competitors are doing with their Facebook page – and they can see YOURS!

* Instead of a business posting a Facebook comment, and hoping people will see it (currently, only about 19% of posts are seen by people that like your business page), the business can now pay to have the comment seen by more people that like the page, and the people that are friends of the people that like your page.

* At present, it looks like business pages will NOT have competing ads in the right hand column. It looks like ads will ony appear in the right column of personal pages.

Final comment: Facebook is literally changing its rules weekly, so be prepared for more changes.

Posted in Tech Tip - Social Media | Comments Off

San Luis Obispo Tourism Rebounding – But Still Not fully Recovered

davek | January 23, 2012 - 1:33 PM

The “Smith Travel Research” (STR) Statistics published by “Visit California”

Which Way for Central Coast Tourism

Which Way for Central Coast Tourism?

for full-year 2012 are encouraging. Once again, Central Coast tourism has increased nicely over the past year. The key “Revenue Per Available Room” (RevPAR) for San Luis Obispo County is up 8.2% for 2011 over 2010. Santa Barbara is up slightly more at + 8.9%. Monterey had another disappointing year, but was still up 4.4% for the year.

Some interesting results appear when comparing RevPAR with 2007 – the last “normal” year before the plunge into recession in mid-2008. RevPAR for SLO County is still 2% below 2007, and Santa Barbara down a similar 3%, with Monterey still down 10%. Overall for the state of California, RevPAR is down 6% for the period.

With luck, 2012 will show another decent increase in revenue, which means that in dollar terms, 2012 would finally reach levels achieved in 2007. Since there has been inflation over the 5 year period, at current rate the inflation-adjusted numbers are not likely to be achieved for another 2-3 years. This may be optimistic; while the US economy is achieving a slow recovery, Europe – a major tourism source for California – is entering recession.

There are also some very interesting stats when comparing SLO County’s results with its “competitive set” of Napa and Santa Rosa/Sonoma. RevPAR has apparently increased an astounding 38% in Napa since 2007. The Sonoma region, on the other hand, is down a whopping 25%. Interestingly, STR reports  a decrease in total rooms available in Napa of 5%, and a 12% decrease of rooms in Sonoma. Room count has actually increased in SLO County by 2% over the period.

Posted in Blog: Central Coast Tourism Industry, SLO County Lodging, Santa Maria Tourism | Comments Off

Another Good News / Bad News Month for SLO Tourism

davek | November 30, 2011 - 3:47 PM

One again, the monthly “Smith Travel Research” stats for California paint a good news / worrying news picture. The latest STR report shows SLO County  Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) up 7.6% for the YTD thru October. That certainly beats nearby Monterey (up just 3.3% YTD).

However, Santa Barbara is up 8.4% for the YTD, Napa is up 12.5%, and Santa Rosa (aka Sonoma) up 11.4%. The state is up 11.2% YTD,with double-digit (or near double-digit)  gains in the LA and San Francisco markets. Even worse, the “comp set” ADR per room is usually much higher that in SLO – over $100 per night in Napa, Santa Barbara and Monterey, vs. just under $75 in SLO.

With things potentially getting much worse in Europe – a major source of visitors to California AND the Central Coast –  this may be as good as it gets for a while. Most countries in Europe are facing a recession, and potentially a depression if the Euro collapses. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Posted in SLO County Attractions, SLO County Lodging, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Central Coast Tourism Up – but could be better…

davek | October 31, 2011 - 3:47 PM
Is the Glass Half Full?

Good, but could be better...

The latest Smith Travel Research (STR or “Star”) reports for September 2011 paint a similar trend to what has been reported before. (Info courtesy of VisitCalifornia.com) Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR)  is up nicely YTD in SLO and Santa Barbara. SLO shows  an 8.2% increase over 2010 for the year through September, which is alignment with the good things I am hearing from hoteliers throughout the county. Santa Barbara (+8.9%) is up even a bit more this year. Poor Monterey is up only 2%.

So far so good (except for Monterey)  and the  good news was recently reported in a major article in the San Luis Obispo Tribune. BUT, BUT when looking at our “comp set” of competing wine regions, things are not so rosy. The Napa Valley region has had a RevPAR increase this year of 13.6%, and Santa Paula (=Sonoma) is up 12.9% YTD. Both sold significantly more rooms than SLO and Santa Barbara +6.3% for Napa, 10.0% for Santa Rosa, and only 5.2-5.3% for SLO and Santa Barbara. So revenue up, but market share down.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Bonobos – An Interesting Example of Facebook Advertising

davek | October 31, 2011 - 3:24 PM
Bonobos - Doing Social Media Right?

Bonobos Is Actively Using Social Media to Build Its New Brand

Facebook ads are of course determined by what interests the member, not the Facebook pages he or she visits. I was therefore surprised when I started seeing a lot of ads for Bonobos clothing as I surfed Facebook. I had never heard of Bonobos, and had not indicated any interest in clothing among my many interests that I indicated on Facebook. I had indicated interest in genealogy and the stock market, and am used to seeing ads for products in those hobbies.

I can only assume Bonobos wanted to target my demographic- men of a certain age, and perhaps they used a marker (eg interest in Theatre, another interest)  as a proxy for sufficient income level. In any case, I have occasionally clicked on their ads, which means they are doing something right.

Perhaps more interestingly, I am beginning to see their ads in the Wall Street Journal print editions. An earlier blog post of mine referenced the fact that some marketers are claiming that while Facebook ads don’t always lead to sales directly, their “halo” effect is similar to seeing print ads. This halo affect gives credibility and familiarity to what I have learned is a very new brand. (See blog post) I would say that this has worked on my case – though I haven’t bought anything – yet.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Good Central Coast Lodging News… and Bad.

davek | August 23, 2011 - 1:59 PM
Is the Glass Half Full?

Good, but could be better...

The California Travel and Tourism Commission has just released statistics through July for the lodging industry in California. The glass is either half full – or half empty, depending on your viewpoint.

First the good news. The most important number for most hotels is “RevPAR” = (Revenue Per Available Room). For the year to date through July, RevPar is up 8.5% in SLO, just behind a 9.2% increase in the Santa Barbara region, and better than the dismal -1.5% in Monterey.

Now the bad news. The increase in SLO is lagging behind the state as a whole, and definitely lagging behind competing wine-tourism destinations of Napa and Santa Rosa. RevPar for the state as a whole is up 11.6% through July, helped by double digit increases in such major areas as Oakland (+15.0%) , Los Angeles (+13.8%) and San Francisco (+21.0%!!). Much of their increase is assumedly due ot a snap back in business travel (of relatively little importance in the Central Coast) and a rise in international tourism, due to the still-weak dollar.

What can’t so easily be explained away are the increases in Napa (+12.9%) and Santa Rosa in Sonoma County (+11.0%). It would be interesting to find out the cause. Better marketing? More international exposure? Closer to the still dynamic Silicon Valley economy? Suggestions / Thoughts?

Posted in SLO County Lodging, Santa Maria Tourism | Comments Off