Act Fast, TripAdvisor offer for business listings (which has never been offered at a regular undiscounted rate!) is now 20% off.  If you remember when the service; which allows accommodations providers to list their phone number and provide a direct link to their Web property first launched, the service was offered at 50% off.  The big threat was that after January the cost would skyrocket.  One year later, that offer looks like it was only a 37.5% discount!

Is it legal to offer a 50% discount that, well, isn’t?

Too Expensive

TripAdvisor knows it is outrageously expensive to advertise on business listings.  That’s why they have never asked anyone to pay full price.  Instead of removing the cash grab altogether as they do for restaurants and attractions, TripAdvisor  now offers hoteliers the option of making monthly payments for their listing!  Sounds like death by a thousand little cuts to me.

ROI – Is a Business Listing worth the cost?

When I first started marketing I used the cost of a new customer as a way to determine the relative value of my investment.

Using Trip Advisor’s math, I only need to earn six new clients directly from TripAdvisor to profit from the arrangement.

Sorry, a customer acquisition cost of $200 doesn’t allow much room for profit.

. . . and of course that’s if things go as well as Tripadvisor promises…..

What does TripAdvisor have to do to profit from the arrangement?

Income: $1200 (in the example sent me)

Expenses incurred:

• invoicing and accounting for the income generated.
• flipping the switch that turns on contact info like TripAdvisor already does for restaurants and attractions at NO COST.

Looks like a great deal for TripAdvisor, but for the accommodation sector in tourism, this cash grab is more than annoying.  It would be great if TripAdvisor could share some beaming hotelier success stories from business listings.

I sometimes get frustrated when I see how people in tourism invest their hard-earned marketing dollars. It’s not that I think they are wasting their money. It’s that most people have no idea whether they are wasting their marketing dollars on their Internet Marketing strategy or not.

How to know if your Internet Marketing Strategy is working?

Answer the 3 questions below with no more than 6 small easy to understand words. . .

1. Clearly describe what matters. What are your marketing objectives?
2. How can you easily measure what matters?
3. Describe one other thing you can easily measure?

Once you have the answers to these questions, put in practice a system to measure what matters.

Set a time frame for analyzing the results.

Plan future marketing efforts based on the results.

HINT: The reason for measuring things is to learn what works and what doesn’t work with your Internet Marketing practices. So plan on doing things a bit differently once you get the results.

Whether you represent a region, a tourism association, or a business, measuring the impact of your Internet Marketing will help you understand your ROI and report results to other members of your group or your team.

Sending email newsletters is still the most effective way of making our phone ring.  Today, I read an interestng post that highlighted all the challenges with measuring the impact of your email with traditional open rates for email newsletters.

Email tracking tools utilize a small image to track when an email is opened.  Unfortunately, this opens all kinds of challenges for email newsletters that are opened in a phone, or email client with images disabled.  In short, these don’t get counted.  In addition, when email is viewed in the preview pane, these also are not tracked and counted.

Read the interested email measurement post at Email Insider.

For me, the success of email marketing is generally tracked best by counting the number of phone calls or emails that the campaign generates or click throughs to the Web site.  Indeed these are true measures of email engagement.  As for open rates, this is an almost useless statistic.