Just a fancy new tool or do they have an impact? E-mails and e-newsletters are elements of an integrated marketing strategy for your tourism operation that motivates phone calls, bookings and inquiries.  In this plain text version of the Tips & Tools newsletter, you’ll read about tips and tools for making the most of e-mails and e-newsletters. We also describe how to make the most of images on Web sites other than your own! We’d love to have you join Todd Lucier and I as we deliver the second year of what past attendees tell us are very relevant and useful one day workshops. We look forward to seeing you soon!

~Jill Vandal

In this issue:
Making your E-mail Subscriber Experience Special
Your Brand across the Web with Image Libraries
Three Keys to Success with Keyword Advertising

Making your Email Subscriber Experience Special

Identity - Create a name for your subscribers to help them feel valued. “Your Brand VIP”, “Your Brand Insider”, “Your Brand Friends & Family” sounds a lot more appealing than being a plain old e-mail subscriber. Make your subscribers feel they're part of something special with a name that describes their importance to your business.

Exclusivity – Provide value-added features and benefits to your email subscribers such as sneak previews, behind-the-scenes stories, multimedia treats, VIP discounts or early notice of specials. Reserve these treats for subscribers. Contest entries may get you a lot of subscribers but instead think about meeting “Your Ideal Guest” needs which are quite different from “Contest entry hopefuls”. You may get a lot more people on your list with a contest, but your desire is to generate phone calls and registrations. Consider a double opt-in such as: “Sign up for e-news, early notification of new events, and subscriber-only specials”. This approach is more likely to lead to an e-mail list built on a desire to visit some day as a paying guest. Your list members will enjoy feeling like insiders who get special treatment.

Personality – Writing an e-mail or or an e-newsletter for a specific target group is very different than writing a generic brochure. Give your organization a human face and an interesting voice by making your e-mail newsletters sound as if they were written from one person to another. When possible, tell personal stories that the reader can relate to and that support your tourism experience in their mind.

Gratitude - Make sure your VIPs know that you appreciate them by providing them with giveaways that they value. This might include wallpaper for their computer (photos of your place through the seasons), a screensaver, game, colouring book pages for the kids, e-cards, audio sound seeing tours, or other downloadable digital freebies. Give subscribers a bit of joy in their inbox.

Provide your subscribers with an identity, inside information, goodies and gratitude, and deliver the e-mail newsletter with personality and style. You will improve the newsletter experience, and at the same time boost your subscription rate, pass-along rate and e-mail return on investment.

Web Words:
Photo Permission: If you use a waiver for guests be sure to include permission to publish photos. As suggested by a participant in one of our workshops last year, giving your guests digital cameras to borrow during their stay with instructions to take pictures that you will later post for their enjoyment has proven to be very successful for some tourism businesses.

Your Brand Across the Web with Image Libraries:

Online image libraries have a number of benefits for savvy tourism businesses who take their images online:
Free online image libraries are usually treated very favorably by search engines. Posting your images on these sites and tagging them with appropriate keywords will result in your image library being indexed by search engines. You’ll have a very good chance of getting visitors to your Web site after they enjoy your images on an image site.

Be sure to provide hyperlinks to your Web site if possible. Since image sites have a high volume of Web traffic, links back to your site have the added benefit of boosting your link popularity and raising your ranking with search engines.
Take the time to upload image sets which are representative of your target markets and post them on various services like those listed below.

The most popular online Image Sharing Sites:

http://photos.yahoo.com – Yahoo! provides a very convenient and easy to use way to share images with your guests. Image libraries can be shared with anyone with an email address. You can set permissions to restrict viewing only by those you give permission to. Photo library viewers do not have to join Yahoo! to see and print photos.
http://www.flickr.com - This service is offered by Yahoo! It is less friendly for sharing photos with your guests than other Yahoo services, but offers opportunity for more detailed photo descriptions, and organizing. Although those you share photos with by email have to become members of Yahoo!, the benefit of creating libraries here is that you can expect better ranking by search engines.
http://www.webshots.com – This is an advertisement-heavy service that allows you to share photos. It contains a large public access library of other people’s images for free download.
http://www.snapfish.com – an HP Web site for sharing images. Easy to use, the site provides options for digital printing services.
http://www.kodakmobile.com – This application allows photos to be uploaded to digital phones. This isn’t as outrageous as it sounds. Consider that the vast majority of tools to access the Internet these days are not computers! Phones will be the primary way people around the world access the Internet in years to come.
http://www.imagestation.com – Sony joins the online image party.

Post Image libraries on your own server:
Posting image libraries of guest visits on your own server has another set of benefits. As part of your customer relationship management process email guests after they return home. Provide a hyperlink in the email to their “own custom image library”. Add a call to action that encourages your visitor to share their pictures with others, and provide direct hyperlinks to the rest of your site. Also consider providing an opt-in tool right on the image page so that your guests, their family and friends can subscribe to your e-newsletter.

Using a tool like Picassa makes it very easy to create your own libraries of images with thumbnails http://picassa.google.com. Picassa is also a great way to organize and quickly enhance images before posting them to the Web. See how Northern Edge Algonquin does it at: http://www.algonquinparkecolodge.com/octoberwolfhowl
Other image ideas:
Provide desktop images like http://www.buckhorncanada.org/wallpapers.html or E-cards like http://www.earthrhythms.ca

Seeking Success with Keywords Advertising? - 3 KEYS
* Use Targeted Ad Groups! – The narrower the focus, the higher the click through rate you’ll get.
* Use specific keywords describing your products. Use a service like http://www.Wordtracker.com or Overture Keyword Selector Tool at http://inventory.overture.com to identify winning keyword combinations and use the keywords your ad will display for within the display ad.
* Send users to a highly related page on your site – a specific landing page. Be consistent and deliver what you promise.

Learn more about Tourism Keys workshops at http://www.tourismkeys.ca