It can be challenging for many tour operators to break into the corporate events market. In order to get your desired business, you need to have the right conversation with your prospects.
Use Email to Win More Corporate Groups
1) Define Your Target Corporate Guest
Knowing your audience is essential to having a successful sales conversation. It’s called your Target Corporate Guest.
As a first step, let’s start by figuring out how to win one person, all the way throughout the campaign. It starts when your Target Corporate Guest purchases their first corporate tour. From there, the goal is to get them to recommend colleagues, to return with their own groups each quarter, and to bring their friends and colleagues along with them.
Our first goal must be to win that one person, and then we can move on to other targets.
2) Segment Your Email Lists
Segmenting means you need to break your big list down into smaller lists so you can manage them better and target your messaging more precisely. Our goal is not to stand in front of a packed room and shout the same message to all the subscribers on your email list at once. You will be able to have more effective email campaigns once you start having better conversations.
We work with tours to create four primary segments:
1. Public Tour: Local
2. Public Tour: Visitor
3. Corporate Tour: Coordinator
4. Corporate Tour: Attendee
These are just a starting point. The more specific you can get with your conversations the better.
3) What To Send
Taking into account the intended recipient, we analyzed the emails’ purpose for six different types of customers.
Cold Outreach
Introduce yourself. Don’t overcomplicate this. Don’t come in hot trying to sell them everything awesome about you. Be present and just say hi.
Warm Outreach
Learn more about their situation. Ask questions. Your experience solves a problem for the person. It’s not about purchasing your tour the same way they would buy a can of beans off the shelf. Develop that relationship and learn more about them to know how you can provide the best experience.
Public Tour: Local
After a local person has taken a public tour with you, let’s encourage them to speak with their company about organizing a corporate group outing.
Public Tour: Visitor
Our email efforts need not go wasted on a tourist. We can still use email to follow up with a visitor and ask them to refer local friends or family they may have been visiting.
Corporate Tour: Coordinator
Let’s follow up and ask if there are any other departments at the company they may be able to refer you to — maybe a colleague, a networking group, or a social club. Our job is not done once the tour is complete. Let’s ask for those referrals.
Corporate Tour: Attendee
While we encourage the coordinator to bring in new corporate opportunities, we remind attendees to come back again. Suggest they bring friends or family on another trip.
We suggest starting with one of these customer types if you’re doing this on your own. If you need a shortcut, our team has experience with a number of CRM systems to help you get this written and into your processes.
In using email to win more corporate groups, it’s important to speak to people as though they are real people. Don’t come in leading with a sale. Lead with curiosity. Lead with looking to help instead of going in for the quick, cheap sale.
We hope this helps you have better conversations with more corporate tour guests.
Commonly Asked Question
What are others doing with email?
Utilizing the advice of segmenting her list, like a true pro Akila with Unexpected ATL has multiple emails going out per month. She shared the breakdown of email communication she is sending per list.
- 2 emails/month to virtual corporate
- 1 email/month to corporate Atlanta
- 2 emails/other week to public Atlanta
Currently 85% of her content is purely informational. Segmenting, being compassionate with her readers, and not always leading with sales messaging has helped Akila find higher open rates.
“Reaching out for intern programs in the summer.”
— Bethia, Columbus Food Adventures
Bethia is making sure her programs are available to interns this summer. Her team usually hosts two or three intern groups, but noticed a lack of them last year. This year she wants to make sure major law firms and corporations are aware of the amazing opportunities she has to offer!
“Instead of sending an automatic email after their event, we’re customizing it with a group photo.”
— Andy, Austin Eats
Andy has discovered a way to delight customers – adding a group photo when sending out post-tour emails! It’s no surprise that personalized touches like these make such an impact. With this little tweak, they’ve seen better opening rates and reviews from both private groups and corporate events. All thanks to the guides who are taking those pictures!
Register now for the next Town Hall
If you couldn’t make our Town Hall, never fear: we’ll be back. Learn how to win more corporate groups in our 60-minute, interactive Zoom meetings. You will meet other tour operators, discover new business ideas, and learn how to grow corporate tour revenue.
This year we will continue to explore new strategies to grow your corporate and private tour business.
