May 3rd, 2024
What frequency have you found to be the most effective for sending EDM’s? Especially when they are part of a wider series.
There is no perfect one size fits all answer here. Things to consider are:
Biggest recommendation is to ensure that you’ve set up rules to suppress the total number of emails a single guess might receive in a week. Watch guest behaviour and alter your approach – if unsubscribes are increasing, then consider decreasing frequency.
How do you segment your list? By Market? Product? Interest? Specific by lead gen? Does your automation flow change for each segment?
None of our current automation flows are segmented other than by initial trigger. For other sends we segment based on the goal we are trying to achieve. I.e. we might segment based on previous Milford Sound travellers to offer a discount on a trip to Doubtful Sound.
What EDM platform do you use?
Dot Digital. We’re happy with the solution but there are lots of great options to choose from. Decide what you are trying to achieve, how you will use it (be realistic!) and then consider options against your criteria. Don’t be afraid to start with Mailchimp if you’re new to this area.
How long was your project to set up Telium?
Implementing a CDP will vary depending on platforms and data needing integration. Working through getting the data layer right is critical to getting good value. We would recommend finding a good integration partner to help support with the process unless you have a high degree of technical ability or a simple marketing tech stack. Expect this to be 6 months+.
Are people choosing Haka/Intrepid because of sustainability initiatives, or is it a nice-to-have?
Yes people are ACTIVELY travelling with Intrepid because of our ‘lead with purpose’ mantra and our sustainability initiatives. Intrepid is the world leading and highest scoring travel BCorp (91 points), we have been carbon zero since 2010 and we are seeing a lot of feedback that suggests customers are choosing to book with us for this reason. This is coupled with our foundation partnerships in every country.
Leading with Purpose has economic benefits and it’s something I’d encourage every business to do (with authenticity of course – you have to walk the talk).
Are you not worried about an audience that is too small when you add a lot of interests to meta paid targeting? Doesn’t this affect the ROI?
Overlaying conscious-traveller mindset targeting with usual demographic targeting will decrease the size of the audience, but it’s all about balance. You don’t want to be too specific to limit ad performance, but you also don’t want to be too broad and potentially throw away impressions on irrelevant audiences. Use the audience size tool in Meta when you’re building your ad sets – it’s a continuum between ‘Specific’ and ‘Broad’. You want to sit in the middle of this dial, slightly towards ‘Specific’ if possible. Add and remove audiences as needed.
How long would you recommend TikTok videos should be?
Personally, I believe that the length of a video depends on its content. With our videos, our trend is that most viewers watch for the first 7 seconds before they begin to drop off if it’s not their kind of thing. The recipe I commonly use is:
However, If I’m posting something more long-winded (A day in the life-styled video), or meaningful (either a safety-related video or a more ‘hard-hitting’ concept), let it run its course. Maybe it’s a 20-second video. Maybe it’s a 2-minute video. Your audience will always desire different types of content depending on their interest, and some ideas take longer to unpack than others. But if in doubt – 15 seconds or less!
Who creates your short form video content? Is it paid or content your team captures? And what ratio is organic content (on your phone) vs staged/branded?
Within our company is a beautiful initiative that our digital marketer spearheads called the ‘Content Creator Program’. She designed a role within our sales and marketing team that allows for crew members that work in any department (operations, frontline, photo & video, etc.) to learn on the job about working within the world of social media. We are provided on-the-job training to do with filming, editing, understanding engagement data, and having an awareness of branding woven throughout it all. We currently have 12 content creators across our 3 sites!
Each person is given the freedom to post without the need for higher approval, is encouraged to approach this with their own creative method (that engages with their own personal interests e.g. filmography, live-streaming, documentary-styled posts, community-centric posts, etc.), and receives an entry-level marketing wage for the hours worked as a rostered content creator. 95% of our content is done in-house by our content creators with iPhones, and a very small portion is done externally when our marketing team releases a new campaign (for example, our current ‘Fear Less’ campaign). Regarding our organic content – anything involving customer participation/video is completely organic and in the moment! Most (but not all) crew jumps/activity demonstrations or ‘tricks’ are staged/done to go on social media! We think a good mix of both organic and staged (for entertainment) creates good variety on our channel.
How do you get around music rights while trying to use trending sounds on TikTok?
We have a small life hack when it comes to TikTok…we didn’t use a business account up until recently! For a long time, we had Bungy acting as a ‘personal’ account as opposed to business. This gave us access to far more trending sounds and music. However, now that we’re registered as a business account, it’s caused us to reflect on what we rely on to inspire our creativity. Most of our most successful posts are ones with original audio caught by our creators (natural voice-over or sounds occurring in the video), so now we’re leaning more into this approach of creating more engaging and intentional visuals and posting organic moments to adapt to this change of sound library. In short, our original method was to register with a personal account (as compared to business) to gain access to more trending sounds.
What AI copywriting tool do you recommend (other than ChatGPT)?
For paid tools, both Jasper and Copy.ai are very well regarded but are both significantly more expensive than an OpenAI account. They are both very business focused and will prompt you to define your brand identity and voice to create text that is consistent across all outputs.
For free tools, Google’s Bard (a direct competitor to ChatGPT) has just been updated to their newest Large Language Model and has been significantly improved in doing so.
As we move to AI powered search, how can we prepare our site content so it shows up in guests results?
As these tools are still very much in the experimental stage there is not yet a clear answer on this. Because they are using the indexed content from the search engines, any content that is triggering Featured Snippets or high rankings on the standard versions of the search engines is likely to be prioritised. Because these models favour accurate and informative information, continuing the current SEO trends of making sure that you have fresh & informative data on your websites is going to be the best tactic that you have in the short term until more testing and information becomes available.
Which of them; ChatGPT, Bing, Bard etc. scrapes the very latest data from the internet?
Both of the currently available Generative AI Search tools – Google and Bing – are using the parent companies search indexes, and as such are pulling information from live websites. This means that their answers should always be giving relevant and up to date information. These live datasets however are not used in the normal chat models like ChatGPT or Bard which are using static data.
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