5 Steps to the Perfect Christmas Rebrand for Tour & Activity Operators

Christmas is and remains the most important sales occasion for the retail industry. Revenues for the traditional festive season have been rising continuously for years. In 2019 alone, Christmas sales in Germany exceeded 100 billion euros. And, of course, suppliers of tours, activities and attractions can also benefit from customers’ increased willingness to buy. And the good news is that high turnover is also expected in 2020 despite the crisis. In this blog article we have summarised what you should pay special attention to this year and which opportunities are out there for the experience industry – like vouchers and communication campaigns. 

But it is not only about creating special offers and mentioning them briefly on your website, as they can be easily overlooked and you give away important sales potential. It is essential that you optimise all your sales channels, and this is exactly where the right Christmas design for your online presence comes into play. 
 

Why you should think about Christmas design

For many people, the value of making their online presence look and feel festive may not be apparent at first, but there are good reasons to invest some time and energy in this. First of all, this year many Christmas markets will only be able to open with limited visitor capacity or not at all. Other major events such as company Christmas parties will also not take place as usual. This means that many people will be looking for alternative options to enjoy the pre-Christmas season with friends, colleagues and relatives. 
The search for suitable offers takes place mainly online and quickly becomes confusing. This makes it all the more important that potential customers can find you and immediately recognise that you offer Christmas specials. This not only increases the attention of your customers, but also grants you a professional appearance by showing that you offer seasonal highlights for all occasions and that your website is always up-to-date. 
We have therefore summarized below a list of best practices regarding Christmas rebrand, and how you can further leverage the season to increase bookings (even despite Covid-19)
 

1. Put your online presence to the test

It’s best to check for yourself how quickly you can find Christmas specials on your website and whether they are mentioned sufficiently. Does your homepage have Christmas elements and do they lead you immediately to the corresponding offer? Did you use high-quality photos or graphics? And is all important information available at first glance? 
 
This article shows you how to achieve a perfect Christmas online presence and how to implement all this quickly and easily. Often you get further than you think with free alternatives. 

2. Let it snow: On your website 

Your website is the flagship of your company. With it you will ultimately convince your customers to buy your experiences. This makes it all the more important that they can find all the important activities and information at a glance on your homepage. 
If you are planning Christmas offers, then this is the place to advertise them. Make them stand out visually by working with high quality photos or graphics. That way they can’t be overlooked in the first place. Our pro-tip at this point: point out graphically explicitly that your offers are limited in time and work with early bird discounts.

Of course, the start page is not the end of the story. Use the subpages to explain your offers in more detail. What can participants expect? Is the experience intended for families and friends or as a team-building event? What do the participants have to bring along? By creating the appropriate subpages, you will be found faster by search engines. You should also pay attention to a high-quality design of the subpages to underline your professionalism. This way, interested customers are more likely to stay on your website and the chance of them becoming bookable customers increases. In this article you will learn how to improve your website conversion in general. 

Here you can see once again the most important action points for your website: 

• Check your website from the point of view of your customers 
• Make sure that your Christmas specials are already on the homepage
• Highlight visually that these specials are limited in time
• Use high quality graphics, photos or small videos to emphasise the Christmas look
• Create subpages to better describe your experiences

3. A good Christmas look doesn’t have to cost anything 

The importance of high-quality graphic content has already been stressed. To help you avoid using clipart or low-resolution graphics, we’ve put together the best stock photo addresses so you can choose from thousands of great photos and graphics in seconds that suit you and make your website look Christmassy, without any kitsch or clichés. Here are our top 3 and of course you will find many more free online photo databases. So there are no limits to your creativity: 

• pixabay.com 
• pexels.com
• freepik.com

And this is how the whole thing can look on your website:

4. Draw attention to you via social media

What works on your website is of course also perfectly suited for your social media channels. To promote your Christmas experiences and promotions, use the same graphics as on your website. This ensures a consistent look and feel, and your customers will know that they have landed on the right website as soon as they click on the social media link. 
For best results, we recommend that you don’t just share your experiences on social media, but actively campaign and promote them. 

Put your customers in the Christmas mood with organic posts. More personalised content is particularly suitable for this. Maybe you still have photos of your Christmas experiences, of you and your team in the right outfit or of enthusiastic customers from last year. Of course, you should always get permission to take photos of customers first. 
If you don’t have such photos yet, you should make sure that you have enough material for next year’s event by the upcoming Christmas season at the latest. 

Our social media tips at a glance: 

• Place targeted advertising on social media and attract new customers to your website 
• Use the same graphics and photos that you use on your website
• Add exciting texts and emojis 
• Don’t just post once, but think up several posts for the whole period until Christmas
• Never forget to link to the right landing page immediately
• Focus also on more personal content with photo material from recent years

5. Voucher design

In addition to the experiences that you offer especially for the pre-Christmas period, the 24th of December is all about the small and large gifts that lie under the Christmas tree. And your offers should not be missing here. With vouchers, you can make sure that you will already generate sales for next year, because more and more people are deciding to give their loved ones unique moments where they can decide for themselves when they want to take place. And especially from this year on, flexibility will become even more essential in the tourism industry. 

Activities

A significant phenomenon of the crisis is the return to local experience. Customers are increasingly looking for activities in their region, minimising the risk that travel restrictions could prevent them from taking up activities and trips. It is precisely this local reference and the support of a regional provider that you should now clearly emphasise in your advertising and communication. And what better way than vouchers? They are your customers’ clearest sign of a shared future with your business and a positive signal towards a return to normality.  

Pop-ups

Pop-ups on your website are one of the most promising ways to put the spotlight on your voucher campaigns and turn your experience offers into the perfect Christmas present. The same applies to vouchers: limit the period for buying presents and use early bird discounts to increase the buying impulse. Vary between value and non-cash vouchers. This gives your customers another option for buying gifts. 

And of course, the Christmas look should not be missing on vouchers. So they also fit perfectly under the Christmas tree. With the bookingkit voucher configurator you can choose from numerous templates or upload your own design and get an even more individual result. 

Our bookingkit extra tip: the best results in voucher sales can be achieved by adjusting your availability. Arrange your experiences so that they can be booked well into the next year or beyond. This gives your customers the necessary leeway to be sure that they buy a voucher for your experiences without any risk, as they can already decide on a date next autumn or winter. 

All voucher tips in the summarised: 

• Offer your customers voucher options (non-cash and value vouchers)
• Use the bookingkit voucher configurator for the right design 
• Limit the action period for a higher buying impulse
• Present yourself as a regional company and secure support
• Use pop-ups to highlight voucher gifts on your website

As you can see, there are many ways to increase sales at Christmas. With the 5 steps from this article you are also optically on the safe side and you will appeal to more customers. If you implement some of these measures, you will also achieve more sales in 2020 than in the past years and this without any great expenditure of time or money. 

If you would like to find out how an online booking system like bookingkit can help you in many other ways too, then arrange your free demo now.