By Sherrie Funk

I just got off the phone with a potential client. He has been in our database for 13 years. The ONLY contact we have ever had with him was at our cruise show in 1994.
He contacted us today because he and a group of his friends (18 cabins) are interested in taking a Europe cruise. Regardless of what anyone says, we won’t delete from our mailing list people who have never bought from us unless they die or ask to be taken off. We touched him 13 years ago. He’s just now buying from us. Had we NOT been sending him mail pieces for the past 13 years, he would never have called us.
Let’s take this a step further. You decide that you want an HDTV. You look through the ads in the newspaper on Sunday, and find that Electronics City and Gadgets R Us both have HDTVs on sale. You visit Gadgets R Us first when you begin looking for that TV, but can’t find what you want. However, there was a store promotion, and you “enter to win” an MP3 player. You actually purchase your HDTV from Electronics City.
Two months go by and you receive a flyer in the mail from Gadgets R US advertising portable DVD players on sale. This doesn’t interest you, so you throw the flyer away. Six months later, you receive a postcard from Gadgets R US with a dollars-off offer on an MP3 player. You’ve been thinking about purchasing an MP3 player since you didn’t win one in the contest. So far, you have only spent money with Electronics City. You had just “registered to win” at Gadgets R Us.
BUT, because Gadgets R US had your name and address and had been mailing to you regularly, when you do purchase that MP3 player, you don’t go to Electronics City where you had spent money in the past. You go to Gadgets R Us because they stayed in front of you. It sounds a bit confusing, but the fact is that Gadgets R Us did a better job of database marketing than Electronics City did.
I read recently that nine out of 10 businesses do not capture the names of all the customers and prospects coming into their place of operation. This applies to the travel industry, as well. The cruise lines do a bang-up job of databasing their past guests. How many times has one of your clients called you with a past-passenger coupon that they received from a specific cruise line? Every guest that boards a ship gets added to that cruise line’s database. And, they get mail from that cruise line multiple times during the year.
The people who contact you are doing so for a reason. They have a need or want, or a problem to be solved. You and your agency have “paid for” this prospect. Therefore, it’s important to get the names, addresses, phone numbers and E-mail addresses of all customers and prospects and keep them on file.
Capture as much other information as you can during that first conversation. Finding out what the prospect is interested in is obvious. But, you also need to know about their past travel history. What was their favorite vacation? How much did they spend? What did they like best about that vacation? Probably most important of all, How did the prospect find out about you? This is a measure of your advertising.
We do a very big cruise and vacation show each year. Our show this year was on Jan. 28. It was about 32 degrees and overcast — too cold to play golf or clean out a garden bed, but just right to book a vacation. We had 2,800 people attend. As people entered our show, we had a registration table set up. Don’t misunderstand. We don’t give away a cruise or vacation. We sell those. However, we give away literally hundreds of door prizes, from coffee mugs to T-shirts and hats to beach towels, all donated by our suppliers. Every single one of those registrations goes into our database and is coded so that we know where we touched that prospect. True, some are duplicates, but we search first to see if their address is already in our database before entering them again. Of the 2,800 people, only about 25% were in our database. That means that 75% were new prospects for us.
But, what about the other 25%, the ones we have touched in the past? Many times an agency will become so involved in keeping up with the current purchases that it forgets past customers. It’s been proven that nearly 65% of former clients aren’t doing business with an agency because of the apathy they perceive from the owner and/or staff. Over time, they become resentful for giving so much to the agency, yet apparently getting nothing back. If they feel neglected, they will switch to another agency that offers the same suppliers.
If you have not been documenting customer information, start now. Many times past customer records are discarded. Don’t make this mistake! Contact past clients by phone and invite them to come back and buy from you again. If customers stop doing business with you, you want to know why. Among other things, it can help your agency make the changes it needs to make. An agent once asked when we took people off our list. The answer: we don’t unless they ask to be taken off.

Here’s my three-step plan for databasing your prospects:
• Implement methods of capturing customer information.
• Identify past customers.
• Invite them back.
Don’t become an Electronics City. Become a Gadgets R Us and get the business from your past passengers and prospects alike.

Sherrie Funk and husband Charlie own Just Cruisin! Plus, Nashville. They founded the Travel Agent Management Academy to educate owners and managers about the techniques that have been instrumental to their agency’s success.