The onset of holiday season enhances the opportunities for travel and hospitality websites to increase their sales.  Be it a quick break, weekend travel, long journey, or a beach holiday; the holiday season sees travelers all set to visit their families and also explore the corners of the world. Travelers come with their adventurous spirits soaring high and they come in all tastes. Particularly in this season, customers are often ready to spend liberally and this could be any travel website’s best chance to accelerate sales. Converting travelers’ passions into sales may sound exciting, but it surely needs that extra push and a well-etched strategy to leverage sales.

In an insightful revelation of Google’s research in 2014 – ‘Traveller’s road to decision’ says that an incredible 65% of leisure travelers are inspired by online resources; most notably through social/video sites and searches. Most customers who are planning a vacation are always online and are looking for the best possible lucrative options that can make their planning easy and accessible.

Despite the surge in web traffic, travel sites may still not fetch a profitable sales conversion. And the reasons might be too many deals by competitors, an array of brand hoppers, a poor mobile experience, less social sharing purchases and many more. Travelers tend to look for the best seasonal deals and promotions around the holiday. Notably the travel industry has adapted itself with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday trends, and provides best possible seasonal offerings similar to those in the e-commerce world.

With market and customer preferences changing dynamically, traditional marketing techniques such as SEM and SEO may prove to be not only expensive, but also bring in undesirably low quality traffic. Thus, Social trends are giving a new lease of life in creating innovative and workable strategies that can help bring in high quality traffic, higher conversion and better customer retention. It is therefore imperative that travel portals apply the right techniques to leverage their services.

Here are two unique strategies that can assure travel sites higher conversions this holiday season.

Visual Commerce:

With people logging on to social media sites all over the globe, photo sharing has become a favorite activity amongst the online users. Holidays are largely experienced as a kaleidoscope of memories captured thorough photographs. These travel photos are now being uploaded, only to be shared across the net and the social media channels, as the trend is here to stay for millions of users across the globe. Clearly, these travel photos are now a visual endorsement of your vacations, food, hotel stays and even spas.So, Welcome to the age of Visual commerce!

Taking advantage of this modern day strategy, marketers are applying Visual Commerce techniques and are benefitting through different ways of photo referral marketing. Therefore, marketers are now using these travel photos to increase their sales like- share product photos.

To assist and manage this trend of visual referral marketing, ShopSocially’s Photomonials app comes in at the right time to help marketers make this activity a greater success.

The Photomonial app works on an innovative concept of automatic, continuous aggregation of photos, from various social networks based on specific hashtags.

It helps you create a beautiful gallery of all the travel photos that shows the unique travel destinations, food, shops, hotel stays etc.  In addition, this app also allows you to curate, moderate and select from a variety of visual templates and also convert these visual delights into working links. These actually act as a social proof of your holiday and endorse travel sites.

ShopSocially’s Photomonial app has the following features:

• Helps aggregate photos from various social media channels such as the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Encourages photo sharing through contests, promotions, and vanity
• Facilitates hashtag based photo aggregation
• Makes photos ‘shoppable’by tagging them to specific products
• Facilitates detailed reports and analytics showing engagement, conversions, referrals etc.

These and many more such features enhance and help boost the ROI.

Customers using ShopSocially’s Photomonial app have seen up to 21% increase in the conversion rates, with an increased engagement of 15%.

Share Your Purchase:

Every new trend now holds within, a golden opportunity for marketers to rev up their sales. Not stopping at sharing photos and making the most out of it, marketers are now encouraging new customers to also share their travel bookings and purchase experiences on social networks, which in turn can encourage more customers to book holidays. ShopSocially’s Share-a-Purchase app is helping to turn a traveler into a brand ambassador by capturing their delight at the most opportune moment i.e. on post purchase confirmation page. This App is embedded on merchant’s site and acts as a purchase sharing widget via social networks that helps to boost branding and sales. Moreover, customers can share their purchase stories which is a new highlight for marketers who are willing to turn every trend into an opportunity.The sentiments attached with each purchase can make for an exciting story, ready to be shared on the social media channels. And that’s exactly the whole idea behind this Share-a-Purchase app. It enables you to implement a post-purchase friend referral program on your website.

Some of the highlights of this Share-a-Purchase app are,

• Achieve post-purchase referrals through Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter etc.
• Capture sentiments behind a purchase to make for a great product story
• Several flexible incentives to encourage sharing e.g. single-use-coupons kickbacks etc.
• Automatic inclusion on trending products page
• A/B testing in experimentation mode to find the best strategy
• Detailed reports and analytics showing engagement, conversions ROI, referrals etc.

ShopSocially’s Share-a-Purchase app can generate up to 5 referrals. Also, the product stories embedded on the product pages can increase the conversion rate by an average of 17%!

To summarize, this holiday season will offer immense opportunities to travel sites and to tap the maximum potential in the most contemporary way. These travel brands need to adopt certain modern day techniques such as visual commerce and share your purchase. These e-marketing applications help you reap increased conversions and better ROI. So, keep your cash register ringing this holiday season!