Learn how to sell more tours using scarcity and urgency in your tour descriptions. Plus, find out how to write an effective ‘at a glance’ section and where to position it on your sales page.
In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of encouraging your prospective guests to book without delay – because delay is the death of the sale! Watch the video below to see scarcity and urgency best practices in action on tour operators’ websites from around the world.
Now, let’s dive in.
At A Glance Section
Your ‘at a glance’ section is a quick snapshot of your tour – the essential tour details that we want a guest to know about this tour. Too often this very fundamental information is buried in paragraphs of text, or someone has to scroll to six or seven different locations just to figure out what type of offering is on this page.
If you confuse, you lose! That’s why your at a glance section needs to be very close to the top of your page. This section should appear just below your media, and it should be clear, concise and to the point. We’re talking bullets, not long sentences.
In this section, you should include the price of your tour or activity, departure times (if relevant), duration of the tour, whether it’s a day or multi-day tour and the tour start location or meeting point. And if it ends in a different place, you could also include that as well.
You should also include the group size and type of tour, i.e. private or public? Plus, include what to bring as well as tour highlights. This highlights section should really be about some of the tangible benefits of this tour.
Let’s put on our guest-focused hat for a moment. When I’m a visitor to a tour page, some of the essential information that I need to know is what type of tour this is, when it’s taking place, the price, et cetera. Until I have that information, I’m not interested in the features and benefits. If I’m only looking for a private tour and I have to read through your entire page just to find out whether this is a private or public tour it’s a very frustrating experience.
You probably have this information at your fingertips, so let’s make sure it’s at the fingertips of your potential guests as well.
Reasons to Believe
The next important section of your tour description page are ‘reasons to believe’ but they’re missing from most tour business websites.
Most tour operators do not provide any reasons why their prospective guests should make a booking today and not wait until tomorrow.
They’re on your website, they’re on your tour description page and we want them to book right now. We don’t want them to go away and research your competitors!
Interestingly, all tours and activities have inbuilt urgency and scarcity. We just need to do a better job of calling it out to our potential guests.
For example, you only have a certain number of seats on your bus. Maybe you have tours at different times of day, and once a tour fills that time slot is simply not available anymore.
Maybe you regularly sell out on weekends during your peak season. All of these are reasons for someone to act now, to make a booking or reservation today, so they’re not disappointed in the future.
If you’re doing promotions or have coupon codes for holidays, be sure to call that out in a prominent way. Overlay the page that has a countdown timer for when your Mother’s Day specials ends. That way, that countdown timer is reminding visitors to that page, “Hey, this is a limited time offer”.
It is costing you every single day to not include authentic scarcity and urgency on your tour sales pages.
All the best with applying these tips and be sure to drop us an email at [email protected] if you’d like some extra help.
