A Quick Tip on Email Addresses

Not getting responses to your emails? There might be a reason and Chris has a quick tip that might save a booking.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Beyond the Handbooks. Practical insight from the minds behind the manuals. Your hosts are the authors of the best-selling Travel Advisors Handbook Series. Hall of Fame Cruise Counselors, Michael Lakana and Chris Grump, Elite Cruise Counselor Scott McAllister, and accredited cruise counselor Danielle Gogne. It's time to go beyond the handbooks.

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And today you got Chris flying solo, the other authors off doing their things. And I wanted to bring you this episode because it's something that happened to me this past week. And I think it's something that might help you in your day-to-day business. So this is going to be one of those kind of quick hit episodes where we're going to give you uh just a quick idea of how to maybe improve one thing you do in your business. And this will take maybe five minutes, if that. So we'll get you in and get you out, as they say. But something happened to me this past week, and it involved our seminar at sea. And I thought, you know what? This might be something that other people encounter. So here we go. We have a forum on our website that people can fill out for the seminar at sea. And they type in their name and their email address, and then they have the option of saying, I'd like a consultation, and we put in their phone number, and then I reach out to them and talk to them about the cruise. Or they can fill out the entire form of what they want. I want this room and all that, and then we send them a quote. So I had a customer that filled out the form and they wanted a quote on the cruise. So I went in and did the quote and put it in our system and sent it out to them. And then I didn't hear anything. And I thought, well, that's a little odd. So then I waited a day or two and I sent a follow-up email to the same address. And I never heard anything back. I never got a bounce back or anything. And then I wondered, okay, what's going on here? Why aren't they answering at all? And then I looked closely at the email address and I realized that they had typed in at gmail.con C O N instead of dot C-O-M. And for whatever reason, we weren't getting a bounce back email saying that it wasn't a legitimate email address. And sometimes you do, but sometimes you don't, especially if you're emailing, say, through a CRM or through maybe a third-party service. And sometimes you'll get a bounce back and you won't notice that last little letter. And you'll go, oh, well, maybe their email address doesn't work or whatever it may be. And you might be tempted to completely abandon that customer because of that. But I noticed that little letter difference, C-O-N. And I realized, okay, the M and the N are next to each other on the keyboard. They just slipped by one finger. So I went in and fixed that email address. And guess what? Now we have a booking because of that. And it could be the difference between getting a booking and abandoning a customer. And so when you're looking at email addresses, double check everything in there. And this also, we use uh constant contact as our uh email system for for newsletters. And when you send an email, it will give you a report and say, this email bounced back, this email got a vacation reply, and so on. You might want to watch in there. And if you get one that says the email's non-existent, look very, very closely at that email address. And sometimes it will be as simple as dot C-O-N or they'll dot dot CMO instead of C O M. They might switch a letter. You might also see two dots in there. They hit it twice. Look for those little things, and if you see them, go in and correct them and try to send the email again. Another tip I can give you in the similar vein is a lot of people might do their email address as their name. So for example, for me, Chris Grum at just say gmail.com. I don't have that address, so don't email it, but let's just say that was it. Or they might be Chris-Grum or dot grum or whatever. Check their names. And if you see somebody using their name and their name is misspelled, maybe they have two Ds in their name and they dropped one of them. That might also be a clue, and you might try emailing that way. Again, this could be the difference between salvaging a relationship with a customer and losing them completely. It doesn't always work, but trust me, it saved a booking for us and it could for you as well.

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Thanks for listening to Beyond the Handbooks. Visit tahandbook.com to order our books. See our upcoming schedule of seminars at C, and listen to episodes on demand. We'll see you next time when we go Beyond the Handbook.