Collect, Automate, Grow: Marketing & Automation Tips for Food Tours

Here are some free tips for your food or brewery tour, tried and tested to increase your revenue in the short and long term.

We also speak with Local Tastes of the City Tour San Francisco on some ways they’ve transformed their business through digital waivers and automations!

We work with some of the most well known food tours in the world, and there’s four major differences which separate the most successful operators from the pack.

They:

1. Ask for allergy/dietary, or any other information that isn’t booking related (explained below) after the Pay Now button.
2. Collect data from 100% of their guests (and not just the lead booker). 
3. Automate that data into social media reviews and remarketing campaigns (especially for gift cards)
4. Crunch the data into marketing reports to understand how to find their future customers and grow with a smaller budget.

Let’s break each point down. 

By asking for dietary or allergy information after the client has paid, you will drastically increase the amount of customers who end up booking. 

Scenario: Imagine a group of 6 going on your food tour. As part of your booking flow you ask for each guest’s name and whether or not they have any dietary restrictions. The lead booker needs to abandon the cart, contact each guest, find out this information, go back to your website, and restart the process... In that period of time someone else finds a different food tour (which doesn’t ask for this info upfront) or the spark of excitement which caused the organizer to become interested in your tour in the first place has been distinguished.

You’ve done the hard part – but you’re falling at the last hurdle. 

Solution: The best digital waiver forms integrate with Fareharbor, Rezdy, Peek, Xola – all of the major food tour booking platforms. You can simplify your booking process and only ask for basic information like group size, the lead booker’s email, phone number, and payment details to get them locked in.

The lead booker then receives a digital waiver form via SMS and email, which is distributed to the rest of the group after payment. You’ve now reduced the friction from your booking process and increased your conversion rate by 50% – money in your pocket!

This solves both point #1 and point #2 – you’ve now found a way to gather data from 100% of your guests, with a flow that doesn’t interfere with your booking or arrival process. Magic!

Now that you’ve gathered all this data, it’s time to set up some “set and forget” automations.

Social media and review sites are the #1 marketing source for food tours by a mile.

Every review contributes to your ranking and with 85% of TripAdvisor users opting to choose one of the top 5 activities when visiting an area – your ranking affects how many customers come through your door.

You might be emailing your guests for reviews through your reservation system, but this only goes to the lead booker (i.e 1 out of 5/6/7 guests). The best digital waiver systems make sure everyone in the group is given the opportunity to leave you a review, at a time when they’re most likely to leave you feedback. And this all happens automatically! Simply collect an email address in your waiver form, and the software does the rest.  

Most food tours we work with will also sell gift cards and if you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity; you can maximize this opportunity by being smart with your data.

With Wherewolf you can find out who your locals are, when their birthdays fall, and the best way to contact them. Our customers can email their previous guests with offers around holidays (e.g Mother’s Day, 4th of July, Halloween), birthdays, and sell gift cards in their shoulder seasons with the click of a button.

Finally, do you really know where your customers are finding you from and how to maximize your marketing budget?

You need to have a presence in the spaces where your customers like to hang out, and with so many physical and online sources available, you have to be specific with your marketing dollars. 

Wherewolf crunches the data collected from your reservation system and waiver forms, shows you exactly what’s working and what’s not, and takes the guesswork out of your spending.

Want to learn more? 

Existing Wherewolf customers can contact us any time through out support portal, we’re always happy to help!

If you’re not a current Wherewolf user, you can book a no-obligation demo with a product specialist to discover all the ways we can help you.