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With 80-90% of Costa Travel's in house leisure revenue now coming from the Internet, Costa incorporated OnlineAgency's content into their website several years ago. Ron Kinkade, Marketing Director of Costa Travel estimates thousands of hours in saved time in managing website content by using OnlineAgency. We first opened our Internet doors about eight years ago. Initially we didn't place enough emphasis on the appearance of the website. Some agencies may not think they have the time or the means to customize their site, but customers won't stay on a site that looks bad or is inconsistent. It's well worth the investment to make your site look good and provide high quality content. We turned to OnlineAgency a few years ago because we were looking for a way to provide current information from our vendors in a consistent, well-designed format. Since we redesigned our site and have properly integrated OnlineAgency's content, we've seen our traffic increase 10-fold. Today, our website receives an average of 3,000-4,000 unique visitors per week. How do you advertise or promote your Agency? We use several travel special listing sites, radio, our independent agent program, partner websites links, business cards, search engine optimization, yellow pages, direct mail, banner ads, the list goes on and on. Assuming it's cost-effective we take advantage of any opportunity we can find to list our website. Some companies charge as much as $.10 per email address to send out promotional emails. The OnlineAgency Newsletter provides huge value to us since we can communicate with thousands of consumers on a weekly basis for no additional charge above our membership fee. Our Newsletter is absolutely essential in maintaining contact with both current and potential clients. Using the OnlineAgency Promotion Wizard, we can post our own specials that suppliers may not normally list like last minute offers. Our custom promotions combine with OnlineAgency's existing supplier content, making it a snap to add our own customized promotions. And of course, the promotions then all carry over to our Newsletter, giving us one of our lowest-cost¾yet most effective¾marketing tools. We always see substantial spikes (generally 50%) to our Quote Requests and site traffic on the day our Newsletter goes out. How do you define success in web marketing as it relates to your business? For us, results are easily quantified when marketing on the Internet. Technology makes it simple to track your marketing campaigns. We rely heavily on the statistics and traffic reports we get from our site traffic monitoring software as well as the OnlineAgency reports on page views and Quote Requests. We often operate as a call center for our various marketing programs and we track them all by giving them private phone numbers. Any time we can get someone on the phone, our closure rates go way up. We make it a point to contact leads by phone when possible in order to increase our closure rates. But we look at it like this, even if the lead doesn't close the first time out, they've been added to our database and at some point they're going to remember us (or be enticed by an offer from our Newsletter) when it comes time to travel. The leads we get through our OnlineAgency content are generally highly qualified because we're able to completely customize what information a prospect is required to submit when they fill out a Quote Request. OnlineAgency provides us with a tremendous amount of content and capabilities that are simply unavailable anywhere else for such a low price.
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