Pearl Holiday Travel & Tour collects 2,000 new leads in a broadcast campaign via SleekFlow

Pearl Holiday Travel & Tour is a long-standing, renowned travel agency trusted by the Malaysian community and international travelers from around the world. Other than arranging personalised tours and itineraries, they take pride in managing arduous Visa application processes, coach rental bookings, cruise holiday reservations, corporate and educational packages, and more. 

Great customer reviews have been received in regards to the selection of food and accommodation plans offered by Pearl Holiday, bringing them back for more satisfying trips and experiences. 

Challenges with the changing trends and interests of customers and travelers

Customers preferred WhatsApp over static information on website and newspaper

Back in the day, Pearl Holiday published printed ads in newspapers to reach out to a vast audience. However, with consumers transitioning to digitalised platforms, they knew they had to move forward with the trend and focus on online resources.

While Pearl Holiday has an official website, only returning customers tend to visit the site, and even though they have the live chat widget installed, users rarely interact with their business through the channel, but instead, prefer to chat through WhatsApp or other popular social media platforms such as Instagram DM and Facebook Messenger.

Getting blocked on WhatsApp Business App

To attract customers on their preferred platforms, Pearl Holiday has then switched their focus to WhatsApp for sending regular event updates to existing customers. “On WhatsApp, even the older generations know their way around when they want to communicate with our business,” the marketing team of Pearl Holiday shared.

Nonetheless, despite having the most appropriate communication channel, they had other issues. Because the free WhatsApp Business App only displays an unknown number, those who can’t identify their business might report or block them, resulting in an account ban. This then affected their brand reputation and led to a troublesome process where they had to use a new number to start over. They came across some third-party WhatsApp blast software that might solve their problem, but it looked unreliable and required them to change to new unknown phone numbers all the time.

Underperforming SMS broadcast campaigns

Other than the online page, Pearl Holiday also tried using SMS broadcast messages, but the results were always less satisfying. This may be caused by unsolicited spam and phishing messages circulating frequently, so Malaysians are rather unwilling to open, not to mention engage with promotional SMS messages.

Moreover, without an analytics dashboard, Pearl Holiday could not track the performance of their SMS blast but had only the number of sent messages. It was also a one-way communication where customers could not reply to their promotional messages if they had any enquiries.

SleekFlow’s WhatsApp Business solution for a travel agency

Pearl Holiday now uses an effective WhatsApp marketing strategy curated by SleekFlow, featuring WhatsApp Business API tools that are particularly practical for the travel industry.

1. WhatsApp Broadcast to send event reminders using a reliable business account

Pearl Holiday often sets up a booth at major travel exhibitions held annually, including MITM and Matta Fair. They also organise yearly in-house fairs to invite customers to browse through packages at their agency. With SleekFlow, they can now broadcast WhatsApp messages as invitations or reminders for customers to join them at the events. “We used to get blocked often when we sent WhatsApp blast messages on the free app. Using WhatsApp Business API, we can safely send WhatsApp messages in bulk without limit. I also no longer have to copy and paste messages all the time.”

Pearl Holiday has blasted WhatsApp messages to existing customers and achieved an average of over 70% read rate. “We know people won’t leave WhatsApp messages unread for days. It’s one of the best marketing channels today.”

I would recommend SleekFlow to businesses that are looking to send WhatsApp broadcast messages to their customers. It comes in handy.

The Marketing Team

Pearl Holiday

2. WhatsApp QR code to collect event leads

By placing a WhatsApp QR code on their booth table, Pearl Holiday can make sure that all the exhibition visitors are attended to, collecting details such as customer names, contact details, interested travel location, budget and more, even when their manpower is not enough. In this case, even though they did not manage to talk to these prospective customers, they can still follow up with them through WhatsApp after the event ends, or save their contacts for future retargeting campaigns.

3. Automated chat flows to engage customers

SleekFlow has also assisted Pearl Holiday with automation flows that have helped the team understand the customer intent. For example, an event booth visitor who scans their WhatsApp QR code will see a pre-set message for their enquiry. Once it is sent, they will receive a greeting message followed by a list message for their travel location. Up till this point, the potential customers will not even need to type a single word for Pearl Holiday to gather information about the enquiry.

SleekFlow helped us set up WhatsApp chat buttons for gauging the customers’ interest and we managed to obtain a satisfying reply rate of around 80%.

The Marketing Team

Pearl Holiday

4. Smart routing of WhatsApp conversations

On SleekFlow, Pearl Holiday has also turned on the setting to automatically route WhatsApp conversations to agents. With the round-robin logic, customer messages are evenly assigned to all their agents, making sure that the work distribution is fair and that the customers receive assistance as soon as possible.

5. WhatsApp live chat to keep track of conversations with website visitors

By installing the free WhatsApp live chat widget on their website, Pearl Holiday can now receive enquiries from website visitors in the SleekFlow Inbox, along with all the other customer communications from various messaging channels. 

Not only will messages not be overlooked, but they can also continue chatting with these potential customers on WhatsApp even after they leave the website.

SleekFlow is simple, easy to use, and makes marketing workflows convenient.

The Marketing Team

Pearl Holiday

2,000 new leads for one campaign

For Pearl Holiday’s 2023 in-house travel fair, they held a WhatsApp broadcast campaign to over 10,000 contacts and generated a 70-80% reply rate in return. “We received nearly 2000 new leads and the performance was satisfactory as we really saw customers purchasing our travel packages.”

Furthermore, Pearl Holiday has also managed to track the performance of these messaging campaigns on SleekFlow’s analytics dashboard. From the delivery rate, open rate, reply rate, and more, they can assess the effectiveness of the messages they send and segment customers based on their interests. Customers who decide to opt out can be excluded from the broadcast list, and others can be grouped by their interested travel location or budget. Other than maximizing return, it also prevents them from being reported or blocked by users as the target audience is more accurate and truly interested in their products.

About Pearl Holiday

Established in 1993, Pearl Holiday (M) Travel & Tour Sdn Bhd is a Travel Operator licensed by the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism Malaysia with inbound, outbound, and ticketing qualifications. The headquarters is in Selangor, Kajang with 3 branches in Kuala Lumpur, Puchong, and East Malaysia Kota Kinabalu. With over 120 passionate and professional work teams and many experienced tour guides, team leaders, and special teams, Pearl Holiday ensures that every traveler enjoys every journey with peace of mind.