If you’re setting out on your digital waiver journey with Wherewolf, welcome to the future! It’s an exciting time, and a little bit of consideration from the start is going to go a long way towards boosting the value of your service.
If you’ve been with us for a while then this article might help you to flesh out some changes to your waiver questions too – our support team are always on hand to offer advice and make the changes you need, after reading this article you may wish to get in touch.
Your digital waiver should replicate the same questions as your existing waiver. Details like your guest’s name, date of birth, and any liability information like medical conditions or allergies are going to keep your business secure. But what about Wherewolf’s powerful data analytics? How can you put that to work?
Reverse Engineering Your Data
What do you want to achieve in 6-12 months time? Your answer to this question will immediately expose what information will be most valuable to you. Some answers might be:
Find more local guests
Asking your customers what region/state and city they’re from will be crucial.
We recommend including region/state questions as a multi-select, then adding in a text field question or multi-select for their city. Zipcode is useful if you’re sending mail, however, as it’s not graphable we do not recommend this for market research purposes.
For example, an operator in Texas might ask “which state are you from?”, with all the US states listed. When a guest selects “Texas”, you can ask them to select from “Dallas”, “Houston”, “San Antonio”, “Austin”, “Fort Worth”, “El Paso”, and “Other”.
Refine my offerings
If you’d like to offer tours or services that are closely aligned to your customers needs, information about their suitability for your current tours is the way to go.
For food tours or experiences that offer lunch, you might find out how many guests have allergies or intolerances and discover the benefit of offering allergy-friendly menu items!
If you offer an adventurous experience, asking your guest’s skill level could help you to dig up more ways to increase customers. You may find that all your customers are highly-skilled, which tells you that there aren’t many learners who find your tours accessible. It could be time to create a “beginners” activity, or to start a marketing campaign targeted at learners.
Asking if they’re attending for a particular occasion, such as a staff party, family outing, or bachelorette’s event, will help you when you’re looking for more ways to promote your experience too.
Partner with other businesses
Reciprocal marketing is a great way for businesses to boost each other up. You might ask your guests if they’re interested in doing other activities in the area, or how long they’re staying in town. If a lot of your Skydive customers are also interested in wine tours, you can take that data to a local vineyard and discuss a full-day experience that includes both of your businesses!
Likewise, asking how long visitors are staying in town will help you to find out if your customers are going to be likely to book another tour. If they are in town just for one weekend, then it might not be worth promoting any more tours or experiences. But if they’re visiting all week, they might be interested in some other experiences that you can recommend or refer them to.
Identify my best marketing channels
A tried-and-true question you should be asking all guests is where they heard about you. This will give you a snapshot of what marketing sources are working best, and which need some extra love.
For example, if all of your customers are finding you through TripAdvisor, then it might be worth considering an additional SEO strategy that helps you appear higher on Google’s search results (and help even more customers find you).
Discover my most valuable demographics
If you want to know who the core of your customers are, then the questions in your waiver will be able to provide you with everything you need. Questions like age, gender, and where they’re from will form the basis of your database and we recommend including these as standard for that reason.
You may have a goal that’s different from these examples – whatever it is, keep that goal in mind as you plan your Wherewolf waiver questions and you’ll create a goldmine of information!
How To Ask Your Questions
The how is just as important as the what!
We recommend using multi-select options for marketing questions. Text entry questions would generally gather a lot of the same data, however, the data will not be as easy to use and interpret. For example, a guest from Colorado with a gluten intolerance might write “CO” for their state instead of “Colorado”, and “GF” for their dietary needs instead of “gluten-free”. When you conduct your reports, these little anomalies will become a big pain to sort through! Not to mention a multi-select question is a lot faster to respond to than a text entry.
Our pre-arrival waiver means that customers are usually completing their waivers ahead of time and from the comfort of their own homes, so 2 or 3 questions can usually glide by unnoticed.
Being strategic with your questions will ensure you’re making the best use of your customer’s time. It can be tempting to ask ten marketing questions, but being considerate of the customer’s experience will go a long way.
The Basics
If you don’t have a marketing strategy in mind then just stick to the basics. Details like your guests’ age, gender, where they’re from, and where they heard about you (in addition to your waiver questions) will still offer huge insights and build your customer blueprint.
Wherewolf automatically graphs your guest’s data alongside the details of their activity so you can report on which activities were most popular at certain times of the year with specific demographics (here’s how you can see this in action).
Even if you’re not sure where to start, we can help get you going and give you the tools you need to make smarter business decisions.
