Sales and Membership Module

The Business Case

Many successful Destination Management Organisations (DMO) derive a significant proportion of their income either through running a Membership scheme or otherwise selling benefits to the local tourism providers. For the providers themselves it represents an opportunity to leverage their collective buying power to extend the reach of their individually limited marketing budgets. Managing this well is therefore an imperative for DMOs and providers alike and ultimately creates a win-win situation resulting in the growth of the tourism economy.

DMOs have many ways in which they add value to their tourism providers and many of these are delivered through their e-tourism solution. Examples include:

• enhanced listings on the official tourism portal
• being featured in thematic or campaign web sites
• promoting their special offers through e-Marketing campaigns
• Online bookings
• Access to advice, research and marketing trend information
• Access to copyright-free destination imagery
• Training and seminars

The ever faster adoption of innovative technologies will provide still more opportunities to be offered as member benefits. The challenge therefore will be to effectively communicate what is available, manage the tasks associated with delivery and efficiently invoice each provider for the benefits received.

With dozens of products and services on offer and hundreds of members potentially buying in, the tracking of all this can prove to be an administrative nightmare. Fortunately the New Mind Sales and Membership module has been designed to simplify the whole process allowing you to focus your efforts on deriving real commercial income from your e-tourism solution. So throw away all those legacy spreadsheets and start proactively cross and up-selling to your tourism providers.

Core Proposition

The core functionality offered by the Sales and Membership module will enable the DMO to:

• define and manage a portfolio of products and services along with the associated costs in each financial year
• define sophisticated membership schemes
• define the different levels of membership with benefits made up of selected products and services
• track the membership status of all providers and segment lapsed and non-members as your prospect database
• construct sophisticated groups of contacts for direct or email communication
• cross and up-sell appropriate products and services to tourism providers
• easily and quickly produce pro-forma invoices
• track joined / renewal dates – never miss another annual subscription
• maintain a record of all business assist activities (e.g. seminars, training, e-Business enablement)

Advanced Features

The complex range of benefits and business assist activities undertaken by a DMO can easily be taken for granted. The Sales and Membership Module does not make this mistake and facilitates the administration of even the most complex schemes.

The Sales and Membership Module will also enable you to plan future communications that need to happen in a timely manner. For instance it is possible to:

• create tasks against member / product records (e.g. Send invitation to networking party, telephone to chase membership renewal, etc.)
• assign those tasks to different members of staff who will then access these via their own ‘Dashboard’ and complete the tasks
• create mailing lists and reports based on membership level, size of business, product type, date of membership expiry, membership status, etc.
• use the inbuilt mailing tool (which has ‘mail merge’ functionality to allow the destination to personalise correspondences) to create letters, invoices or e-mails on a Destination’s own template.

In short, the Advanced Membership Module will enable any DMO to both improve its effectiveness in delivering benefits to its tourism providers but also in tracking and reporting on this activity in order to satisfy the all important funding outputs.