OVERVIEW
Congratulations on your start to direct target-marketing of travel product. Travel Club Manager is designed for you to be able record, manipulate and combine client data to allow you to use this valuable information to best market your travel product.
The best way to get this information is to start a Travel Club for your client/geographic area base. Once you have done this, your members will co-operate in providing information, and to update this information in exchange for benefits you will provide to them as members. Travel Club Manager will then provide you with the tools to effectively use this information to best market travel product.
Any marketing or advertising information you provide to someone is not considered unwanted or unsolicited, providing this information is aimed at the person’s specific interests. This means your advertising will be read and considered. This is the biggest major hurtle with the overabundance of travel product on offer every day.
Once you have your data base of members set up, choosing the right people to market any product to, is only a few mouse-clicks away. The flexibility in your search criteria is phenomenal. Once your search is done, the results can immediately be exported for mail-merge or sent to email. It is our opinion, important sales information should always be sent through the post. The reason for this is, people get a lot of advertising in their email and, although your information is coming directly to them as a Club Member, it is too easy to close the email to view or discuss later. Never underestimate the importance of a tactile brochure or flyer when it come to something you want to sell worth thousands of dollars. A great use of the email function of your Travel Club Manager is for club announcements, newsletters, competitions and to follow up postal offers.
We have included in your forms, the needed information that research and real-time usage have proven to be the most useful. If you find you have no interest in some of the categories, or wish to add additional categories, you can easily modify the forms in Category Maintenance to suit your individual needs.
Your Travel Club Manager will generate your Enrolment Form for printing for you, and as well, when it comes time for you to ask your members to update their preferences, will generate the individual forms including all their existing preferences for distribution and update.
You will be amazed by the ease of operation of your Travel Club Manager and the strike-rate return from your new direct target-marketing. In this guide you will have simple explanations of all functions (with the exception of things like “save”, “close” etc. for obvious reasons).
GETTING STARTED
The Travel Club Manager Installation program has been designed to be extremely user friendly. Simply insert the disc and follow the prompts. Please note: you must install Travel Club Manager using an account with administrative privileges (i.e. Administrator).
Travel Club Manager requires the Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework to be installed on your machine. The Travel Club Manager Installation program will detect whether or not you have the .NET Framework installed and, if the .NET Framework is not detected, you will be prompted to install the Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework.
Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework
If the Travel Club Manager Installation program does not detect a copy of the Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework installed on your machine you will be asked to install it before configuring Travel Club Manager (see Figure 1). Choose Yes to continue. You will not be prompted for any additional information while the Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework is being installed. (see Figure 2).
Figure 1 – Install Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework.
Figure 2 – Configuring Microsoft ® .NET 2.0 Framework.
Windows 2000 / Windows 2003 Server / Windows XP
Step 1: Click Next at the Travel Club Manager Installation program (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 – Welcome to the Travel Club Manager Installation program.
Step 2: Carefully read the End User License Agreement and choose ‘I accept the terms in the license agreement’ and choose Next (see Figure 4).
Figure 4 – Accept the End User License Agreement.
Step 3: Enter your Company Information and choose ‘Anyone who uses this computer (all users)’ to configure Shortcuts to Travel Club Manager for all your users then click Next (see Figure 5).
Figure 5 – Enter your Company Information.
Step 4: Click Next to begin the installation (Figure 6).
Figure 6 – Begin the Installation.
Step 5: Select ‘Launch Travel Club Manager’ and click Finish (Fig. 7).
Figure 7 – Launching Travel Club Manager.
Step 6: Enter your Travel Club Information and click Save Configuration (see Figure 8).
Figure 8 – Enter your Travel Club Information.
Step 7: Enter the Registration Key which was provided with your disc and click Continue to validate your copy of Travel Club Manager (see Figures 9 & 10). Restart Travel Club Manager (Figure 11).
Figure 9 – Enter your Registration Key.
Figure 10 – Validating your copy of Travel Club Manager.
Figure 11 – Save your settings and begin to use Travel Club Manager.
Windows Vista
Step 1: Open the Travel Club Manager CD through My Computer or by clicking ‘Open folder to view files’ (see Figure 12).
Figure 12 – Open the Travel Club Manager CD.
Step 2: Right click the setup.exe file and choose Run as administrator (see Figure 13).
Figure 13 – Run the Travel Club Manager Installation program as an administrator.
Step 3: If you receive an ‘An unidentified program wants access to your computer’ message choose Accept (see Figure 14).
Figure 14 – Allow the Travel Club Manager Installation program to run.
Step 4: Click Next at the Travel Club Manager Installation program (see Figure 15).
Figure 15 – Welcome to the Travel Club Manager Installation program.
Step 5: Carefully read the End User License Agreement and choose ‘I accept the terms in the license agreement’ and choose Next (see Figure 16).
Figure 16 – Accept the End User License Agreement.
Step 6: Enter your Company Information and choose ‘Anyone who uses this computer (all users)’ to configure Shortcuts to Travel Club Manager for all your users then click Next (see Figure 17).
Figure 17 – Enter your Company Information
Step 7: Click Next to being the Travel Club Manager installation (see Figure 18).
Figure 18 – Begin the Installation.
Step 8: Select ‘Launch Travel Club Manager’ and click Finish
(Figure 19).
Figure 19 – Launching Travel Club Manager
Step 9: Enter your Travel Club Information and click Save Configuration (see Figure 20).
Figure 20 – Enter your Travel Club Information.
Step 10: Enter the Registration Key which was provided with your disc and click Continue to validate your copy of Travel Club Manager (see Figures 21 & 22).Restart Travel Club Manager (Figure 23).
Figure 21 – Enter your Registration Key.
Figure 22 – Validating your copy of Travel Club Manager.
Figure 23 – Save your settings and begin to use Travel Club Manager.
MENU
Your menu is your starting point where you will find the links to all your program functions. These are SEARCH, ADD A MEMBER, FIND & UPDATE A MEMBER, CATEGORY MAINTENANCE AND TOOLS & OPTIONS.
SEARCH
Show All Results
With this selected, your search will give you results of all clients who match your search criteria.
Exclude All Results With An Email Address
Use this function when you want to export the result for mail-merge and do a separate search for those with an email address.
Show Only Results With An Email Address
Use this function to use results for emailing only.
Male – Female
Use this function when you want search results based on client gender.
Minimum/Maximum Age & Search Date
Use this function when your search needs to be age sensitive (i.e. 18’s to 35’s or seniors). You can just put in a minimum age, just a maximum, or both. Use the Search date field when you want your age sensitive results to show those in the chosen age bracket on a certain date (i.e. you want to know who will be a certain age at the time of the tour you are promoting for the future).
Preference Tabs
This is the place you select the client preference criteria for your search.
Search Button
Once you have selected your search criteria, this button generates the search results.
Send Offer Via Email
When you select this function, your search result will open a “Send Clients An Email” dialogue window, where you can choose a font for your email, put in your name and personal email address, subject, attach files (.doc, .pdf, .jpg etc.), deselect certain clients from email-out, insert clients’ first names automatically (i.e. Dear John & Mary), insert a link, preview your email prior to sending, test sending, start emailing and change your mail server. (When using the “test” function, one email will be sent to the email address you have entered as the “sender”, or your address, so you can see what the email will look like before sending it out to your search list. If you have used the “insert client’s first names” feature, your test email will put “John & Jane” by default.)
Export to Excel
This function will send your search to Excel and will create an Excel file for you to save, use, alter, manipulate and use for mail merge and any other function for which you may use Excel files.
Export To Text
This function is used when you just want a notepad list of your search results to save or print.
Prepare Members’ Profiles
Up to date information is the life blood of data base marketing. At least once a year, you should poll your membership for changes in their contact details and travel preferences and interests. Travel Club Manager makes this a breeze. When you select “Prepare Profiles”, it will prepare member profiles with each member’s current details and preferences for you to send out for an update. A bonus, of some sort, for an early return of a member’s update will insure up to date information. This function will prepare profiles just for the clients in the result of a search, or if no search has been done, it will prepare profiles for all members in your data base. When the profiles are being compiled, the program will batch them on lots of 10 profiles in Word, and the at the end of the compilation, will combine all the documents into one, and delete the batches of 10 to avoid confusion.
ADD A MEMBER
Member’s Contact Details
This is where you will enter all the contact details of your clients,
Entering Preferences
This is where you will enter all your client’s travel preferences as they have listed them on their enrolment forms. There are two ways to do this. You can either mouse-tick the appropriate boxes, of if you feel it is quicker for you, you can enter just the letter/number I.D. of the items and the boxes will automatically tick when you enter or tab out of the field. When using this option, you do not have to separate the I.D.’s with a space or comma unless the I.D. is a double digit (for example, if you want to select a & b & c & 3 & 5 & aa & ad, you would type in abc35,aa,ad).
The “Use Tabs” and “Don’t Use Tabs” just changes the way the preferences display for your entry. The “Use Tabs” is the default, but if you choose “Don’t Use Tabs” you will notice the categories will display in list form with a scroll bar.
Create Member
Once you have added all your new member’s criteria, this will save the new client to your data base.
FIND & UPDATE A MEMBER
This is the place to find a member or members. This is an extremely interactive function, as it will search for clients that match as much or as little information as you enter in any field. If all you can remember about the client is her first name is Shirley and she was interest in Japan, you can find her here. This is also, where you bring up a client’s profile to change or update their information.
Export Search
After doing a client search, choosing this function will take your search results into the SEARCH window, where you can choose what you want to do with the results.
Category Maintenance
This is where you have the data categories for which you wish to collect your members’ preferences. The categories here, and the lists attached to them, are totally dynamic and you can change, alter, add or delete them to suit your individual needs. The default settings will suit most people and we suggest these settings should probably remain. The power is yours. What appears here will reflect what appears on your enrolment form, and on the preference tabs in the program windows.
Position Up and Down
This will move the categories into a different order should you like to reorder the way the categories appear on the screen and enrolment form.
Remove Selected Category
To remove an unwanted category, click-select it and choose this option.
Add Category
Should you wish to add a category, type in the name of the new category (tick the “Extra Details” box if your new category requires an extra field, i.e. client numbers or other membership number) and choose add item. After you have added the new category, click-select it from the list, and them add in the data list that is to appear with the new category. Easy, isn’t it!
Generate Enrolment form
This function will take the category data you have chosen to use and generate a Word document to give to your joining club members. You may alter the formatting before printing if you like, but if you want to add extra categories, you should do this in Category Maintenance first. This function is also available on the TOOLS & OPTIONS menu.
TOOLS & OPTIONS
Backup
When choosing this option, Travel Club Manager will make a backup of your data base and settings and put this backup in your program file. It will also ask you if you would like a copy of this backup in another location, and will ask you if you would like the earlier backups deleted. This function will allow you make sure you data is secure and be able to compare your current data with past stages of your club if desired.
Restore
This function will open a window allowing you to choose a backup file to restore into your program.
Import
This is a fantastic feature of your Travel Club Manager. If you have a current database with all your clients’ details, you can save yourself having to re-enter all of that data. “Tell me More!” we hear you say.
On your Travel Club Manager CD you will find a folder named “Import Instructions”, and in this folder, you will find an excel file with the following fields: Title, Surname, Given Name, Preferred Name, DOB, Address 1, Address 2, PO Box, Suburb, State, Postcode, Phone Home, Phone Business, Phone Mobile, Phone Fax, Email, Gender, Passport Country, Passport No, Passport Expiry, Membership No.
The fields within the Excel file must remain in their original order (as shown above) for the Travel Club Manager’s import function to work correctly.
The first step to importing your existing users is to enter (usually by copy and paste) all your client’s details from another Excel file, Access database or tab delimited text file into the appropriate fields in the import Excel file.
If you are missing some of the information for the fields, simply leave those cells blank.
When you have finished entering all your client’s information, choose Save As from the File menu. Choose Save as type: Text (Tab delimited), choose your save location and enter a file name.
Click Yes to save the file in Text (Tab delimited) format.
Click Import within Tools & Options; and select the file you just saved from Excel (remember to make sure you have closed Excel before you continue). This will add the data you have placed in this file into your Travel Club Manager client database. Ahh … magic!
Popularity Reports
This is one of the most exciting and useful features of Travel Club Manager. You can generate a list in all important categories of the order of popularity of your client base, showing number of members and percentage of your club with this category interest. A regular monitoring of your “Top Ten’s” will guide you to intelligent marketing.
Change I.D. Details
When you first installed your Travel Club Manager, you were asked to input certain company details and your mail server. This option will allow you to change any of these settings.
Generate Enrolment form
This function will take the category data you have chosen to use and generate a Word document to give to your joining club members. You may alter the formatting before printing if you like, but if you want to add extra categories, you should do this in Category Maintenance first. This function is also available on the CATEGORY MAINTEANCE menu.
User Manual (We won’t insult you with an explanation.)
So, there you have it. Simple to operate, easy to remember, and the information you can obtain is pure gold! Should you have any questions, suggestions, or problems needing our support, just let us know at www.thatsoftwareco.com or www.travelclubmanager.com and we will be our upmost to assist you.
With Travel Club Manager you will be astounded at how easy it is to market in a way you never thought possible, or if you did, had no idea how to collect and manage the information needed. That! Software Co. knows you will have success with this program. And That’s the truth!