Improve Merchant Engagement for Your Passport

Onboarding merchants onto a passport is only the beginning of ensuring your pass’ success. Gathering quality discounts, selecting a meaningful prize and finding the right pass duration all play a role in a passport’s success, but promoting the pass and ensuring merchant locations are trained is just as important.

If you want to hear more about the merchant outreach and onboarding process, tune into the short video linked in this paragraph for details about how it works from start to finish.

In this blog, we’re sharing a few tactics that go above and beyond our standard process. These tactics have proven successful for other clients.

Are you interested in kicking your merchant engagement up a notch? Try one of these ideas!

For merchant businesses with high turnover, try regularly scheduled webinars that describe your pass program.

Even if the webinar only lasts 10 minutes, a chance to hear a real person talk about the passport and answer questions can be really meaningful. Clients with seasonal workers, in particular, might appreciate this method. If your destination has peak seasons with an influx of workers, it may be smart to host quarterly webinars with the purpose of training and educating staffers at local businesses.

Some of our clients have recorded videos they share with merchants that staff in training can access at any time.

For help spreading the word about your passport, try incentivizing your merchant partners with co-op advertising opportunities.

In this webinar (recorded June 2022), Visit Eau Claire shared that one of the ways they incentivized merchants to actively promote passports on their social channels, on location and in newsletters was to host a contest that rewarded the locations for their efforts. The top 3 merchant businesses with check-ins earned advertising packages valued from $300 – $1,000 courtesy of Visit Eau Claire.

For merchant businesses using collateral, each drop-off is an opportunity to check in.

We encourage our clients to distribute collateral to their merchant locations. This collateral should describe the process to sign up for the pass and the process to check-in or redeem. Having on-site flyers, window clings or rack cards can make a big difference in how customers and staffers approach the pass on location.

Don’t wait for merchants to ask for more collateral before you stop in to offer it! Keeping collateral well stocked and having an opportunity for a regular conversation with a merchant partner is worth scheduling time for.

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