This Week @ PacSet: Pondering Prizes and Promotions
A bit about the prize packs for the survey respondents, and another dive into that very survey.
Hello PacSet friends! A bit of a quick one this week, as most of our work this week has been in service of prep for summer and prep for some other forthcoming announcements (hehehe…), but still, we have some goodies for you all. Let’s get into it!
FINAL WEEK FOR THE SURVEY!
As you all know, we’ve been running a survey of our previous guests/alumni and new travelers to Japan over here, and the response has been pretty fabulous! The survey closes this Friday, so if you haven’t answered it yet, click the link below and give us your feedback! PLUS: if you do, there’s a link that takes you to a page to register for fabulous prizes… which we’re announcing today!
PRIZES!
We will be holding a drawing for prizes from the people who submitted a response to the survey. They are:
3RD PLACE: (10 winners) 🦊 Kippu Plush + Two PacSet Shirts
2ND PLACE: (3 winners) 🍽️ “Dinner on us!” $50 to spend @ Door Dash
1ST PLACE: (1 winner) 🏆 The Gacha Box!
The WHAT?!?!
So here’s the story: over the many, many years we’ve been running trips to Japan, we’ve acquired a lot of gachapon. We have a collection of the things, and for this prize, we’re going to be sending you a bunch of them. Seriously, we have a ton of these. Some of them are cute, some are cringe, but all of them are fun. Because of course they are.
We’ll also toss in the third place prizes too, just because we love you that much. ❤️ Answer the survey below for your crack at the winnings!
Promo Blues
This week, Evan tackles the topic of promotion and what a nightmare it can be…
Hello friends! Evan here…
For those of you who have answered our little survey, I don’t think that I’ll be surprising any of you when I tell you that advertising is the main reason we decided to run it. Promoting our offerings has become a lot more difficult since we opened in 2011. To be honest, this is no surprise; how people are traveling to Japan, who is going and how they are going has all changed dramatically over the last ten years.
Cons And Pros
For today’s column, I’d like to focus less on answering questions and more on some of the common suggestions we’ve had for promoting our trips. I’d like to start with one near and dear to my heart: the anime convention. From one respondent:
I think having booths at anime conventions would be good since people that are there obviously have an interest in Japan.
We agree! However, in recent years, it’s become less of an issue of should and more how.
The best part of going to cons is the ability to talk to people directly about their travel plans, go over their ideas, and help them find the journey they dream of. With Minnesota’s Anime Detour in particular, we are part of that community, run a panel there every year, and run a trip with them (the Anime De-Tour), and I don’t foresee that ever changing. For other cons, however…
managing the madness at Anime Detour
We have run panels at other conventions, and that’s always awesome, but it’s a very limited window to talk to people, and we’ve found that many conventions will reject panels that are strictly promotional in nature. Personally, I love talking to people about travel planning or Japanese culture in general, but it hasn’t really moved the needle much yet. Regardless, we’ll keep going to cons and running panel presentations when possible, just because I love running panels anyway. 😃
Booths and info tables are something we are considering for smaller conventions and events. For the big ones, probably not. On that note: I guess it’s finally time for me to talk about why we’ve ditched Anime Expo and don’t plan to return.
When we started operations, Anime Expo was an opportunity for us to talk to fans about our trips, share stories, and get their feedback. Even though TALKING LIKE THIS so we could be heard over the noise of the exhibit hall for four days straight would give us all laryngitis on a yearly basis, we loved it. However, in recent years, the exhibit hall at Expo has become less about selling and more about marketing for most everyone there. People run in, rush to buy things or get signatures from the guests/YouTubers/Idol folks in the vicinity, and that’s it. Starting in 2017, we noticed the number of people we got to really talk to and interact with drop quite a bit, even though we spent an ungodly sum of money on the booth that we had to write off as a massive loss at tax time. By the end, we felt like we were paying $10K to watch the lines for other booths and talking to no one.
What we’d love to do: I personally would LOVE to host a PacSet room party at a few conventions; they are a fabulous opportunity to meet people, share what we do, and talk about travel. However, the number of conventions running convention-supported room party blocks has dwindled to nearly nothing, and we’d rather not run an unsanctioned one at the conventions that just let parties happen and are shocked when things get crazy. Anyways, if anyone has a local con with a room party block, let us know; we’d sincerely consider it.
Image Capture
I do have some feedback regarding advertising on the website. There are times where I read a description of a trip and pass it up, but when I look at it again later I realize that there's a lot more to it than I thought. It's a bit vague, I know. Maybe it would help to have a picture or two associated with each day to show the key thing to expect.
I agree. We’re working on this one. The website is kind of like a constantly evolving blender of work, but we’re making tweaks. I am optimistic we can make this thing work nicer as time goes on. This is one of those things that just takes time, but we’re getting there.
To finish: let’s discuss the thing that’s brought more people to PacSet over the last ten years than anything else. That would be…
Mouth Words
Oh sorry, I meant word of mouth. You know, when your friend tells you something cool and you’re like, “awesome, I’ll look into that.” From another response:
Maybe instagram? To be honest, I heard about pacset from my friend who went on a trip with you. Her recommendation swayed me more than an ad would. I also don’t know how she found you guys…
This gets at something I want to highlight: it isn’t lost on me or anyone who works with PacSet that you telling your friends about us is the biggest source of our traffic and the reason we still exist. And for that, all I can say is an enthusiastic thank you; it means the world.
With anything we come up with for promotion, the one thing I personally want to make sure of is that everyone who travels with us likes PacSet enough that they want to share it with their friends. I will admit that this is why we’ve continued to devote most of our work hours to prep for trips and fine-tuning every trip we offer; we know what we sell is high quality, and we want to keep it that way!
In closing, I can say with certainty that we are going over each and every suggestion for advertising with a fine-toothed comb, because we know that what we provide is worth the time the traveler spends with us. No matter how all of you initially found PacSet, we truly appreciate it and can’t wait to see you again on a trip in the future. - E.
Next week: Cat content. No, really.
