In travel, most ad traffic gets lost on the long road to a booking request: websites, forms, managers, waiting for a reply. In this case, a Telegram bot works as a traffic converter right inside the messenger. Users are segmented, get a bonus and see tours that suit them, while the tour operator gets requests and data for follow-up work and personalized offers.
Written by Artem Zhukov, head of the Telegram bot development agency zhar.agency and author of the @ZharAgency channel
What the tour operator's Telegram bot does
A tour operator came to us with a task: build a bot to receive traffic in Telegram. The company promotes itself actively and needed a converter inside the messenger so it wouldn't have to send traffic to external platforms.
The bot we built:
Serves as a landing point for ad traffic.
Segments users and delivers a lead magnet.
Runs broadcasts that warm users up.
Describes the tours and collects bookings.
A separate challenge was presenting about a hundred tours in a convenient way. Users had to be able to find their way easily through the tour operator's many programs.
How to segment users for personalized offers
When a person starts the bot for the first time, they are invited to take a short quiz to get a lead magnet: a discount on a tour.
A short survey lets us qualify and segment the audience. We find out demographics (adults, with children and their ages, solo travelers) and preferences: sightseeing or active tours, and which programs exactly they're interested in (road trips, rafting, horseback riding, hiking and so on).
After the survey, the user gets a list of matching tours and a discount that is valid for two days.
When a person submits a request, we also ask for their preferred date and the number of travelers. So at two stages we collect a lot of information about users and save it all in categories.
How to send personalized broadcasts in a Telegram bot
When a person completes the quiz and submits a request, the bot assigns them categories. This gives us users split into subgroups, for example: solo travelers, parents with children, travelers without children, people interested in horseback tours, rafting, ATV or snowmobile tours, and so on.
Later, the tour operator can send broadcasts to audience segments, offering each group what it's really interested in.
How to increase a Telegram bot's conversion rate
The chatbot has three scenarios with reminders that motivate users to keep interacting with the service.
We know people often start a bot just so they don't lose it, and then don't move any further down the funnel. For this case there is an "After start" scenario, where several messages remind them to use the bot's features.
The second scenario is triggered when the discount is issued. It's only valid for two days, and during that time the user gets several notifications reminding them that the discount is about to expire.
Users who haven't submitted a request for a discounted tour get a warm-up sequence. This scenario tells them more about the tours and the company's advantages, shows customer reviews and invites them to submit a request.
Why a bot is often the better choice for Telegram traffic
A bot subscriber is almost always cheaper than a channel subscriber. When a person visits a channel, they evaluate the content and decide whether they want to read it.
With traffic to a bot, a person lands on the first screen, usually with an attractive offer and a description of what's waiting inside. To see what comes next, they have to start the bot, which means becoming its subscriber.
It's similar to advertising a private channel. Only those ads are usually annoying, and unlike a bot, a private channel can't be promoted through Telegram Ads.
With a bot, you subscribe first and evaluate later. With a channel, you evaluate first and then decide whether to subscribe.
You can promote a bot both with paid posts in other channels and through Telegram Ads, despite it being "closed".
A bot usually has a clear commercial purpose, and by starting it, a person shows interest in the product. Unlike a channel, which people may read for months before buying anything.
Conclusion
A Telegram bot works well when you need to capture ad traffic quickly and guide users to a booking request. A bot subscriber usually costs less, and conversion is much higher than in a channel or on a website. Even with the upfront development costs, in the long run a chatbot performs better and pays for itself many times over.
