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Fabulous Family Fun
A loyal customer base and terrific service have made Family Fun For Less more successful than its owners could ever imagine.
Family Fun For Less ,
specializes in inexpensive airline tickets, cruise tickets and family tour packages and is run out of the owner's basement. Though the company has been around for several years, their real profits started flowing when they decided to hit the Internet. Then, through smart advertising, business began booming.
"I told them that we had to do a combination of traditional and Internet advertising, " said Milt Larsen, Spokesperson for the company. "You can't depend on search engines alone."
Family Fun For Less committed to a weekly adverting budget of $400 - $800. This allows them to advertise in the Sunday papers of Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Provo, as well as the 39 small weekly Utah papers.
"The first time our ad ran in the Salt Lake City papers, they forgot to include our Web site address or phone number," Milt said.
Even minus the Salt Lake papers, the traffic to their site went up substantially that first weekend. Instead of the few thousand hits that the site normally received, Family Fun For Less logged over 18,000 hits and made $24,000 in sales. The next weekend, all their ads ran correctly, and the site was hit over 23,000 times, and generated over $57,000 in revenue. The following weekend, Family Fun For Less received over 26,000 visits.
Since then, their numbers have continued to soar. On January 29, the site received over 57,000 hits.
"We keep track of all our numbers on WebStats, and we can see a direct correlation between our advertising and the traffic we receive," Milt remarked.
Family Fun For Less requires its clients to become members of the Web site by filling out a WebProfiler form. This provides valuable marketing data for the company. Since the beginning of January, Family Fun For Less has added over 1,500 new members.
Milt stresses that traditional advertising is key to any business's success.
"As a marketing tool, the Internet is not one hundred percent reliable," he said.
Milt also encourages businesses to utilize the small weekly papers of their state, stating that for a flat fee, you can advertise in all the weeklies and get your company name to all corners of your state.
As the person who maintains the company's Web site, Milt really enjoys using Visual WebTools™ V4.1™.
"It is very fast," Milt stated. "And I really enjoy being able to use WebWizard offline."
Though he maintains a successful e-business Web site, Milt has never taken any Web design classes. He learned to use Visual WebTools by following the tutorial and experimenting on his own. He hired Rent-a-Pro to design the company logo.
"If I can do this, anyone can," Milt stated.
Throughout its lifetime, Family Fun For Less has maintained strong relationships with its partners and customers. Because good customer service is essential to the company, they provide four telephone lines for their clients, two of them toll-free. They also provide true quality deals, such as $109 round-trip airplane tickets to Orlando, FL over certain school holidays. The company specializes in popular destinations such as Florida, California and Hawaii. They also organize tours to such exotic locales as China, Israel, and Tahiti.
"We're definitely in the niche market," said Milt.
Despite the success of his company, Milt doesn't believe that he did anything special.
"Anyone can do this," he said. "Anyone that has quality goods or services, coupled with traditional and Internet marketing can be a success."
