Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 224: Why should a travel advisor track their specific offer launch?
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency Near Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner helping travel advisors become the CEO of their business. it's day 224. Let me pull my notes. Yep. 224. Did it actually work? The new offer? Your new rollout, you're announcing, maybe, maybe it's just announcing. I'm a new travel advisor. Did it work? How to tell if a new niche, a new offer, or just a big rollout, any of any kind, new brand, like company name, new members on the team. There's so many different things you could announce. But did it actually work? Was there an impact? So you should have done a soft launch, then you do the rollout. Now, how do you actually know whether this new offer worked? We're gonna get specific on the tracking methods and timelines. This could also apply to a new lead magnet as well. So I talk all the time. This podcast is tied to our 12-month program over at elevatewithrachelk.com called the Success Circle. And right now we're like on week 33 or something. I don't know. Where we're talking about the new offer rollouts. and so these episodes kind of expand on the things that might be the most confusing for people in the success circle and a lot of mindset stuff. But If you know me at all, I'm like, track the data. Track the data. You can't find improvement unless you're tracking the data. I'm not saying check everything every single day, four times a day. I like to recommend once a week. Overview, write it down, don't worry about it. Look at the trend once a month. Make decisions for changes once a quarter. It's not that hard. It's just an extra thing to do. So we've talked about tracking your marketing, your finances, your operations. Operational numbers as an ongoing habit. It's really that's my Fridays. If I can that's what I do on Fridays. then on Mondays I review what needs to happen based on the data I got from Friday. Anyway, a new offer and the rollout deserves its own focused version of the same discipline. Specific enough that you can look back and honestly answer whether this was worth the energy that you've put into it. Okay. So, what to actually track? Your lead source and the volume attributable to the launch. Did inquiries actually increase around your rollout window? Can you trace them back to it specifically rather than assuming? So, and you're probably gonna be like, well, how can I assume I posted like four times a day online and not everything had to do with the new rollout? Great question. If you really want to be clear about this, you can make duplicate like landing pages, consultation pages, whatever, how whatever software you use. But you could put like on your link tree or link in bio, or just put that link up at the top temporarily on your profile. That's not a link in bio, and see how many. clicks that specific page got. So let's say you do honeymoon and anniversary travel and you are offering now destination weddings. Your consultations are nearly the same, whatever, you would probably create a s new page on your website explicitly listing the destination wedding services. So that would be the one link that you would set up at the top of your profile, if you don't have a link in bio, for people to click and see how many clicks it's gotten since the new offer rollout. If you have a link in bio, like a link tree or whatever, Canva Link in Bio, I don't care what you use, but if you have one of those, then you want to put the link and then move it to the top. I like to move it to the top to get them. If that's what I'm pushing right now, that's the first thing I want them to see on my link in bio. And then you can look at the analytics there and see how many clicks there were. If you are simply offering like a additional service and service package and it's tied to a service page you've already created, duplicate that page, change the slug slightly on your website, and then link that wherever you need to link it. and see how many clicks that it's gonna get. That's the easiest way to see if your leads are actually coming from this new offer rollout is to have a specific URL to test it. Okay. So just because you have a new rollout, like say you wanted to get into destination weddings and that was your new offer rollout, okay? And you didn't have that link, but for some reason your content the algorithm liked a lot more, so push it out to more people. But they're not necessarily booking weddings, they're booking just honeymoons and anniversaries. So that tells you it's not necessarily your copy, kinda is, but it's not the offer that you want. so then you need to look at like what the hook is, the call to action, and the formatting of that post, because that's more important to the algorithm than you just announcing you have this new niche. brings me to my second point. The conversion rate for this offer specifically of the people who inquired about the new offer, how many actually booked or purchased that specific niche or offer? A high volume of interest with a low conversion rate tells a very different story than a smaller but highly converting group. And this is why I'm a huge fan of not following the vanity metrics of followers. I mean, it does, it should get you numbers. But if you have an influx of like 10,000 new followers overnight or 100,000 new followers overnight, but you have Two inquiries, that's not a high converting piece of content. That's just something that's kind of interesting to people, a lot of people. And if they aren't asking for that offer specifically and they just kinda go poking around your profile, well, you just kinda lucked out. I'm I'm not it's not necessarily your offer's bad. I'm saying you went viral, great, grand, lovely. And also if they went for something else, like a freebie, you're you haven't warmed them up enough. Or maybe the new offer isn't truly aligned with your a your new audience. Okay. the next thing, and this is why you need to track it for f several months, I would say, with a new offer. The revenue generated from it against your time and your cost to acquire. If you don't know, I need to write this down because I keep forgetting to put this in the descriptions. What day are we on two? Do twenty-four. Write that down. I'll have it in the description. You can sign up for it. It's free. Know your numbers, the cost to acquire a client, the lifetime value of your clients. You can play around with that and dream big and be like, they book 17 trips a year. as well as how many trips based on your niche and your average commission and your commission rate, whatever booking value. you will need to make on a monthly and annual basis in order to hit your income goals and revenue goals. So that's a free resource. So you can use that and be like, I'm not making any money or you're I'm doing just fine. Some people are like, What do you mean I make this money, this much money per trip? But the revenue generated from this set against your time investment, especially for something that's like a knowledge-based product, revenue alone doesn't tell the whole story. Weigh it against how much of your time the launch and ongoing delivery actually requires. Because if it's some crazy custom thing. that's gonna be a lot more time and probably not as much revenue generated for for an hourly rate. Okay. Qualitative feedback. Not everything shows up as a number. What are people actually saying about this new offer? Are they confused? Are they delighted? Or are they like, I don't really give two rep rips about what this person's doing over here? So you need to have all of that stuff. This is what advisors get wrong is they don't wait long enough and they only judge all of this after one or two weeks. When the launch buzz has barely even settled, give any real rollout at least a full quarter. 90 days. Any new niche, any new offer you're doing, 90 days before drawing conclusions. and longer for anything with a longer natural sales cycle, like the higher tick ticket trip planning. Like if you want to get into weddings, you don't make five posts, put it out there and be like, well I got three views, no one wants to work with me. You make five posts a day for three months. And then you can start to look, am I actually getting then you look at these questions after three months, is this actually working? I'm not saying post five times a day, but if you really want revenue, post five times a day. You're gonna hate it in the end. So, this is why your monthly and your quarterly reviews for your travel agency matter. A new offer's performance should be a specific line in those reviews, not something you just think about when you happen to remember it. Look at it consistently on the same schedule as all your other numbers. And that's gonna let you make an honest, unemotional call. Keep going, adjust, or retire it. Based on real data, instead of getting a gut feeling on a random Tuesday, I just need to quit this. Because you're gonna have those moments, especially when it gets boring saying the same thing over and over again, you're gonna have those moments. I love me the quarterly reviews. And I just want everyone to know you can do this when you have a new offer. Let's say back to the quarterly reviews, because I'm gonna have probably a whole other week about that coming up in the next few weeks. So with the quarterly reviews, if you have this idea, and we started this off in episode 221, is like, you got an you got an idea? Let's talk about it. It might be a terrible idea. It might be the best thing ever. And that's something that you kind of just, when you have the idea, write it down. I like to do CEO time weekly and then monthly reviews and then quarterly and annual reviews. makes me see if I'm actually on track. And it's makes me see, oops, I did backslide a little bit here, but I can come back. It's no big deal. So when I have these ideas, I save them until my CEO time on Mondays. And then I look at the ideas and I'm like, okay, was I smoking something crazy when I came up with this idea, or is this something I should look into more? And how urgent is this idea? And I'll either table it, if I like it, for the monthly review or the quarterly review or the annual review. It's not something I have to implement right away because you have to stay steady. It's just like if you were a restaurant. restaurant you wanted to Introduce a new food menu item. You've already got like your hours for your staff scheduled. You've already got all the kitchen equipment and all the basic staples. So then it's like, okay, well now I need to, I'm gonna use Cisco because that's what I remember and I worked in hospitality. Now I need to talk to my Cisco rep and see what it's gonna cost for this. And I need to who and my staff can actually like they're not gonna roll out this new menu the next day, right? I need to see who on my staff can actually create this. This item consistently. I've got to create the recipe how I like it. So I've got to do some testing first. Then I gotta compare the cogs and labor and everything before I even price it out. And then I have to soft launch it with a random daily special for a few weeks, maybe a quarter, before it's officially on the menu to see if it's actually popular and the people like it. Because just because I like it doesn't mean the people that are Coming into my restaurants dine are gonna love it. It's the same thing with your travel agency. You can have a crazy idea for a unique new niche, but that doesn't mean completely change all the copy on your website. That doesn't mean change everything all at once and go in kind of blind. Take these little baby steps. And if you need to put this task for this new idea all the way back episode day 221, just follow along. And if you need to put it on a monthly review, and then you need to assign for the next month, you need to do this little bit of research, Rachel. I'm just gonna call you Rachel, sorry. For next month, and then for the quarter, you can make the decision: do I want to start really focusing on launching us for next quarter or next year? Because you still have to maintain serving everybody else. You can't just drop the ball on everything you've already established, right? Anyway, this closes out the stretch on the evaluating, the soft launching, the rolling out, the tracking new offers. Hmm, we're gonna talk about mindset stuff the next few days because you know how I do if you listen to these episodes, basic business stuff, and then mindset, and sometimes I sing in a stupid robot voice. we're gonna change your mindset about judging yourself against your competition, understanding what that is and what is actually quote unquote yours to protect. Okay, this is Travel Agency New Year podcast day 223, 224. 224. All right, have a good day.