Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 143 - Tips to keep your travel clients coming back every trip!
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome back to the Travel Agency New Year Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. If you don't know who I am, just go to elevatewithrachelk.com. I'm a travel agency owner and this podcast is for travel advisors ⁓ trying to navigate the world of building your business up. There's so much information out there and it can get very confusing and overwhelming. ⁓ So that's kind of why I'm here, except I'm doing 365 episodes. Thanks for coming back again and joining me today. Today is day 143, how to tweak your client retention efforts. So maybe you... have built some clients up and they're not quite always coming back for trips, maybe, maybe, maybe not, I don't know. Maybe you don't have a system in place for client retention. So let's talk about options that you can implement ⁓ to maybe get more repeat bookings, because repeat bookings and repeat clientele, like client retention. is the biggest ROI in any service based business and specifically the travel industry. It will lead to more referrals and you still should market. Don't get me wrong there. However, you don't have to be so concerned with ramping up your marketing efforts. If you are brand new, you do need to really, really market yourself and build that client base up. And once you are satisfied with that and you are getting repeat business and referrals and the revenue is where you want it to be, you still do have to show up in your marketing online. It's just not so much of a push if you are like, I'm in happy place. Does that make sense? Of course it makes sense. All right, number one, ⁓ your onboarding. Is that easy for your clients and leads? You also want to make sure if they're brand new clients, ⁓ that you always have something to where this is a partnership. You are agreeing to be in partnership for this trip. So for example, if you have a consultation and you're like, man, I'm really struggling to close these consultations or they say they're interested and then they ghost, take a look at your onboarding process. If there's nothing where they have to make a requirement of like, Providing personal information for example or signing an agreement before you start any proposals that's a possible gap that you can tweak very very easily and All you need to do depending on what your travel CRM is you can create a simple form Where they sign off and agree to your terms and conditions I highly recommend speaking with an attorney to create your terms and conditions If you charge fees, have a fee schedule outlining the fee schedule for them to review and sign off on. And obviously you want them to pay the fee before you do any work. Now they have made that investment. Even if you don't charge a fee, they have had to review your terms and conditions and they have had to probably provide the personal information like the names and dates of birth of everyone traveling on this trip before you even start the proposal process. That means that they have made an investment, even if it's just like a quick 60 seconds of their time. So they're more likely to stay with you. Furthermore, if you have this simple onboarding process, you're going to get more repeat business because A, they know that you're going to have their personal information on file already and B, ⁓ they'll have a thorough understanding of how it works. Now if you do change your onboarding process and you get someone to come back for a repeat trip, you should explain to them as soon as you implement a new change, just email everyone in your CRM and be like, hey, we've updated this part of our process thanks to all of your awesome feedback. Okay, another thing that you can do is personalized communication like a handwritten note, like a thank you note, like actually send a card in the mail. I know many travel advisors do this around the holidays, an actual handwritten, hopefully your handwriting is legible, but an actual handwritten note ⁓ that you can mail off to them. You don't necessarily have to do it as during the holidays, you could just do it. after they come back from their trip, could send a little postcard if you wanted to. This will be more of a financial investment as well because you will have to purchase the cards. It's not too big of an investment, however, just think of that and your time and the postage. Consider that. Okay, the third tip, and I love this tip, so I have it written down in my notes as quote unquote, your battery is low. And this is where you can add it to your workflow to trigger if there are no new deposits on trips in like 13 plus months, for example. You could also do this as a handwritten note to set a reminder if they haven't deposited on a trip. It really depends on how big your client base is. And you can handwrite something and be like, so in your copy for this, you can ask them to scheduled consultation to plan the next trip, you definitely want to acknowledge that they do have hectic lives. Everyone has a busy life and yes, they may have been reading your newsletters and all that fun stuff, but also they're just like, I don't have time to think about this, da da da da da. But if you have notes in your CRM of like future destination interests, like I have that on every single one of my forms that ties to every person that fills out a form. If they fill that out, You could just say, I haven't noted here that a future destination interest of yours is blah, blah, blah. Now this you can't really automate so much. Like getting that specific and personalized. But if you do have an automated email and they reply and say, yeah, I really want to move forward, then you can do the personal touch at that point and say, hey, you mentioned that you really wanted to go to Portugal. in your future destination interests, is that still something you're interested in? Because I have some contacts that can put together an amazing trip. Okay, mobile friendly forms and processes. Do you have mobile friendly forms and processes? I know for me especially, I don't really check to see how mobile friendly my forms are. ⁓ Especially when I first set them all up and I transitioned over to VCRM. They are mobile friendly, don't get me wrong. And my booking pages, I do a lot of groups, so I have like a booking page. They are mobile friendly. Just make sure that that, like test your stuff out on your cell phone. See how it looks on your cell phone compared to your desktop. And make sure it's mobile friendly. And I know some, software allows you to view it. how it would show up on mobile or even a tablet. So at least check that if you don't test it on your own mobile just to see how the flow of it goes. Because it could look like the copy could just like squish down, know, and just take up so much space on the screen and they're just like, this is too much. Okay, or maybe you have, like you use WordPress and you do a lot of coding and the coding's kind of like wonky and so the buttons are really tiny on mobile. You ever been in that situation where you're trying to fill out a form and you're like, this is so helpful, except this form sucks on my phone and I don't want to get up and go to my computer. Okay, tip number five, when feedback is provided, show those clients how it has changed your business. So like I had just mentioned, based on your feedback, we really appreciate this new process, blah, blah, blah, blah, a few minutes ago. If there's specific feedback from an individual client, even if it's someone who's like, this is the worst experience ever for one reason or another, right? It's gonna happen at some point. The more business you do, the more likely that's going to happen. And if you come back to them and say, hey, I really appreciate your feedback because of this feedback and because of this issue that you had this... has been implemented in our process in the future. So no one has to experience it again. Thank you so much for helping us ⁓ continue to improve our business. So that has actually, I've done that a few times with people, especially people who are very, very upset. And they have come back because they're like, OK, I'll try it again. And normally when people get very, very upset, it's like things completely out of my control. ⁓ But then they'll start, and that happens to all of us, things out of our control, and then they start to lose trust, so they'll start to nitpick everything they can kind of thing. That happens. Okay, the last tip would be communities. The third space meetups, I mentioned this a few episodes ago, how the third space is kind of coming back. because people are so sick of just like, yeah, working from home is great. And also, since everything was shut down back in 2020, things really haven't opened up to where people can just like go to their regular bar, restaurant, cafe, bookstore, like how it used to be. If you are of a certain age, you remember just being able to show up somewhere and people being like, How you doing? Because you've been there enough times. Even if it was just like a janky record store, they'd be like, I remember you. What's up? How you been? But you could also do ⁓ communities on Reddit, like subreddits, Discords, Facebook groups, wherever your ideal client is going to want to show up and what is aligned with your values. So those are some things you can do to tweak your client retention efforts. Just some quick tips and trips. Tricks, not trips. Although we should be booking trips. I hope you all have a wonderful day. If you found this helpful, feel free to share this with another travel advisor who might also be struggling with client retention. There's so many more things that I touch on in these episodes like these episodes around these days. I kind of do like a segment of about 15 to 20 minutes each. Excuse me. Based on a specific subject. So you can get the deets without having to listen to me for an hour straight unless you really want to. OK, thanks for joining me again and have a great day.