Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 234: Build a Travel Advisor Follow-Up & Nurture System That Works
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner that's trying to speak like she's reading the news. Anyway, I want to help you build your business with this podcast. I have other resources as well. You can find them at elevatewithrachelk dot com. I am in the trenches with you. Right meow. Book and travel. So you're fine. Day two hundred and thirty-four, building your outreach, nurturing your ecosystem, getting that repeat business, getting those referrals. So we talked about individual personal touches, which are great, but they only compound into real business results if they're happening consistently for every single client, not just the ones who happen to cross your mind, which I have been guilty of. I'll be like, yeah, this person. today we're gonna build all of the last two episode ideas into your travel agency systems, okay? And by the way, if it if I I give you guys a lot of ideas, please don't feel like you have to implement them immediately. Like sit on it. Go join the success circle. Sit on it. And during your monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews, that's when you make the decisions, not just when you're randomly inspired. That's how you pull the emotion out and you can respond to influence rather than react to it. So don't feel like you have to do this. Just consider it. All right, you gotta think of this as the full life cycle of every relationship in your business. Mapped out so nobody falls through the cracks. The new lead, the active clients, the past clients, the referrals. Each stage has its own touch points on a schedule, and you can build it into your workflows if you want to, rather than being left to memory or mood. Number one, pre booking. This is nurturing. These are the stages, by the way. Sorry, I'm reading my show notes. I'm like, what? What does pre-booking have to do? This is what I get for not doing the notebook anymore. Anyway, stage number one, pre-booking. Nurturing someone from the first contact towards booking. This is anyone warm or cold. We've talked about warm inbound, cold inbound, warm outbound, cold outbound. What does it mean? Just in case. You wanna move away from the people in this industry teaching you and like get some real help from business advisors, you know what I mean? People who run other businesses and you hear these terms, I don't know why they're not in the travel industry or they're not spoken a lot of these things. But anyway, warm inbound, cold inbound, warm outbound, cold outbound. That's how you generate leads. We covered this maybe like a week or two ago. I don't remember anymore. There's so many episodes. I was like, this'll be easy. It's only 365 episodes. Ha ha ha. It's a lot. anyway, but this is nurturing someone from first contact towards booking. So pre booking. There was a long rant about nothing. Stage number two, your active client. They have deposited. But the touch points from the booking strategy and like the luxury service episodes, I need to have like a spreadsheet with every single episode pulled up. In fact, I think I do. Let me see. You want to know why I have this spreadsheet? Because I used perplexity, just so you know, to analyze. my YouTube podcast. What do you mean I gotta verify who I am? Clearly I'm prepared for this. okay let me type in my password. Anyway, and I learned from perplexity, because this is a lot of episodes, I had some thumbnail slides that I'm not gonna do this. Nope. I'm not gonna go find my cell phone. Anyway, there were some thumbnail slides that Or thumbnails on the videos in YouTube and on Spotify and Apple that had typos in because I might be a little dyslexic and I'm like, How come nobody's pointed this out to me? Some of these episodes have like fifty plus streams and nobody cares about the thumbnail, but I was like, I better fix that so I don't have someone being like, Look at the typo. I can't believe you typed an extra letter. At least it proves AI didn't do it, I guess. But anyway, I fixed all those. All right, I'm not staying on track today. I hope it this is at least entertaining. So we have episodes covering booking strategy, luxury service touch points, what to integrate. I think one of is like gosh, it had premium in it, 'cause it was one of the episodes had a typo in the thumbnail. There's maybe like day one ninety five or something. Somewhere around there. Anyway, but that's going to be proactive check-ins, anticipating needs, staying ahead of problems during the planning and travel. The next stage is immediately post-trip, the welcome home follow-up, the initial thank you. Ideally within the first week of their return while the trip is still fresh in their mind. and then the ongoing past client. This is where the personal touches live from the last couple of episodes, the 2x rule, the three six twelve month check-ins that we talked about in outreach episodes, sending handwritten birthday cards, sending postcards from the destination they most recently visited for like their birthday, and then relevant updates. So if you miss the other episodes regarding the relevant updates, you can say, well, I put this stuff in my email newsletter, but it doesn't make them feel special if you're just if it's just a little section of your entire newsletter. Nobody feels like an insider with you, right? If you're talking about selling, selling, selling, then you're like, by the way, here's this update. What you can do is segment, you can, okay. And I'm going to use Mail or Lite as an example. And I know so many of my students use Flowdesk. But I know in Mail or Lite you can create groups. Okay. And maybe if you're using Turn, you could do this too. I don't know how Turn works. I don't use it. I stick with VCRM. But you can create groups. And you can create groups by brand. You can create groups by destination. You create groups and name them whatever you want. And then when there's an announcement for that specific destination, as you get your new clients and add them to your CRM, you can tag them in multiple groups. So if they booked a Virgin Voyages Mediterranean cruise as an example, you could have a group just for virgin voyages. And when you download the CSV of your contacts in your travel CRM and upload them into your email newsletter CRM. you should be able to tag them in these separate groups. So you could tag them into a virgin voyages group and then you can tag them into a Mediterranean group. And you can even go like it just really depends on your niche and your specialty. So when there's a new thing in the Mediterranean and you want to send an email and be like, you got you're my you've been to the Mediterranean before. We work together on this trip. Don't make it like a blanket, make it a little more personalized email. But when you send those updates, you can make them feel special. Because it's not in your general newsletter. And if it's like Virgin, be like, hey, they're adding this new ship to the fleet. You've already done the Mediterranean cruise, or you've already sailed with Virgin before. Do you want to come check this ship out and book a consultation with me? You know what I mean? And then they get the updates and then they can tell their friends and be like, my travel agent just happened to give me the insider info. No big deal. I got the hookup. Think about it. Alright. The next stage is referral activation. A specific occasional touch that isn't just please refer me, but it makes it easy and natural. Sharing that you have room for a few more new clients, offering a referral thank you, or simply reminding them warmly that you'd love to help their friends and family too. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Back to Grouping and segmenting, tagging your email addresses, your contacts inside your email CRM. You can also do this if you start doing like group space, like on a cruise. We're gonna go back to virgin voyages. So if they've already sailed virgin voyages and they already sailed the Mediterranean on virgin voyages, let's say you segment everyone in those two groups. And then you can email them if they haven't, even if they've already signed up to go on your next group cruise with Virgin, whatever. You could also email those people only and just be like, hey, do you know anybody else who would like to join? We have six spots left or five spots left. You know what mean? Know what I'm saying, Vern? Comment if you know what that reference is, and congrats for making it this far. Okay. You gotta track this in your CRM, and it's so easy to do it. You could even, if you're like, I don't have a travel CRM, I don't have an email newsletter CRM, then spreadsheet. All of us, most of us, not all of us, but many of us use Google Workspace. And now Google Workspace includes Gemini AI Assistant. So you could open up a new spreadsheet in your Google Drive, click on the little Gemini, and be like, help me make a spreadsheet to track. where people are traveling to or the and the resort brand have a column for the resort brand, have a column for the cruise line, have a column for the destination, have a column for their travel dates. And then you could probably send set up zapier notifications or ask Gemini how to connect it with your calendar so you can just have a reminder sent to send them an email. If you want to go real old school but at your scaling, also If you're scaling enough, you should probably have a CRM. But if you don't, that's a way to really start. And then when you do get a CRM, you're gonna be like, this is way better than my janky spreadsheet. but you can even ask Gemini to help you put in a field for the client stage, their next scheduled touch point. Whatever you want to do in there. I say this because I hear a lot of agents and it it's nice you can train Claude and you can train ChatGPT and also Gemini is included in your workspace. So if you're paying for ChatGPT or Claude, be very like maybe try out Gemini if you're like, I need to do some budget cuts. And I get it, because you've probably trained your AI already. Anyway. And remember our batching conversation. We have task by task systems. Okay, this ecosystem doesn't need daily attention. Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly batch sessions for these types of emails, whatever. Reviewing who is due for a touch point at each stage. Like I said, put it on your VCRM dashboard. Because everyone uses VCR V CRM. Set up a reminder, sorry, in your travel agency CRM. I just started talking like you work on my team, like you're one of my agents. You're like, bitch, I don't use VCRM. It sucks. No, it's fine. It's fine for me. But you can you should be able to set up reminders for each profile, follow-ups for the trips, and have that on your dashboard. And so when you see that dashboard, you can check through your notifications on like CEO time or just like Monday morning when you're writing out your week. And that way you can batch those emails out. anyway, this closes out the stretch on the two X rule and building real lasting value from your past clients. I'm excited for tomorrow's episode, my notes for tomorrow. Social media people are getting burnt out on it. Because of all the AI posts and what that means for how you can connect with people because you have a huge advantage, everybody. Have a great day. I'll see you tomorrow.