Thank you all so much for being here today. It's a pleasure to have you all. Just some housekeeping things before we get started. If you could put your phone on silence mode or do not disturb, that would be amazing. We're going to have a lot to cover today and we just need your attention, because we're going to be moving pretty fast asked. We want to make sure that you get the most out of this training and it actually be impactful for your tour operation. However, as I'm sure Brandon will mention, please unmute yourself if you want to chime in, ask any questions.

We want this to be interactive and if you haven't yet, please download this sheet that goes along with the training. I'll send you the link right now, guys. Okay, you click that link, it will bring you to the Resmark Systems site. Click download now and it will pull up the worksheet that will go along with this presentation. If you want to grab a pen and paper too, that's fine. If you want to quickly print it out to you, that's fine too. Every month we try to bring you guys on the best industry leaders, mentors, coaches in the industry for our monthly Resmark trainings, simply to just bring you value.

We believe that helping each other grow, showing what's worked, what's not worked, coming together to collaborate really does level up the tourism industry as a whole. I hope you guys would agree with that as you're coming on our monthly trainings, I know I see a couple of people who have been on before. I think without question, one of my favorite mentors is on today. Maybe I'm biased, I don't know, but Brandon Lake, can you guys drop a one in the chat? If you've heard Brandon Lake present at a conference or seen a past training he's done. I'd like to see if you guys have seen him speak before. Just drop a one in the chat if you can. Anybody?

Nobody, it's all fresh and new.

Well, that's okay. Totally okay. I'm sure some of you guys have, well, if you don't know who Brandon is, buckle up, because his story is quite amazing, guys. Brandon is the Owner of Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center. He's taken the two tour operations to multi-million dollars of growth. Being a tour operator himself, he saw a lot of gaps within the operation, which is what led him to his own software ventures. We have Resmark, which is our bookings software.

We have our website, digital waivers and ResmarkWeb marketing for tour operators, which have yielded billions in sales globally. We got some ones, cool guys. Outside of the office. Brandon loves to explore the world, as you probably would have guessed, with his wife and his four children. Brandon is seriously a remarkable mentor, boss, owner, you name it, and he's definitely an amazing presenter, so you guys are definitely in for a special treat. Brandon, I hope I covered it all. I'm going to pass it over to you.

Okay, awesome. Thank you Nikki. I'm excited to be with everybody today. Like Nikki said, we are going to cover a lot. I'm going to jump in and just give you a quick overview, a little bit of my background, how we got to where we are today to kind of add on to what Nikki mentioned, and then we are going to jump into an awesome framework that I think will be very helpful to everybody. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Hopefully, everybody can see this. Give me a thumbs up if you're seeing that.

That's a little picture of my kids right in the Hiawatha trail. Super cool experience up there. Now, I'm going to put up our deck. Okay, so we are going to talk today about a process that we've actually implemented in our own business. One thing I really like to do with these presentations is talk about not just concepts that you can apply, but real life scenarios that have actually made a difference in our business and that's what I'm going to share with you today.

First, let me give you a little bit of my background with that and I'm going to see if I can get, gosh on my side. There it is. I have these Zoom controls sitting right over everything. I can't see anybody here. Okay, so let me just give you a little bit of background and we will start running through this. I actually, in 1977, my father, along with two other partners, purchased a river rafting company. This was Western River Expeditions. I literally grew up rafting the rivers of Southern Utah and the Colorado River through Grand Canyon.

I was a river guide in my early 20s and then I worked in sales and marketing and did some things in some other industries, which I'm very glad I did. In 2001, I came back to Western River to kind of oversee sales and marketing and my first project was to build a website. This is what I built. Looking back, I'm actually a bit embarrassed by the design back then. Gradients were cool and all of this stuff I put in here, it seemed pretty great, but I look back and go, "Ooh, I can't believe I built it that way."

This is actually before YouTube or anything existed like that. We thought we'd be super advanced and we let people listen to comments from our guests and so they could click this thing in a little audio file would pop up and they would listen to people talk about their trip. Seems like it wasn't that long ago, but man, how things have changed over the years. About the same time, we had an operation down in Utah and this operation was really struggling. Maybe it was because of my terrible website, I don't know, but my partners and I put our heads together and we came up with a new strategy.

We did what any logical person was would do, we bought the Taco Bell on Main Street in Moab, Utah. Now, Taco Bell was actually out of business. We didn't want to go into the food industry, but we wanted to use the building. We decided we would call it Moab Adventure Center to prove that good things can actually come from Taco Bell. Now we didn't want to spend too much money remodeling the building, so we actually built our logo to fit the bell shape on top. You can kind of see that little curve up on top and we built that to just fit right in there, so we didn't have to spend too much with the building. We built a brand new website for Moab Adventure Center.

Thankfully, we updated our original design of the Western River site and we built a software platform called Resmark that Nikki had mentioned in her introduction, literally transformed the way we did business. We also got together with a group of lawyers and insurance agents and we pioneered a brand new digital liability waiver platform called WaiverSign. With the help of these systems, we actually increased our guest count from about 5,000 to 40,000, and we are now on a mission to help other businesses do the same.

Like I said, we love to share the things we've learned in our business to help you kind of replicate that. I recognize not every business is the same, but hopefully the concepts that we share that way, you can find some parallels with all of that. As time went on, we really wanted to help companies even more and we recently launched a brand new service that I'm super excited about called ResmarkWeb. We started to create websites for people taking everything we've learned from our sites over the years, which do incredibly well, and building that into a framework that we offer to other people.

We offer SEO, paid ads management, and because we're building off of everything that we've learned over decades of experience, literally we've seen some really awesome results for those clients. Across the Resmark booking platform and Resmark website services, WaiverSign, we work with a lot of different clients. Some of the clients we work with are large clients like LL Bean, smaller clients to medium clients like Backside Tours up in Canada. Through all of the work with all these different businesses, we see one thing that is always consistent and that is change.

Change can be kind of hard, right? I love this saying, I welcome change as long as nothing is altered or different than before. It can be frustrating even when, especially those of you who are in sales and marketing, it seems like everything is constantly changing and at light speed. Take a look at a few of these examples. This is just some recent changes we've seen. We've seen changes in OTA bookings. OTA bookings were down 34% last year while direct bookings increased 29% over the same period, voice search is growing like crazy.

SEO experts predict that the number of monthly voice search queries is going to increase from one billion every month last year to double that amount this year, two billion voice search queries in the US. The growth is crazy in some of these new things, the change is crazy. AI, we're seeing massive changes in that. I know everybody's minds are kind of spinning with how do I use this? How do we incorporate this into our business? Is it going to change the way we do things? Is it going to change the way I employ people? There's all of these changes.

By 2025, experts estimate that AI-driven marketing technologies will power 85% of customer interactions. That's huge. That's right around the corner. We're talking like end of next year. Over the past five years, we've also seen 96% of iOS users opt out. Meaning the way we could target people in the past has completely changed. We used to be able to do lots of cool things with that. All these new privacy laws and everything that are coming at us, they're changing the way we do things. Digital ad spend has doubled in the travel industry. What does that mean?

Ad prices are going higher than ever and it is just crazy. It's just change after change after change. Marketing is even changing. Those who are doing the marketing, I feel like this a lot of the time. I'm sitting all the time not as fun as being out on the river, I can tell you that, but I do love what I do. What do we do? With everything changing and getting more challenging? Where do we focus? I want to just share a little clip from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, as to what he has to say about this.

I very frequently get the question, "What's going to change in the next 10 years?" That is an interesting question. It's a very common one. I almost never get the question, "What's not going to change in the next 10 years?" I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

Okay, I love that. Do you hear what he said in that last piece? Build a strategy around the things that are stable in time, build a strategy around what is not going to change. What is that? If we could look at all these things that we do, what would we say is not going to change? This is what I say, the right message for the right person at the right time. I'm going to walk you through an exercise we did with our business with the hope that you can apply this to yours. What's going to happen here is we're going to create a predictable sales engine.

It's going to have nine steps that you can repeat over and over and over, not just to generate more customers, but to generate the right customers. There's a big difference and we'll talk about that. This is a process that we have adopted actually from DigitalMarketer, but we adapted it for tours, activities and experiences. You're going to see some really concrete ideas as we go through all of these steps here. We're going to work through all nine of these stages. We're going to map out each one of them and essentially answer the question, how do customers happen?

Then we're going to figure out how do we repeat it over and over. Where do we start? We start by asking the question, how do people become aware of our business? That's in that aware column there. Then, we determine what is the outcome we want at the end. Then we're going to fill in all the steps as we answer the questions, what happens next? After they become aware, then what? After they engage, then what? I wish I could say that every sale happens immediately after people become aware of the business, but we all know that's not true.

Sometimes it is, and that's awesome when that happens, but not always. If we don't follow these steps, we are going to be throwing away a ton of revenue that could have been ours if we would've followed them. I mapped this out with our own business. I love to use sticky notes. It's an awesome way to get together with a group and brainstorm ideas. Everybody can kind of do it in isolation, jot down with a sharpie and put it up on the board and then you organize and remove duplicates and all that kind of stuff.

But you get some really good stuff this way if you can get together with your team and put this together. I'm going to share some of these ideas with you. There is a worksheet that Nikki shared. It's in the chat, so you can go there, find the link. You also should have received an email with it and it's also on the screen. In some form or another, if you want to, have that printed out, you can make some notes as you go as to what these things mean and kind of ideas that might come to you as you go along. Let's get started.

Before we get into the nine steps, we need to answer a very important question. That is, who is your ideal customer? If you want to flip that sheet over if you have it, think about this. What customer is your most profitable, your most enjoyable to work with and the most likely to promote your experience to others? Now every business is going to have a different ideal customer. For us, we determine that our customers who are the most profitable, the most enjoyable to work with and the most likely to share their experience with others are those who do multiple adventures with us during their stay in Moab.

Now again, we have two different businesses. We have a multi-day rafting business. We also have a day trip-oriented business, Moab Adventure Center. That's the one we're kind of going to look at here as we go through these processes. We did this process for Western River and it's completely different target, completely different messaging, different problems and pain points they're trying to solve. We'll be looking at Moab Adventure Center as we go through this. We want to find this type of person. Again, who is the most profitable, most enjoyable to work with and the most likely to share their experience with others.

We segmented our customers into four groups by the number of adventures they booked, and we determined that our very best customers do four or more adventures. Now, at the time we looked at this that we were having a very small percentage of people ever get to that point. Our thing was how do we get more of these? They produce four times the revenue as the one adventure customer, which we have a lot of and we spend just as much money to get the four adventure customer as we do the one adventure customer. How do we get more of those?

Some of you might go, "That's exactly what mine is too.} But if it's not you think about it in your mind, who is that ideal customer for you? Maybe using a different methodology. But once you've identified your ideal customer, the next question is, what is the right message for your customer? Let's talk about how to come up with this for a minute. In 1966, Eugene Schwartz wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising. At one point, this book was actually selling online for $900. They've now printed more copy, so it's a little bit less, but it is still, last time I looked, which was a few weeks ago, it was selling for $425 on Amazon.

I actually was like, "That's crazy. I've got to get a copy of this book." I actually got a copy of this book. I've never seen a book sell for that much. I was curious what was in it, what was so much value? It is fantastic, and I'll share with you just a little piece of his message. He says, "Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copywriter's task, not to create this mass desire, but to channel and direct it."

That is spot on and it's awesome and there is so much other stuff in that book to kind of help support this, but that's sort of the core message. What we have to ask ourselves is what are the hopes, dreams, and fears and desires that already exist in the heart of our ideal customer? You can ask your customers, right? There's lots of ways to do this. Surveys, ask them over the phone, lots of different methods to find out what was inside their heart. [inaudible 00:17:27]. Okay, maybe took care of muting. But there's also this, I found this very useful.

Harvard and Bain & Company came up with a tool that's really helpful in directing us towards the right message. They call it the Elements of Value Pyramid. It basically breaks down the hopes, dreams, desires of all humans into four basic categories, functional, emotional life-changing and social impact. You've kind of all seen this hierarchy of needs pyramid before, I'm sure, but this breaks it down into some different categories that I really like from a tourism perspective. Because you can look at these and go, "Oh yeah, I see exactly what people are getting out of the experience that I offer, but am I communicating it?"

The idea is the more elements you can provide, the more value someone's going to get out of the experience and the greater the customer's loyalty and the greater your revenue. We looked at this and we determined, all right, of all these things on the pyramid, our customer wants to feel like they've accomplished something that changes who they are. They want to go home with memories, that's heirloom. They want to feel like they belong to this elite group. They want to have fun. They want to escape and reduce stress.

They want to post photos of all the amazing things they've done. They want a quality experience, they like rewards, they want to learn about the area, they want to experience variety, authenticity, and they want to do it all in the most simple way possible that reduces effort for them. Again, if you don't know your customer well enough, ask them, do an email survey. Ask them on the phone, ask them on your website, ask them in online groups where you think your ideal customer is affiliated. You can even do something really easy with AI today.

If you kind of have some idea of this, you can actually take some of that information into ChatGPT and have them create a customer avatar for you that lists out all of their hopes, dreams, desires and fears and challenges and frustrations and everything and relates it to your business. If you provide that information and create that prompt, you can get some awesome stuff back. But I would say combine that with the human element too. Take the time, find this out from your customers, and then figure out what challenge or frustration are they really trying to solve.

If you found one of these that resonates with your ideal customer, make sure it's in your headlines, your copy, your email, your ads everywhere. I'm going to show you some examples of that as we walk through this process. Once we've identified the right customer and the right messaging, we're going to take that through every touch point of the customer journey. Again, the goal here is to create a system that once we put it in place, it will generate more and more and more of these ideal customers. You can flip your sheet back over if you've got some ideas about your ideal customer and then you're going to see little boxes for each one of these and you can jot down some ideas as we go.

All right, we're going to move pretty quickly through this. Here we go. The first step is becoming aware. How do qualified prospects find out about our business? One of the most common ways is that they're going to search online. Search is changing a lot right now, right? There's AI-generated results now in the search, you're probably all seeing that. We have to think about that in our marketing strategy and that's one of the things we're doing with ResmarkWeb is crafting things to work well with all of those changes that are happening there.

But what will not change there is your messaging. Always. If you can craft messaging on your page titles, your meta descriptions, your ad copy, if it's a paid ad, think about those. Do they resonate with the values? Do they answer the challenge or frustration? Here's an example that incorporates several of the values that we found. If you can see that meta description there, it says, make the most of your time in Moab. That's reduce my effort. See the top tours, trails, food, shops and more. They want variety. Book over 30 five-star adventures.

They want to make sure that what they're booking is quality and take home the best photos and stories. There's that badge value heirloom, and we're testing these things, right? Google keep in mind does not always pull in your meta description, right? Sometimes it's going to, especially with a paid ad, you're going to have all these little snippets and it's going to use its algorithm to figure out which of those go together. But you can place all of those together and it will over time put them together in a way that it feels makes the most sense and that produces the highest conversion.

But at its core, you can make sure that each one of those little snippets, if it's a paid ad, or if it's search, your title, or if it's organic, your title, your meta description, all of that. The next thing is make sure the page that they land on reinforces that language. Here you can kind of see that idea of looking to create the perfect trip in Moab and don't know where to start, Moab Adventure Center makes it easy. Again, reduces effort to get more out of Moab, more fun, more memories, more feeling refreshed, reducing that anxiety.

If you're not sure, again, see our recommended itineraries. Again, we're reducing that effort for what the person has to do to get from becoming aware to actually getting everything booked. I'm not saying this is perfect messaging. We are actually testing this, refining it over time, but the concept of understanding the needs and desires of your ideal customer and speaking to that is exactly what we need to do on these pages. We're actually noticing a shift with our overnight rafting trip guest target.

For years, they were nervous about being disconnected for too long. Recently, we've seen that shift to people actually looking for vacations that force them to disconnect. My point with that is while we might've talked about something a few years back, connectivity in a different way, now we're using that and talking about it differently, because people, the mentality and the needs of the customer can change a little bit over time. It's good to refresh this. Now, we're creating ads and messaging around digital detox and all of these things that are resonating with a lot of people.

They're coming back and we're seeing reviews, "It was so great to disconnect for this week that I was out on the river." And so continue to research it, figure out the values, the benefits, and work them into your message. How else do people become aware of our business? They might see a display ad online. Do those have similar messages? What about print ads? Here you can see we've worked in the values of affiliation being recognized as a certified adventurer and reward, getting a free 40 ounce stainless steel bottle if they booked four more adventures.

You can weave some of that in. Maybe people see a shared post or an ad on social. Again, same message is worked into the ad or the post. In some form or another, a prospect has become aware of our business. We talked about all the steps that might happen, what happens next? How do they engage with what they're viewing or hearing? In other words, how do we leverage content and marketing to engage new prospects? This word engage is used a lot in marketing. In the dictionary, it's defined as emotional involvement or commitment. I like that for what we're doing here too.

Another way to put this is how do we get them to feel emotion and commit to spending more time with us? If you think about all the efforts to make people aware of our business, nearly every one of them eventually drives prospects back to our website. That's where most of that conversion is actually happening. When we talk about engagement, our website is really, really key. Let's look at three keys to increasing engagement on your website. Number one is website design. First impressions are made within the first 50 milliseconds of your page becoming visible, and those first impressions are 94% design related.

If your search copy evoked enough emotion that they're clicking on it to see more, make sure your site is speaking to them from a design perspective. It's so critical. You can see what a great difference good design makes. We're talking about messaging here and delivering the right message. It's also about the look and feel of your website. It says something about who you are and what you stand for and what the experience stands for. How do you do that in images and layout that they're going to see in milliseconds and make a mental judgment about what they're looking at here?

If you look back at your definition of your ideal customer, does your imaging resonate with your ideal customer? I love this. If you're into fishing, I love the emotion this evokes. I love that you can see people's faces. Make sure that a good percentage of your imagery has people's faces on it. People want to see themselves in the activity that they might be doing. We just launched this website for LL Bean a while back. One thing I loved about watching this come together was the consistency of their messaging. What they say on the homepage comes through everywhere.

Our expert led experiences won't just help you get outside more, they'll help you get more from being outside. That's what they do. They teach courses and classes and people shop for retail stuff and then they plug them into this discovery channel that they have and people get out and use it and they get more from being outside. I love it and they know what their customer wants. The next thing is reducing load time. Conversions actually drop by 4.42% for every second that it takes a site to load. To put that in context, if you did one million in sales every year, every second of load time amounts to about $44,200.

An additional five seconds would be over $200,000. That is huge. Take a look at that. Do you know where you're at? Do you know how to find it? Let's talk about it for a minute. You can go to a tool, like PageSpeed Insights, and it's free, you just Google it, PageSpeed Insights, and you can look at this and you're going to see a bunch of stuff that you might go like, "What the heck does all this mean?" You look at it and you see something that says largest contentful paint. If you're seeing something like what you see on the screen, you might be leaving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the table every month.

When we take on a new website, we're really focusing on these Core Web Vitals across the board and the load times are really, really important. We do everything that we can and it's hard. I recognize in the tourism industry a lot of it's imagery and videos. These are big heavy resources that we want to load and it's not like a plumbing website or something that wouldn't be quite as exciting, but a visual factor is so important, but there are ways to do it to make sure that it loads quickly. That's really, really important. We try to make it look like this.

If you're looking at something like this on your PageSpeed insights, fantastic. It's going to make a big impact. Nikki, I don't know if you already passed this along, but if maybe you can grab the link and pass it along in the chat and then we can, and if you want to chat about it, we'd be happy to walk through it with you. Whether you choose to use our services or not, it doesn't really matter. Our team would love to just chat with you and help point you in the right direction with that. The last step is to test your copy and images. There's several ways to do this.

This is our homepage of the Moab Adventure Center website. This is it with an overlay from a tool called Crazy Egg. There's lots of these heat mapping tools out there. You can Google heat mapping website tool and find a whole bunch and compare them. We've used this one and like it, but what it does is it helps us see where people are clicking, how they're interacting, and if I have a button or something on this site that I'm really hoping people are clicking and I don't see it lit up in the heat map, I might say, "Gosh, we got to do some testing. Do a little bit of A-B testing, make some tweaks, see what we can do to get people more engaged with the content we want them engaged with."

Right? Here's something to think about, your phone script. This should reinforce the same messaging. I don't know how many of you even have something like this. We wrote this up long time ago for both our Western River and our Moab Adventure Center people. One cool thing is we try to help them understand, particularly for somebody that's new. We do have some seasonal employees down in Moab and so we're doing this training frequently and they're not reading this, ideally, but they're getting the gist of how they're walking people through this.

You can see that we're using people's names and then we're asking a bunch of questions. What dates are they going to be here? Who are they traveling with? What type of experience are they looking for? What do you hope to get out of the experience? That's an amazing question to ask, because you can find that, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to recommend something completely different than what you think you want and I'm going to make a really strong recommendation and tell you why." It's powerful when that happens. On the right side of the screen, you can see there we talk to what are they doing in ResMark as they go.

You could do that with your reservation system, whatever it is. It can be a really helpful training tool and you can do the same thing with online chat, because a lot of our conversations are happening there. Sometimes we let the customer drive the conversation maybe a little more than we should and we become order takers and when we can inject ourselves and learn a little bit about them and then really have a more fruitful conversation and recommendation. When they walk into your location, do they see the same messaging? All of this helps to drive engagement.

When we think about engagement, we want people to get to the conversion that we want them to book, and some of them do. Some of them go right from being aware to engaging, getting excited and just booking and that is awesome. That is like path number one if we can make that happen. But what if they don't? This is where a lot of companies miss something very important, and that is, if someone has visited, we've spent all this money and time to get them to our website to finally engage and they leave anonymously, we've left a lot on the table. What else can we offer? If they're not ready to book, what else can we do that will help them subscribe, we call it here.

The question we have to ask ourselves is what valuable chunk of content can you offer in exchange for your prospect's contact information and permission to follow up? Okay. Just to give you an example, we created a free insiders guide to Moab, Utah. I know Dan Overlatz on the call has something similar on his site too. People give us their name and email and we send them the guide. This form, I checked, last year, was filled out over 10,000 times. For all of our visits, I wish the percentage was even higher than that, but that's 10,000 people that didn't book, but requested this. That's awesome. Now, we have their email and permission to send them something.

In the guide, just to give you an idea if you wanted to create something like this, and I'm not saying that, there's other ways to do this, right? Lots of ways you could think about doing this. We chose this method and we try to keep the same messaging for our ideal customer consistent throughout it. We put some fun things in there. We recommend restaurants, and it's not all just about our tours. It's like, here's a map of the city, here's restaurants and not just a restaurant, but we suggest you order this dish at this restaurant, because amazing. People love that kind of insider local knowledge. How do you do that?

The first step is to build a lead form after you've identified the right content, right? There are a lot of form builders out there. We use Resmark, which of course makes it really easy, because it integrates directly into the system. But you could use third-party systems, like Google Forms. OptinMonster has one, your email platform might have one, but in some form or another, identify the right content, put it out there as a lead magnet and start collecting this. We actually build the subscription process into the phone script. If they don't make a booking, just like on the website we say, "Hey, we've got this incredible guide, can we go ahead and send it to you?"

They give us their email address and we send it on, and a lot of them happen that way. Once someone has subscribed, you need to nurture them towards conversion. It's one thing to get the email and just sit on it and put them in your newsletter list, and that's not what I'm talking about. That would be good. But what would be better is how to get your prospects to continue engaging with the business and move them towards that initial purchase or conversion. Here are a few ideas. One of the most effective ways to continue keeping our customer engaged is that we send personalized follow-up emails.

If you can do this through your reservation or your sales system, that is key, because then it can kind of integrate with the moment they book and message paths change and all of that. I'll just show you a few examples of messages we send. The first email that we send, we try to provide a very personal touch. It comes from Lisey, who's also one of the real people who is answering the phone. There's a very good chance they might've even talked to her or will talk to her somewhere in their journey.

If they call, it also includes a link to a video from our operations manager. People love to see faces and names of real people behind the business. It means a lot. You'll notice that the copy and the videos, again, conveying the same message built for our ideal customer, we send another email with ideas to plan an itinerary. Again, this is not all about the things we sell. We're not just saying, "Book this, this, this," and everything that makes us money, we're including value in here.

We're saying, "Hey, there's an incredible scenic drive right here. You could go check out these restaurants and see this place." But then mixed into that, of course, are some of the activities we sell. We have a quick follow-up this design to start a conversation that helps move them towards making a booking. I love this one and we get a lot of replies to it. Sometimes we get pretty verbose in our emails. Sometimes the two-sentence end with a question email is what people go, "Oh, I should reply to Lisey, so I'm not being rude." That's awesome.

Sometimes they get ignored too, but we get a lot and it starts a conversation, which is ultimately what we're trying to do. One last idea I'll share with you is we took a list of all our recent email leads. We created custom audiences on Facebook and Instagram, and then we serve up ads to that audience to help nurture them through the process, while they're getting these other emails and they're getting remarketing ads or retargeting ads on the Google Display Network.

All of these things are working together at the same time and they're seeing us everywhere after they've interacted with us. I'm just going to share with you a quick example of a video. Again, this video idea here is that it puts the idea of multiple adventures in their head. That's what we're trying to convey and all the other values that we talked about. This video actually features a lot of my kids in here, because they are very affordable models, so here you go. Okay, awesome.

Hopefully, that gives you a few ideas as to what you can do in that nurturing phase of the journey. Keep in mind, everything we've done so far is to drive prospects to the next stage of the journey, which is conversion. All the consistency in our messaging, speaking to their core desires, channeling that towards our products is all built to drive conversion. As you consider what constitutes a conversion, the question to ask is what minimal purchase or commitment do we want our prospects to make?

I say minimal in our case, because maybe it's just a single adventure. That's not to say that we can't get them to book some additional adventures before they actually finish their experience with us. I want to talk about that a little bit. A conversion for us is booking at least one tour. In our case, we don't really have any preferences to what that is. We have a lot of different choices. One critical part of this purchase process is that we have a way to collect email addresses of all the adult participants.

Here's another opportunity that's often missed. We often will collect the customer email and nothing else, until maybe the people arrive and they're signing waivers right there on the spot or whatever. Honestly, the rest of the journey will fall apart and we will miss major opportunities all over if we don't collect information for all participants and collect it as soon as possible. How do we do this? For us, we complete the booking and then we ask each participant to fill out a waiver via WaiverSign.

You can see it here on the Resmark page. It's important to note also that this happens after we've received booking and payment. Another mistake we see out there is that too much information is tried to be gathered before the booking. Give me all the participants' information and their heights and their weights and all of this stuff. If the customer doesn't have all of that with them, you get really high abandonment rates and it happens really frequently. Keep it super simple on the customer side, only the minimum information you need.

Get the payment. Then we actually will present something on the screen that makes it feel like the booking's not quite done, which is actually really helpful. Most people will be like, "Oh, I better do this before, or maybe I'm not, I don't have my booking secured." Their booking is secured and everything, but it pops up on the screen and helps them feel like they need to get to the next page, which looks like this. They click get started here. They enter their information, they read the waiver, apply their signature, and the contact information is updated directly into the reservation for every individual product.

But that's just the products where they're participating. What's cool about that is it allows us to then craft messages to them knowing exactly what they're doing, because sometimes we'll have people that will do different people participating in different activities even on the same reservation. The next step that we want to do is excite them. What do I mean by excite? How will you help the new customer get excited over their initial purchase and want to do more?

You really have three opportunities to excite people, number one, immediately following the purchase. Number two, leading up to the experience itself. Number three, during the experience itself. This is really our chance as tour operators to shine and to do something different. I love brainstorming these and thinking about these things. Let's talk about this. First thing they get after booking is a confirmation email. What they expect to see in the confirmation email is, "It's confirmed. Here it is. Here's your receipt," and so forth.

But what don't they expect to see? You might consider a video from the owner of the business or a link to a page with fun trivia about the trip that they just booked. Think of something, do something a little different, because there's so much normal out there and you can really shine in this area. Immediately they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is really cool." If you have other options, at that point, they might be thinking, "Maybe I should book more with this company. This is incredible."

Even if you only have one experience to offer, don't discount any of these. It's still a good thing to do. It's going to engender more loyalty and more excitement over the product itself, more excitement over your service. What happens leading up to the experience? You can send a series of communications, right? This gives you an opportunity to let your service shine before the experience happen, and it gives you a chance to set expectations. We actually have one of these emails right here. I don't know if you can see it right here, but we'll do something.

We get people, you guys probably see this too. You get people who will do a rafting trip, for example, and most of the time we're getting five-star reviews, but occasionally you get a one or two star review. It's not because of our guides, not because of anything that the company did. It's because of the size of the rapids that weren't what they thought, or it's because it was windy that day or whatever. Stuff that's completely out of our control. We try to also use these emails just to set expectations, because we know it's going to influence their experience.

We'll talk about water levels and what to expect and share a video that helps them with that. We'll talk about what might happen in windy conditions. What are all those things that come up that you commonly get complaints about that are out of your control? Include those in these emails. Set expectations. It's an easy, easy thing to do. This past summer, we started seeing review after review that mentioned one of our guides, David. This is a cool way to think about things that you may not know are happening.

This is, and I love this, because he just took his own initiative and started doing this. The story that we start hearing is about these people. They're standing at Double O Arch in Arches National Park, and they suddenly start hearing this saxophone playing and we start seeing reviews like this. When David played his saxophone at Double Arch, it literally brought me to tears. Keep in mind this is deep emotion being felt in the middle of a tour that only lasts a few hours. That's awesome.

It's the kind of feeling we hope people can have at some point during every experience. What are these little signature moments you could create during the experience, like this, that your guides have talents and can do that? Sometimes these things happen organically, like David and his saxophone. We actually have a platform that lets you manage all your reviews in one place, and it's kind of cool, because you can go in and see, I looked at this and I was like, "What the heck? Chad is mentioned 137 times. That's how much as much as our business name. What is going on? What is Chad doing on his trips?"

You can filter and see what are they saying about him or go say, "Chad, what are you doing on these trips?" People are loving the experience. How do I replicate that with other guides and just see? Lots of really cool tools like that maybe you wouldn't catch if you were just looking through your reviews or replying on a daily basis. Once people are excited about your service, we want to help them take advantage of more of your services, if you can do that. This is what we refer to the ascend step of the journey.

Now this might be booking an additional experience, it might be purchasing retail or any other purchase they can make with you. The question here is what additional purchase can you inspire them to make before or after their experience takes place? Let me give you a personal example. I travel out in and out of the Salt Lake City airport quite a bit, and we started using a place called The Parking Spot. Maybe some of you have The Parking Spot in your area. They started offering detailing services, and I went to pre-book my parking at a lower rate, and the website showed me the detail options.

I was like, honestly, ever since COVID, I work at home now and I don't wash my truck very much, so it's terrible. I decided I'm going to add this on, and I added onto my truck. I drop it off and I get a text message from Caitlin telling me, "Man, your truck has a pretty thick layer of salt and muck on the outside, and I recommend upgrading to the heavy-duty detail for only 50 more dollars." I said, "Okay, we'll do that." I'd already committed to the service anyways, and this upgrade wasn't that much of a stretch.

I said, "Okay, that's fine." That's a really great example of a customer who's going to purchase $8 per day parking and ascending to a purchase that was ultimately $175. From the upselling on the website to the messaging afterwards, all of that. Fast-forward a few months later, we're headed out for spring break with the family. This time I'm parking my wife's car at the airport, it's her birthday. I'm like, "Oh, I'll add on the detail again." We drop the car off. What happens?

The same message comes from Caitlin telling me my car's pretty dirty. You'd recommend the heavy detail for $50 more. I actually sent her message. I was like, "Caitlin, is this systematized?" She was like, "Oh, no, no, we don't do that," but I was wondering if it was. But anyways, they're consistent and that's what's important. Of course, it leads to a lot of that upselling. How do we do this in the tour business? Well, we can feature additional experiences on our individual product pages.

Sometimes people come to the website searching specifically for a product, like in our case, they'll type in Moab rafting, rafting and Moab, whatever, and we're the number one result. They land on that and really they won't know if we do anything else if we're not telling them some of that in the section you might also like or things like that. That's good to do. Not that you want to distract them from it, make all the feature of the main thing they came for there, but sometimes that can be really helpful.

Upselling at checkout, according to Forrester, upsells are responsible for more than 30% of e-commerce revenue. That's incredible. Send an email immediately following the purchase that helps them know about additional experiences or additional services. Make it super easy to add them. Number four, when they click check in, make it obvious that there's additional services available. Super easy way for you to experiment with your messaging. We did something like this with a QR code.

This is people who are actually in the midst of the experience. Again, they might be there for a week. We might be catching them on day two. They're going out doing a canyoneering trip and we put these QR codes in different places in vans and on seats and things like that. The cool thing is when you know where someone's coming from, you can really direct that message just to them. Like this, "What's next for you in Moab? Hey, I know that you're in Moab and I know you're on one of our trips."

So I can say something very specific about that, that's kind of fun. Next idea is selling more through retail. How excited people are about their experience with your business directly influences these sales. What did we learn from just about every theme park, right? The traffic flows through the gift shop after you have the experience, and we can facilitate that. We can do that same kind of thing in our business if you have something like that available. This last idea here plays off of badge value and achievement. We actually created an adventure passport that allows kids to collect stamps or stickers as they do various activities.

Kids love that. There's a lot of power in having kids tell their parents they want to go outside and do more cool stuff, because parents, especially today, like, "Oh my gosh, you're saying you want to go do this thing outside and get off your phone and all of that?" It's like, "Yes, let's go do that." They're happy to do that. Then trigger specific emails just before the experience that enhance the experience, maybe promote those additional services. We talked about that a little bit, and I think that's an important factor.

Once we've done that, we can really, once we've excited those who have converted, so they kind of ascend further through other purchases or engaging more, our job is to turn them into advocates. The question here is, how will you provide opportunities for your customers to post about your business and make it easy to submit reviews? Here's a couple of ideas with this. Recently, we're on a trip to Kauai. We did a boat tour of the Nepali coast. Our guide waits until we have this perfect backdrop. You can see it right there.

Turns the boat around and he offers to take a photo of us. My wife, of course, with this great photo that has our whole family on there. What does she do with it? She posts it on her profile. Now, we're talking about this experience to all those who see what we did and where we did it, and it's a great way to generate some of that word of mouth. If you have an opportunity to do something similar, we know a lot of tour companies do a phenomenal job at helping people collect pictures during the experience, but it's a pretty obvious one, but sometimes overlooked.

Another obvious one I think that most of us are doing is to send an automatic message immediately following the experience to collect reviews. Hopefully, you're doing that. We like to make sure the messaging is going to, again, not just the customer, but to every single participant. It makes a huge difference. It could be my wife and I both have their emails there. Maybe I don't submit a review, maybe she does, or vice versa, but we like to give them a few options as to where they can post reviews. You can kind of see that here. We like to make sure our links are going directly to the page where they can enter the reviews, not where they have to go search for it.

Just make sure that's what's happening with your link. We do that for each of the review links that we're sending. Then once you get those reviews, make sure you reply to them. It is incredible the difference that this makes. Wampley actually did a study of 200,000 small businesses. They found on average that the businesses who replied got 35% more revenue than those who didn't. 75% of businesses don't reply to their reviews at all. This is honestly an easy thing to do to stand out and you know probably from your own personal experience, what a difference that makes when you see the interaction happening when you're reading through those reviews.

Brandon?

Yeah?

Real quick. Do you have some scribbles on your screen? I think you might have done some, so can you just clear those up?

Oh my goodness.

Your slides are too beautiful to scribble on, and on my end, I can't change it.

That is funny. Hold on a second. Let me stop.

I'm sure everybody thought it was on their own screen and not yours. Don't worry, we can still see the slides.

It's funny. Let me hit play again and see if it, oh, good, they're not there anymore. Are they not there?

I can't see your screen just yet.

Oh, well, then they're not there. All right, just a minute.

There we go. They're not there.

Okay. That is weird. I don't know how that happened. All I'm really doing is clicking the down arrow as I go through this. That's pretty crazy. In terms of reviews, we actually have some tools that will aggregate all your reviews into one place, save you a ton of time from having to monitor and manage reviews on every platform. If anybody's interested in that, message us in the chat, we'll get you pointed in the right direction. Then, we will move into our final step of the journey to take our advocates and turn them into promoters.

The question here is, how will you inspire the customer to talk frequently about their experience and invite others to join them in the future, right? This is really the best thing that we can have happen. I love seeing our repeat customers come back, and especially when they come back and bring other people with them. It's the best marketing that we can have. Ultimately, this needs to happen very naturally, and it's most likely going to be a result of everything else that we just talked about, that you've created a true standout experience.

You're exceeding expectations all along the way of the customer journey. But that said, people are generally a little bit lazy, and so here are a few ideas to make it easier for them. Give them a conversation starter. This is one of the reasons we provide complimentary bottles to every customer. We don't do the big 40 ounce bottles for everyone. Those are just the ones that book four or more things, but we do have these really nice stainless steel vacuum sealed bottles that we give to everyone. It's a nice thing from an environment perspective.

We were seeing a lot of people with disposable plastic bottles and stuff and went this direction. People really appreciate it and they have something that they really keep around and use, and it makes it easy to talk about the experience. Of course, if you have retail, that's a great way that people are going to bring up the business if they walk away with some of your logoed items there. The final idea that I'm going to share with you here was born from a desire to help our guests feel even more connected with our brand.

I personally think this works better on multi-day trips than day trips, but we actually created a way for them to build their own page on our website. Here's how it works. We trigger an automatic email through Resmark after their experience. It takes them to a form on our website where they can fill in their information, including a full description of the experience, a picture from their trip. It actually, like I said, creates a page on our website. Some people will literally go in and write poems and all these paragraphs about the trip, because they've had this really emotional experience about their trip, and it gives them a platform to do that, and then they can share that page with their friends.

That's been pretty cool to see people engage with that. This is what creates a predictable process, and you can call it an operating system if you want, but that is what we have engineered to generate more of our ideal customers. My hope with all of this is that, really, in a world that's constantly changing, where our kids are growing up too fast, marketing seems so hard to keep up with, if we focus on the right person with the right message at the right time, you can create your own system like this that will literally automatically generate more of your ideal customers than ever before.

If you have questions about any of that, want to dig in a little bit deeper, I'd be happy to personally answer anything, share more detailed examples about what we've done. If you'd like to look at any of the systems or website services we use to accomplish what we talked about today, you can scan the QR code on your screen or you can visit resmarksystems.com/vip to get more information. With that, Nikki, maybe we can take some questions. I know we have a couple of other resources out there too. Maybe you can just talk about those really quick Nikki and then we'll answer any questions.

Yeah, guys, real quick, I'm going to drop my email, in case anybody wants to shoot me an email with any questions afterwards. We also have Don, our salesperson on here. Just this past week we just published our Do It Yourself Marketing Guide for Tour Operators. It is 100% free and it's like 70 some pages of a lot of valuable content, but we break it up between all of the digital marketing platforms to generate direct booking. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, email marketing, social media, and so on. It's really comprehensive, but you don't have to digest it all at once. You can implement something now and then eventually add to it.

If you'd like the do it yourself guide, you do have to just fill out the form, but it is completely free. It will bring you right to the download and you'll get an email with it to your email. I'm going to drop you that link. Then lastly, just yesterday, we started a Facebook group for tour operators specific to marketing. We thought because we know a lot about marketing and we really do enjoy just providing value, we thought, why not just grow a community and group where we could all work together and kind of explain how some things work. We get the same questions a lot, so I thought maybe it would be a good idea to kind of bring us all together.

I'm also going to shoot that link. I don't want to overwhelm you guys with value, but take it as you want. Here is the Facebook link. We are calling it the Travel and Tourism Mastermind. It's not going to be promotional. It's going to be simply to help us all grow together. You've got four amazing marketing experts in that group. But yeah, and then Don, if you want to drop your calendar link just real quick, if anybody does want to book a call. Of course, we are here as well on the marketing, booking software, WaiverSign end too.

Awesome. Thanks, Nikki. Do we have any questions that we want to wrap up with? If anybody has anything, you can go ahead and post it in the chat there and we're happy to just take a couple of minutes. We're right at the top of the hour here. We can take a couple of minutes and answer a couple of questions.

As you guys are thinking of some questions. This will also be published on our website, this whole recording, probably this evening, if not tomorrow morning, depending on how long YouTube takes. The replay will go out and you'll also get an email with the replay if you ever want to go back and re-watch it.

Okay, awesome. If you do have additional questions, you got Nikki's email there. Mine's on the screen here as well. You're welcome to send me something directly if you have questions about anything, and certainly check out the resources online and we're glad everybody could make it today. Hopefully, you found some good takeaways that you can apply to your business.

We're actually rebuilding a bunch of things with a couple of our sites, and we'll be putting together some learnings from all of that process and sharing some new things here coming up in the coming months. I'm excited to go through that with everybody and let you know some of the differences that some of those changes have made. Okay. Excellent. Thanks everybody.