Build a Checkout Flow That Actually Closes the Sale

You did the hard work — they clicked Book Now. So why are so many of them dropping off before they finish? In Part 2 of the Booking Stage, Nikki, Greg, and Brandon Lake dig into what happens after the click: the checkout flow, mobile experience, upsells, and the small friction points quietly costing tour operators bookings every day.

We talk through how many steps your booking process should really have, the calendar and form mistakes that send visitors to a competitor, why mobile-first matters more than ever, and how smart upsells can lift your average order value without adding a single new customer. Plus how offline conversions — phone calls, chats, and emails — fit into the bigger picture.

In this episode:

• The biggest checkout killers: friction, uncertainty, and a broken mobile experience
• Where to place upsells (and how to grow average order value on any tour)
• Why post-booking silence is killing your conversion rate — and what to do instead

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0:00 Intro & Welcome to Part 2 of the Booking Stage
0:42 How Often Do People Abandon Checkout?
2:47 Traffic Is Down — Why That's Not Always Bad
5:08 Conversion Rate vs. Traffic Volume
9:02 How Many Steps Should a Booking Process Have?
10:23 Common Friction Points That Cause Drop-Offs
14:13 Eliminating Dead Ends in the Checkout Flow
17:12 Mobile vs. Desktop: Why Conversion Rates Differ
20:15 Mobile Checkout Issues to Watch For
24:06 Uncertainty: The Hidden Checkout Killer
26:18 Silence: Why You Need a Way for Customers to Reach You
27:22 Post-Booking Communication & Customer Confidence
28:33 What to Include in a High-Converting Checkout
30:25 Borrowing Amazon's One-Click Concept for Tours
33:14 How Visibility & Conversion Rate Compound
34:52 Upsells & Increasing Average Order Value
42:13 The Power of Strategic Upsells
42:51 Offline Conversions: Phone, Chat & Email
47:52 Why Personal Connection Drives Bookings
48:46 Wrap-Up & What's Next: The Experience Stage

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

And we're back with another episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast. This podcast is hosted by Resmark, a leading booking software and marketing company specific for tour operators. We are continuing to break down the booking stage of the Resmark Growth Engine. And today we're getting into part two. So if you listen to our last episode, we talked all about the tour pages, the product pages, and what gets somebody to actually click book now. But today we're focusing on what happens after the click. This is the checkout, the upsells, and your overall booking flow. And honestly, it's where a lot of tour operators are losing revenue without even realizing it. So, Brandon, let's start here. When somebody clicks book now, how how often do they not finish or abandon the checkout process? Is it maybe, maybe it's seldom, or maybe it's more frequently than it should happen?

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Yeah. It is definitely more frequently than it should happen. And that is that is the reality of e-commerce. I mean, the but the interesting thing about the travel and hospitality industry is it's actually a little greater there, quite a bit greater. So average abandonment rate is what we call that in the travel and hospitality rate is around 70 to 82%, meaning only 18 to 30 percent of people who start that process are making it to the other side. And if you think about that with tours and activities, it's actually even a little bit higher. That abandonment rate's actually a little bit higher. So last episode, we talked about our, you know, like we talked about this theater concept, right? And go back and listen to that if you haven't heard it yet. But like the idea of trying to fill this theater with people who come to watch this preview, and then only a couple of them are actually going to raise their hand and buy a ticket to actually have the experience, right? And when you think about the whole funnel, like we've spent all this time to getting people to the site in the first place, then to our product page, and now to the checkout. If you look at the whole thing, Nikki, only about one to three percent are actually going to make it out, you know, with a booking in hand from that first entry. So, you know, abandonment is happening in checkout, but it's happening before that too. So, so like that, that whole thing, it's really important. I just mentioned that because that last episode's really great if you didn't have a chance to listen to it yet, of just thinking about what happens before everything that we're about to talk about today. And they are very interrelated to some of a lot of the things we do on that last step before they come into checkout make a big difference with improving this conversion rate here.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

So before we dive deep into that, I want to talk about traffic a little bit. We mentioned this a little bit in the last podcast, part one of this. And what I'm seeing in the industry and just overall in all websites is that traffic tends to be down. And that can often be a you know, an alarming thing to see. And maybe five, six, seven years ago, that would have been like super alarming, like, oh our traffic's down 10%. We have a client their traffic's down 10% right now, almost 11%. That could be super alarming, but with the the way we're moving towards AI overviews and AI search and these different search methods, people are getting more information and doing a lot more of that comparison outside of your website. Like Google's goal, they would love for you never to leave Google and to just search and find everything and book without ever going to another person's website. And so traffic being down isn't necessarily a bad thing. Um, our client that's struggling or that has that right now, their purchases are actually up 90%. Their revenue is up 67%. So they saw a decrease in traffic and a huge increase in in revenue, right? So as we go through this episode and we talk about you know what's happening after that torpage, once they are in the booking flow, that's gonna be really impactful to making sure that that less traffic is still converting at a higher rate. And this also comes with like search engine optimization, right? Your rankings. You may have been ranking for a keyword. We saw this with our own um brand waiver sign. Um we had a blog post that it goes up and down. It'll go like number one and we'll get a ton of people visiting a site, and then it'll drop and we'll get fewer, right? But it's not a keyword that's actually that that strong. It's not a transactional keyword. And so it's not as big of a deal because we're bringing people in that maybe aren't that ideal customers. So just some things to kind of frame what we're gonna be talking about throughout this episode. So I want to ask you, Brandon, what role does conversion rate play versus that traffic volume and how do they kind of work together to increase revenue? Or work separately?

SPEAKER_02 5:08

Yeah. No, well, they do. Um and I love this question, Greg, because it's a reality that we are facing as tour operators today. Um and some people I've even heard some people say, well, if people are just gonna stay on Google or wherever else or in AI, then why do I need even need a website? And let me tell you, nothing could be farther from the truth. Because how do you think you're going to surface in that AI overview or get cited in the answer inside of Gemini or Perplexity or ChatGPT or whatever people are using to do their research? It's because your website is not only out there with some authority and with probably pretty good rankings in the search engine, because if the search engine can't even find it, how do you think it's going to get cited by the search engine or in uh you know an AI overview somewhere else, right? Like your ranking is actually what's causing you, even though you might not see the traffic getting trickling down to the site, you're getting visibility. I like to refer to it as search visibility, right? Because that you're now showing up. Maybe it's not your your site, but that the way your site is structured, the way the content is laid out, the way you're serving that up to these AI platforms is absolutely critical in you getting seen. And the correlation when someone comes from something where they've done the research and AI has actually recommended your company, they convert at like a crazy amount higher than the people who come from a standard link in the search engine. So I love that traffic. Like it is crazy to look at. You know, you can see like a four to seven percent times conversion rate on that traffic. So that's the traffic piece of the equation, right? And it's and it's critical and it's you think about it as like search visibility these days. My my traffic is now on my site, but it's also traffic of people seeing me somewhere else. Okay. So let's talk about the other side of your question, conversion rate. This one I think is overlooked way too much. So for spent, and it's partially because we've been um trained in a way over over the last decade plus to just think about rankings and traffic. And I'm not saying that is not important. That's absolutely important, but we've neglected the other piece of this, which I would say today is so critical, which is conversion rate. Like, what are the little things we can do on our website? What are the things we can do during the checkout process that will actually get, you know, one more person out of every hundred to actually complete a booking? If you can do that, one more person out of every hundred, that is a 1% in, you know, like not you look at that and you say, well, that's 1%, right? But if you've increased from two people or or one person and added another person, that's a hundred percent increase in your conversion rate. You've doubled your conversion rate. And that is going to be have a direct effect on your ultimately profitability, right? Because you got the same marketing expense for the most part, but you're doing things better and the output is, you know, often 20%, 50%, sometimes even 100% greater.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So it also makes your marketing spend, your ad spend less a smaller percentage of the overall profit, right? Because if you're getting two people now with the same effort, now you're basically spending half as much money to get those people.

SPEAKER_02 8:54

That's exactly right. It is a it is one of the best things you can do to get a better return on your marketing investment.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

So let's dial in conversion rate on the checkout process or through the checkout process. I want to talk a little bit about friction, uncertainty, and mobile experience. About how many steps should a booking process ideally have?

SPEAKER_02 9:22

Ideally, you don't want your booking process to have more than three steps. Um that's kind of where we see the sweet spot. And what are we talking about? Like what if you think about okay, what are the key steps to a checkout process? We've got the selection of quantity and date. That's gonna be a really important part. Then you're going to have where people enter the customer information, you're gonna have to collect their name and their email address and perhaps a cell phone, um, where they're gonna agree to policies and stuff, right? And then that third piece is usually the payment. And and at any one of those steps, things can go wrong, right? We'll talk about that a little bit. But those are kind of the three key areas that we'll be honing in on uh here. And some processes break it up even further. And then, like, there's just it feels like there's more steps and you don't know where you are, and all of those things can really create a lot of abandonment.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

I think that's what's really important is it to be very clear to the user where they're at in the steps as well. And I'm sure we're gonna touch on that. But one time I was booking a tour and I ended up off of the website because it was frustrating me. It was causing so much friction. I was clicking to go to the booking, go through the booking process, but then it was bringing me back to somewhere else. And then at the very end, like five or six steps in, it had me fill out a form, which is fine, but it was just I was confused and I'm not, I'm pretty tech savvy. So for me to need to drop off and just go with another tour operator, I was like, this was causing a lot of friction. And it was unneeded, um, to be honest. What are other common friction points um that cause users to drop off? So again, like for me, it's not having a clear path on what's next and having too many paths or too many steps. Are there is there anything else you could think of?

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Oh, yeah, for sure. And that's a big one that you mentioned, Nikki. Like that is really, really important. And you can solve some of that with having like a progress bar, right? On the checkout. Let people know exactly where they are. Like, boom, you're here, you have two more steps left. Okay, you're on the second step. You have one more step left. Okay, you're you're done, right? And that's just that helps orient us. I think think about times you've been given instructions in life or whatever. And if you like can't see the app, you know, where the final step is and how many things you have to do to get there, our brains are just like, they want to know that. So give it to them. Let them see it visually so they know exactly what's happening. Um, some of the other things that can really create a lot of friction are an unbranded checkout. So when a lot of a lot of booking platforms um wrap things in their own branding, even, right? And so, like you're you've gotten accustomed to this site, you've spent some time on it, you've viewed some pages, you've been on the product page, and then it comes time to book and you click it, and it's like you've you either leave the site entirely or something else pops up at you that is like, hold on, where am I? Right. And our brains have to kind of reorient themselves because the look and feel of it is completely different. The branding is sometimes very different, the fonts, the colors, everything, right? It's jarring, and that can create abandonment. Um, some other things that will create too much friction would be like a, you know, sometimes we have these policies that are like just like a wall of text. And maybe we're looking at them on desktop and they're like, oh, this is not bad, but look at it on your phone, and you're like, whoa, like it just goes on and on and on. And so figure out ways to present that. We made an update to our checkout with Resmark recently where we we actually encapsulated those into kind of little accordions, you know, and so you can click each one and expand. You know, sometimes we have a few policies, not just one, right? So it's like, okay, I get that, I get this one, I get the third one, okay. I agree, right? And people can take them in little bite-sized chunks. Um and we saw a really big boost on that one step. We track every step to see like what little changes we'll do to increase that conversion rate on the other side. And that that was definitely one of them. Um another one is just load time, right? This is like kind of an obvious one, but like how quickly does each of those steps load? Um, how quickly are they seeing availability? How quickly are they getting through um adding something to their cart and moving on to actually putting in their information, right? Like sometimes those can be pretty significant and they can have a really negative impact on the whole experience in terms of friction.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Yeah, I would add one more to that real quick. And it's it was a issue we dealt with a long time ago. I think we solved it in 2018, 19 something maybe. But it's especially prevalent in tours of sellout, right? So if you're sold out for 2016 or 2026, not 2016, um and you're trying to sell 2027 and the calendar opens to today's date instead of the first available date. Now I have to go and click through nine months to try to figure out if you even have availability. So making it really easy for the the user to know this is your availability and when I can actually do a trip, right? So that that can go a long ways.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

Yeah. And what you point out, Greg, is like not having dead ends, right? Like uh we're actually working on a new checkout flow right now that we're kind of prepping for releasing here soon. And one of the big objects of that new checkout flow has been eliminate all the dead ends. So if something is sold out, rather than just saying sold out, what could we do? Um, we could have a wait list. We could have um recommend an alternative where they can just quickly click on that, see what the alternative is and go explore it, or reach out to someone from our team, you know, to let them know. Like sometimes you're looking at things like kind of in a vacuum, right? Like I searched for this thing, I landed on this one trip. I don't even know that this company has four other alternatives that are very close to the experience I'm looking at. And I'm just not there looking at them. So I see that thing is sold out and I leave. Um, so why not have something that they can go? Oh, there's our there's alternatives, there's other things you sell. I didn't even know because my path of search brought me to this page and I haven't seen a set a single other thing on your site. So sometimes we just put our operator hat on and say, I know everything we offer. You must know too. That is not the case at all. So think about that. Like, where are the dead ends? Those create dead ends create friction. How can you make it so there's no dead ends in your checkout process? That's that's our goal for this next iteration of the checkout process, which we're pretty excited about.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Yeah, I think that alternate piece is super cool because being someone that's gone on some rubber routing trips, one in the Grand Canyon, one in Cataract Canyon here in Utah. Like for me, let's say I couldn't have gotten on that Grand Canyon trip. If I knew that Cataract Canyon was an option, I for sure would have booked that, knowing what I know now because Cataract Canyon was just such an awesome trip for me. So like having that alternate now makes me go and do it. I love it. Well, I'm still gonna go do the other trip, probably, because I want to still go to the Grand Canyon. So now you've got a a returning customer instead of a someone that's waiting or goes with someone else because they have availability.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

Yep, 100% makes a huge difference.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

I think it was in part one of or it was earlier in this episode, but we were talking about mobile. And I know as you know, um I'm on my laptop, I'm on my computer, and sometimes I'm not putting myself in the position. So I have to go out of my way to check our mobile websites and making sure that the booking a call with us is seamless. So, do you know for Moab Adventure Center or Western River what the percentage of people that are booking from mobile versus computer? Obviously, it's really important to make sure that it's seamless across mobile, but maybe like people hearing the percentage will be like, wow, that is really important.

SPEAKER_02 17:54

Yeah. So we get about 50% or sorry, 56% of our sessions. So visitors that are coming to our website are mobile sessions. Um, but the interesting thing is, and this is actually true across the board, this isn't necessarily a problem with our site, but it is very common. Um, desktop converts at about twice the rate of mobile. Um and that's something that we're really looking at on our end too. Like, how do we how do we improve that? I think some of it is that you know, people more casually browse and, you know, especially with travel, like maybe they're sitting at dinner talking about something. Maybe they're not gonna actually like do the purchase, but they're but they're browse, they're looking around, they're doing the research, right? On their phone. And then when it comes time to transact, we are often moving over to desktop to do that. So I think that's I think some of those are the same visitor, like, you know, browse a bit, checked it out, and then got serious and actually booked it on their computer. I do that a lot. You know, I'll like, okay, before I put down the money on this, I want to see it bigger and really look at it, right? But I don't think that's always going to happen. Like, I do think people are getting more and more comfortable doing that entire transaction on their phone. Like there's already transactions I do all the time on. If I don't even bother to go to the computer, you know, for restaurant orders, stuff like stuff like that is just really, really easy. If I'm doing travel or booking flights or something, I tend to want to be on my laptop, you know, to kind of to do that for some reason. But yeah. Um so but I think I think we're just headed that direction. So mobile is uh, it's really important um to be paying attention to so many things. And and like I've said earlier, we don't always look at our business on a phone. We're not going through the checkout process on a phone and seeing where some of those hangups are. So whether you're doing that yourself or whether you're hiring someone um like Resmark Web or someone who can help you analyze that and kind of look through that and and know where some of those little gotchas are with mobile, um we get it, it gets ignored all the time. So take time to look at mobile. It matters.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

I want to talk about uh some of the biggest issues with um the mobile checkout process. But first, I want to show and share an example. We're building a website right now and we're going through the website, we're on the tour page, and it looks amazing on desktop. It looks amazing on mobile too. But one thing that we noticed is because we're in we're on desktop and we're on our laptops or computers, we're able to see a lot more of the screen. And on mobile, the book now gets hidden very easily as soon as you start scrolling just a little bit. So, unless we have a lot of call to actions throughout the mobile experience, sometimes we can miss that opportunity if somebody's ready to book but can't easily see it. And sometimes we want it right in their face. So on mobile, maybe we want to make it sticky, meaning it stays with the user as they're scrolling down your phone. Whereas on desktop, we wouldn't want to do that because we can have, we do have more real estate to put more call to actions because it's more spaced out. Brandon, do you notice any other big issues on mobile that we wouldn't see on desktop all the time?

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Um yeah, you you see a few things there, and it varies depending on booking platform and so forth. But like a couple of really common ones would be calendars. So when you're clicking to choose a date, sometimes calendars do not, I mean, think about how you have to utilize it, you know, like some of them require kind of a pinch and zoom to read. Like, is that calendar just super easy to tap? Um, maybe it was easy on the on the desktop, but it looks terrible on mobile, right? If you can't pick a date, forget it. Your people are abandoning. So that's one. Um we talked about it a little bit earlier, but policy text sometimes it requires like it's literally filling your entire phone screen. But going down even further, like scrolling through that. So maybe considering having those in accordions could produce something. The other a few others are like form fields. If you have a form field that is asking for a phone number, but it's not actually coded as a number field, that can be really annoying. You're like tap, and I have to like change my keyboard and go find the, but it's so much easier when it's a number field and I just go pop and I put in my phone number, right? Like that's that's easy. Or forms that don't autofill. Like so much of what happens to me most of the time is it's just autofilled. I've got my stuff stored in Chrome and I hit the name field and boom, the whole form's filled out. And I can I can do that in literally a second. I've filled out almost the whole form because they're mostly asking for the same thing and that stuff's already stored. So make sure your forms are doing that, and then you don't have to worry about a lot of these other things. Um and then the other thing you see on mobile, which, if we're not paying attention, can creep in there and just literally wipe out our mobile bookings. But like sometimes your keyboard pops up and covers key areas like a call to action. Or the other thing I've seen, I saw it on a site just a couple weeks ago. Um, here's the call to action button. It's nicely like frozen across the bottom, but it's covered up by chat. So you can't and you can't move the chat around. It's like, ah, the button I need is hiding under that thing and I can't get to it. And on desktop, it's like, no, I didn't even notice it because I've got tons of space there, but everything crams together. And what is, you know, covering up on top of that?

unknown 23:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Definitely pop-ups on mobile are is something that I try to avoid because especially if you have a live chat widget and then you have your accessibilities, and then you have your cookies, and then now you have a pop-up, and maybe you have a banner. There's just too much. There's just too much noise happening. Um, and you just want to show them your beautiful hero image with your call to action. So sometimes simple is okay, you know?

SPEAKER_02 24:05

Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned, Nikki, I don't think we talked about this, but you briefly mentioned it. You said um another checkout killer is uncertainty. Um I don't think we actually touched on it, but I just want to mention a couple things with this because it is like really important. So we think about what I like to call checkout killers, as you mentioned. You got friction, we talked about that. You've got mobile, we went into that. But there's two others that are really important. And one of them is uncertainty. So this is one that is overlooked all the time. Like, and there's a few areas where it creeps into the picture. So your pricing is is the price there? Is it clear? What's included, what's not? Like, does it have all the taxes and fees and everything there soon in the process, right? Um, not having your cancellation policy very easily readable and right there with it. When people can't see that and they're about to make a purchase, you're probably gonna lose the sale because they don't understand, they want to understand the risk, right? In in putting a payment down. So make sure that's clear. The other thing is like um having, I see this all the time where people miss this, like having the details there about where to meet and and what to bring. I'm not talking about like a big extensive list, but just simply that you're booking the 8 a.m. tour and you click it and it shows you that at 8 a.m. you're gonna meet at this location and remember these couple of things. It's like a sentence or two that they kind of go, okay, that's what's happening. Again, if you can't visualize yourself doing this or see how it happens, it's the same problem with the progress bar. It's like, okay, I click the 8 a.m. I don't even know what's about to happen. I'm about to put down my money and I don't know where I'm supposed to be at 8 a.m. Like it didn't tell me anything. It just told me I was booking the 8 a.m., which is fine for like movie tickets. We know what to do, right? I'd show up to the theater for the movie. I don't need you to tell me go sit in my seat and do this thing. But with tours and activities, it's a different thing. Like, does it meet at that place? Am I supposed to get myself to the river? Like, what is going on? Um, say that, right? So that's those are some things with uncertainty. And then the other one I'll throw in there is silence. And what I mean by that, which seems kind of funny because it's like, well, of course it's silence. I'm just clicking away on their phone or keyboard or whatever, booking this. But what happens when they're in the middle of that and they want to talk to somebody? They have that code. They're ready to buy, but there is nowhere that they can see how to do that. Could I make a quick phone call and just ask a quick question before I put down $400 or $4,000? Like, I need to be able to do that, right? Or is there a live chat that I can quickly just, hey, I'm in the middle of this purchase, something came up. You know, I've got to ask this question before I, before I finalize this. When there's no way to do that, their only option is to abandon. So, so all four of those are big ones, right? We've got friction, we've got uncertainty, we have silence, and we have mobile. And if we can solve those four in our checkout process, we're gonna see a boost in conversion rate.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

And right now we're talking about a checkout process, but when I think of the booking stage in our customer life cycle, that's immediately post-booking as well. And if that part has uncertainty or is silent as well, I think that's damaged as well. People are gonna start canceling a lot quicker, which then obviously doesn't help your conversion rate because now they're unconverted. And this happens all the time. I my wife, she went to Taylor Swift concert during her tour in New Orleans, booked a tour in like Pensacola, Florida, or somewhere out there, and like they she heard nothing from them after the booking. And she was so nervous, she's like, I just got scammed, this isn't even a real business. How do I get my money back? And then they finally reached out and she was okay, she had a great time. But that uncertainty immediately starts to have negative feelings toward your company, the tour, that's just gonna negatively impact the experience.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

So yeah, especially when you talk about all your all your savings on a Taylor Swift ticket price, right? Like it gets even more serious.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Exactly. Yeah. So, Brandon, we talked about a lot of things not to do, um, just barely, and things that we should avoid doing. What are just a couple things that are very valuable to have in your checkout? Like just two or three things that are would be would help you be high converting if you include these things.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Yeah, and a lot of these are the answer to what we just talked about, right? What is the answer to removing friction, to removing uncertainty and silence and the mobile experience? So here's a handful of them. Um try to have your brand continue through the experience, right? Same fonts, colors, logos, everything is continuing there. Get your progress bar in place during the checkout. Show them how many steps it is, exactly what they are and where they're at. Um, look at your collapsible policies. Have a persistent like trust bar somewhere, whether that's, you know, frozen at the top underneath the tour name, whether it's down the sidebar. Um, we're looking at some of those in the in the new piece we're gonna, we've already implemented that, but we're actually putting some of those into the newest checkout process that will be even better on mobile to kind of make sure they stay there. Umce you've seen them on the tour page, you're like, okay, that gave me enough, enough like connection and trust that I'm gonna go ahead and check out, right? And then you get to check out and they all disappear. You're like, oh, now I'm about to put my credit card in. Do I still trust this company? Are they legitimate? Like, you know, you need to see those things. So have those there. Um, the clear meeting logistics, all of that is right there with them. Um, use the autofill that we talked about with that. Just it's like making it effortless, right? If there's any point in the process that you're feeling like I'm questioning, this is hard, I'm having to put too much effort into this, we lose sales, right? So every little thing we can do to kind of make that be more effortless is gonna be important.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

I've brought this, I brought this up previously, but I absolutely love Amazon's new feature. Maybe you all haven't seen it. I don't know. They have a feature that's a one-click order. So it's kind of like their old button they had, but it's literally one click. If you have an order coming already, it's a blue button that says add to your Friday delivery, and you click it, and that's it. It adds it, and it comes. So finding those frictionless paths is extremely, extremely helpful because I like I click that every time. Yeah, let's just get it here as soon as possible.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

Yep. I use it way too much. And uh it's awesome, right? It's like, oh, I can get it there with that delivery. Like, and you feel good about it because you're like, oh, I'm saving boxes, you know. Like I'll put it in, yeah, put it in that delivery. That's that feels good on that front, and I get it right away, and I don't have to do a single other thing besides click that button and uh makes it super, super, super easy. Yeah. We actually so we actually piggybacked on that Amazon concept in our newest checkout where we not quite that easy, but we actually put um an upsell near the end of the process that you can simply click. You still have to choose the date and time. I mean, it's not as retail's a lot easier, right? Like if I want that that thing, uh it's I don't have to choose anything about it, right? But sewers are a little bit different. Like what day do you want to go? What time do you want to go? Um, but we tried to make that as easy as possible. You literally just click it, date, time, your customer information is already there because we already know you're just adding this to your existing delivery, so to speak, your existing order, and then you check out. So um it's really cool to try to piggyback on some of those things that we know are working well for you know broader e-commerce.

SPEAKER_00 32:15

A lot of these things we're talking about are small, such small improvements um that tour operators could could make those changes today, whether it's carrying the same fonts or messaging um into the checkout flow or just these small things. And I think sometimes we forget like the consumer doesn't realize that those little differences help them make that decision, whether they know it or not. For example, when I told you that story earlier about me having to click through multiple five plus steps and then it went to a form, I was maybe just having a rough day and I just didn't want to deal with it. So I just went off of that website and then went to another. So I think sometimes like the way that consumers' minds think, you know, we just have to put ourselves in their position and then consider all of the uh probab all of the possibilities and just make it as easy as possible and utilize these best practices um wherever we can and keep stacking them up, you know. Um, so we talk a lot about the results that happen with our, you know, the revenue that comes from these conversion increases. So let's chat. How do improvements compound when both the visibility and conversion increase? And now we're we're doubling down here.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

Yeah, and this you've hit on a real key here, Nikki, because when we can when we can bring those two things together, right? We're talking about greater visibility, greater conversion rate. The output of those two things together is exponentially better, right? Every every visit that I can get, whether I'm spending whatever dollars I'm spending or whatever effort I'm taking to get that person to my website is compounded in a really dramatic way by my conversion rate. Um, if I like we've talked about before, for every hundred people that come, how many are actually coming out the other side, right? If it's just one today, like a 1% conversion rate, what if I could get it to two? You've effectively doubled your revenue, right? By adding one more person, same traffic. Now increase the traffic with a bit of a conversion rate increase, and that's compounded even further. So the cool thing about that too is I can say, okay, now it makes more sense for me to put a little more money into paid ads or into some other effort that I'm doing from a marketing perspective because I know every person that I get to enter into the site comes out the other side at this higher rate. And that's that's really the key.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

So when we were talking just a minute ago, you brought up upsells. I want to just touch on those briefly. Maybe some companies feel like they can't upsell their you know, a big tour, they have one opportunity to sell that thing and they're maybe not going to return or have another thing they can sell. I would say with that, like how think about it of how you can increase the average order value of each person that books, right? And so that could be done. I know, like, let's let's use your company's Western River expeditions. When you're going in rafting in the Grand Canyon, there's things that you need to have a great experience. And so how do you is it possible to upsell them those clothing items or those other pieces where I'm going on a seven-day Grand Canyon trip? I'm probably not also going on a four-day cataract canyon trip. So, what other ways can you increase that order value? And so for day trip companies or you know, ones that have multiple options per day, how or what's the best place maybe to have these upsells? Is it early in the booking process? Is it after the booking process? How do you go about doing this?

SPEAKER_02 36:11

Yeah, and I average order value is critical. And sometimes it's a statistic we don't look at enough, right? Um it's another one that is very easy to increase. Again, same traffic, higher average order value equals more revenue by however much that average order value is increased. Simple, right? So I look at really three main areas you can increase average order value. Um number one is increasing the price of your product, right? Like that's uh that's a an easy way to increase average order value. Well, you might say, well, what about price sensitivity? What about all of those kinds of things? Um when you're a little more data driven in your process, like we talk about this all the time, um, and we've talked about it a lot in these podcasts, about doing the research to figure out who your ideal customer is, right? When you nail that and the copy and the images and everything is coming together and they're going, this is for me, right? Suddenly the value proposition that you're making with this product is greater and your price can be greater too. We just made some increases on our pricing by anywhere from 12 to 94% on various products. And what happened was we actually saw in almost every case, we either maintained what we had before in terms of volume or we increased it a little bit. Um and the output of that is phenomenal, you know? So if you can get this right, and Resmark Web helped with that a ton, right? I mean, doing all of the research and looking at our reviews and our chat logs and doing the interviews and all of that to kind of figure that out and then dial in our copy and layout and everything according to that makes a huge difference. So so number one is your price. If you can do that, you've increased average order value. Number two is upsells. And you to, and there are two types of these. Um, the first type, Greg, you mentioned where do I put it in the process, right? So the first type is like something that applies to the trip. So this is what many of us refer to as add-ons. Um and you got to be really careful with these. Like, I've seen people put, they get so pumped about upsells and add-ons. They put like nine things in their checkout process. Well, what have you done? You've increased friction, right? Now I have way too many decisions to make about this thing. So, really, like one or two is great. Do you have a, you know, what is it that you're upselling? Um, does it relate to the trip? If it's totally unrelated, it's not a great upsell. You know, if you're selling to an older market that and you're doing hiking tours and like, you know, hiking stick, walking sticks, that kind of thing, like hiking poles or whatever, um, that could be a great upsell. They're not that expensive. You've got an inventory of them and have enough for everybody on the tour to use them if they, if they so choose, and you've really got that dialed in, you know your market needs it. Great. That's an easy upsell. They don't want to go buy them necessarily, but they'd love to use them on your tour. So, what type of thing like relates exactly to the experience that is a needed upsell by your ideal customer? That's that's the key, that, and only having a couple of them, right? Um and then the other type of upsell is a secondary product. So, again, maybe not as applicable to like a bigger multi-day tour. I'm not going to book two big multi-day tours back to back, usually. But of day trips, if you offer more than one thing, there's an opportunity there. Um, research has shown that putting the product in the checkout before payment actually can hurt your checkout, meaning you might increase your abandonment rate because people are like, oh, I started down this path, I was about to buy, but now I got this. I'm presented with this other thing. Oh, maybe I should do this one instead. Maybe I should do both, what should I do? Oh, friction. Um and now I abandon because I'm not sure what to do. I know I got to go back and talk to my wife about it because I'm not sure, right? And then we get busy with life and never come back and don't book the thing. So what we've done on our process is actually put that right after confirmation. And they're good things to experiment with. I'm not saying everybody fits that mold, and that's the exact thing that your business should do. Um, every product is different, every business is different, every location is different. That's why it's so important to test these things. But I would say upsells that apply to your trip, one or two in the process of checkout. Ancillary products that complement the tour, put them at the end, you know, right as they finish. Like most people book this in addition. If you can say that confidently too, to kind of give that little um qualifier to people, like, oh, I want to be like most people. And most people are booking these two things together. I can see one was a morning tour, the other's a sunset tour. I put those in the same day. Um, they go together really nicely. Easy upsell. And you increase your average order value, right? So those three areas price increases, upsells that happen inside the experience, and then actual ancillary products. And sometimes there are upsells, I guess a slight fourth category that you can do. You mentioned like clothing and stuff like that, Greg. Like I need to prepare for this big experience. We do some upselling of retail that happens after, well after people book. Like it happens in, you know, maybe 90 days, 60 days before the travel date, where we're saying, hey, if this is a new experience for you, you might not have all of these items in your closet. So we're gonna make it really easy for you to just click and make a purchase of all the things on the packing list. Um, and those are upsells too. So all of those things are great to think about in terms of increasing your average order value.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

And I don't think uh a lot of tour operators are doing this and doing it strategically before they come on board, before they become a client of ours, we notice that not many are doing this, and maybe it's because they don't know how or they haven't thought of it before. So that is something that our team helps with. We want to strategize on the best practices, and of course, as Brandon said, we want to test things and we want to see what works for you and what's best. Because just because it is working for Western River Moab, it might be a different story and we might have to do something different for you. But it's definitely another opportunity to increase that average order value. So we're talking a lot about, you know, the checkout kind of process and after they hit book now. What is the role of offline conversions? Let's chat about that. Like how do phone, chat, email interactions impact those bookings as well? Does it go in tandem? Is it separate? Is there anything you could touch on that?

SPEAKER_02 43:11

Yeah, this is huge. I mean, we we talk about website. We're talking about website here a lot, obviously. Um that's a service that we provide. But we also um at Resmark Web will help people with putting together a script um to increase your phone bookings. This is something that we actually have in our own business. And sometimes we make the mistake of hiring people and just thinking, like, oh, we have a bubbly friendly personality and they'll be great and they, you know, they get familiar with our tours and they'll just be good at this. Um there is a dramatic difference between people who really know how to sell and have the tools and have the script to walk through versus those who don't. I've seen it in our own business. Like sometimes a 3X Difference between those who are good at it and those who are just, you know, great and friendly on the phone. And they're nothing like I wouldn't discount their personality or anything for any reason, right? But when you follow certain steps, um, whether you're chatting or whether you're on the phone or whether you're having email interactions, those will make huge difference in the conversion process. So a couple of things that I'm that I'm talking about here, you're like, what's in this script? What are you even talking about? So here's here's just a few keys that we that we go. So you got some take-homes around this. Okay. So answering the phone with your name. That's when I say script, I'm not talking about somebody's reading something. I'm just saying you're following a process, right? So you're answering the phone with your name, so and the business name. That's step one on our list. Then people are moving into um putting themselves in the driver's seat. Sometimes we let the customer like really drive that conversation. And so they might call in and start asking about something. We can stop that a little bit and ask a few questions. So, Nikki, talk to me about who you're who you're traveling with. When are you gonna be here? Um, what kind of experience are you looking for? Even if you called and you had something in your head, like tell me about the type of experience you're looking for. I just want to make sure what you're thinking is right for you. Um, if I can learn who, what, when, and even how that's gonna happen and why, like what's motivating you behind that? I can now make like a really strong recommendation that's probably gonna resonate with you. It might be exactly what you were looking at, but I might also say, Nikki, what you're what you're thinking about, I think is perfect for you. Can I also suggest something else to add to it? And you're like, yeah. Um, because it's exciting, right? And then I'm like, you should also do this while you're here. Like, based on what you said you're who you're traveling with and what you're doing, it is just an awesome fit. Now you can always say no, right? But if people are doing that, that little that's an upsell that's happening on the phone, right? Um, or it's a recommendation that's just a really strong recommendation. I always relate this to like eating out, right? I love eating out. I love food. And I love it when your server is passionate about some of the dishes. Like I always, whenever I go, I'm like, what do you recommend? I just like to see their passion and stuff, you know? And like if they're like, oh, you gotta get this dip, I'll order it almost every single time. Um because it's just, I don't know. It's like I don't want to make a mistake either. I might think I want this thing, but they know their, they know what their whole clientele loves and they, you know, I'd love to hear it. And so I think when we can figure out what's in their minds and hearts, make a strong suggestion. And then another piece that's on our script is ask for the booking. So we'll say something like, I do let me just check that for you during the date you told me, Nikki. I'm gonna check here. I do see that we have two seats available if that's what you asked for. I'll say we, you know, we do have two seats available for June 5th. Would you like me to go ahead and book that for you? You know? And sometimes we just sort of wait for the customer to say, I'd like to book that, you know, and like uh their brains are gonna be like, okay, thanks for the information. Uh, I'll go talk to whoever's traveling with me and I'll come back, right? Unless we just go ahead and ask for it. But we've created a little urgency by saying things like, I do have two spaces available on that date. Would you like me to go ahead and book it? And some of those little steps like that can make a huge difference. We've got a handful of others, like 10 things that we try to follow, but those are some of the key things that I think really make a difference. And you do the same thing in chat, you can do the same thing in email.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

I don't want to say an easy way, but it's low-hanging fruit to be able to get on a phone call with somebody, create that personal connection, especially for those more multi-day, um, more expensive, heavy investment operations. Um something similar happened to me when I was booking, uh it was Kilimanjaro last year. I actually jumped on a Zoom call with the owner of the company, which was really cool. Um, I don't know if that was typically part of their booking process, but I had the ability to do that and get my questions answered. And he did ask for the booking on that Zoom call face to face. Um, well, he said, Did you get the proposal I just sent? You know, and then we finished some things up there. But I do think it's important. Um it also creates that personal connection. So now you actually know the people and they know you and yeah. So big part of why we're exactly that wraps up part two of the booking stage, everybody. And really, this is where everything comes together. As you could probably tell, you can drive all the traffic in the world as we talk about over and over again. But if your tour pages aren't helping people decide and your checkout flow is creating friction, like we talked about, you're going to just lose bookings. And if you're wondering where to focus next, start here. So look at your tour pages, go through your own checkout process, find the friction, fix the gaps. And when you're looking at this, also look at it on mobile. Next, we're moving into the experiencing experience stage. What actually happens once guests show up? So I think this is going to be really exciting for you guys to listen to. I always ask you this. I'm gonna ask it again, and I mean it. If you enjoy these episodes, please give us give us some feedback. Just send it over to a friend, another tour operator. It really helps us grow and reach more people in the industry. Thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.