Behind the Scenes Adventures approached me to redesign their existing website to reflect their unique position as a boutique tour company and streamline the previously manual tour registration process with an automated online system.
By moving the registration process to their website, what used to take an hour per customer now takes just a few minutes. With their redesigned website, monthly inquiries grew by 33% and led to $120,000 in new online tour sales in the first five months.
The opportunity
Behind the Scenes Adventures is a boutique tour company that specializes in small group textile tours to unique destinations off the beaten path. After 25 years, they needed a new website that:
- Reflects a growing list of amazing destinations and the one-of-a-kind experience they bring to their guests
- Replaces their manual paper workflow with an easy-to-manage online booking process
- Provides potential customers an easy way to inquire about tours, register, sign contracts, and pay deposits online, all without the owner needing to do much more than answer an email
- Leverages content marketing to increase organic website traffic and generate more leads by sharing Cythia’s decades of travel and textile expertise in blog posts that can also be shared across social media
Bringing a workflow online for the first time
Like many small businesses built from the ground up, Behind the Seneces Adventures had an established workflow for registering, collecting payments, and onboarding clients interested in their tours. The problem was that the entire process was manual. Inquiries came from phone calls or emails, registration, and contracts were done through paper forms, and payments came through checks in the mail. Every new customer required a significant amount of time to follow up and could easily take a week to process all the paperwork.
With the goal of saving time and reducing workload, I developed a solution that would automate and bring the registration process online. They also needed a solution that made it easy on their clients, kept their personal level of service high, and reduced the amount of interaction required. Instead of stringing together several expensive specialized services, I provided a single flexible solution to handle all touchpoints, from contact forms to tour inquiries to trip registrations, legal document signing, and payment collection.
As a small company, it was essential to Behind the Scenes Adventures that they didn’t need to adopt new workflows. Instead of investing in and learning a whole new approach they would never use, I created a tailored solution that matched their existing systems.
One of my favorite experiences working with clients on projects like Behind The Scenes Adventures is when the results of their new website were more than they had thought. Within the first week of launch, new inquiries and paid registrations started coming in. All while the owner was in Kyrgyzstan with a tour group:
This is really cool and is working so well!!! I want to thank you again because I know that… these forms were not easy to set up and test, etc. I really appreciate all your hard work on this site—it is WORKING!!!
— Cynthia Samaké
Owner
Reaching new customers through organic search
For many years, most of Behind the Scenes Adventures’ registrations came from returning clients and referrals, and their email marketing list served as their primary source of leads. With the new website, we wanted to expand their reach. I developed a content strategy that helped them turn their decades of travel and textile expertise and distinctive destinations into content that connects with their audience and drives new online inquiries through search traffic.
In most businesses, content marketing takes a back seat because of the time it takes to write unique, high-quality content that connects with the right audience. To accelerate results, we recycled and repurposed existing content to create nine new articles to support the website launch. With an internal link strategy and strong calls to action for related tours, Behind the Scenes Adventures’ is now being found by new customers organically through blog posts.
While the original website acted primarily as a digital brochure, today the Behind the Scenes Adventures website provides education and inspiration and acts their primary source of new leads.
The interesting part to me is there are a lot more inquiries from people I don’t know, maybe 95%. Whereas before, it was half and half. I sent out emails, and I knew the vast majority of the people who inquired about a trip. But that’s changed, and now all the new people are from google.
– Cynthia Samaké
Owner
The impactful results
By bringing their inquiry and registration process online, a 60-minute manual process became a 5 minutes process and dramatically reduced the amount of paperwork that needed to be managed. The website redesign made it easier for visitors to discover their tours and unique destinations, leading to monthly inquiries growing by 33% and leading to $120,000 in online sales in the first five months of their new website being launched.
1 Hour Savings
Bringing the inquiry and registration process online created a workflow that took only a few minutes per registration rather than the hour it had.
$120,000
Website redesign increased inquiries and conversions by 33% and led to an increase in sales in the first 5 months.