A healthy travel business is a growing travel business. That’s why, even if you have a solid base of repeat clients (but especially if you don’t), it’s so important to be thinking about ways to build your list of leads.
No doubt about it, though, this becomes harder to do when you work from home, as many travel pros do today.
Instead of relying on foot traffic coming in to your storefront agency — you have to drum up digital traffic online.
One of the best ways to do that is with something called an opt-in offer. You may have heard it referred to as a lead magnet or IFO, but essentially, an opt-in offer is a valuable piece of content you give away for free in exchange for a prospect’s email address. Then, you can market to that prospect via email! (If you’re still iffy about how an opt-in offer works, this blog post should help).
Often, biz owners will create some sort of free downloadable pdf guide for their opt-in offer. Nothing wrong with that — I’ve created a lot of those myself!
But there’s another kind of opt-in offer I’d urge you to try, one that works particularly well for the travel industry.
Enter: The Quiz.
To make this work as an opt-in offer, you would use an online quiz builder to set up your quiz, on a topic that would appeal to your ideal audience, and then to get their results someone taking the quiz would need to enter their email address. That’s how you turn them into a lead!
A quick example would be creating a quiz called, “Where Should You Go On Your Next Vacation?”
I’ve created a few quizzes now for my clients and I’m working on creating one for Bon Vivant Copy, too. Here are 3 reasons why you should give quizzes a try:
1) It keeps the focus on the prospect.
I always preach that when you create an opt-in offer, you should always keep the focus on the prospect, not on you. A quiz makes this so easy to do, by design, since we’re answering questions about ourselves! We all love learning about ourselves, hence the enduring popularity of Buzzfeed quizzes. We also love telling other people about ourselves, which means people who take your quiz will be pretty likely to hit the “share” button too 🙂
2) It’s interactive.
Quizzes are just more engaging than a lot of other opt-in offer formats because they’re interactive — the user has to take a series of actions, a.k.a. answering questions, to get their results. Our goal when we create content for our audience should always be to make it as engaging as possible — and again, quizzes hit the mark, by design. If you ever get the feeling that that awesome pdf guide you put together is just sitting unread in subscribers’ inboxes … then it’s time to try a quiz.
3) It gives you incredible insight into your audience.
Here’s the BIGGEST reason why quizzes make for a great opt-in offer: you can use them as market research. Every time a prospect answers your quiz questions, you get a treasure trove of insight into their biggest travel desires/fears/etc. Then, you can use those insights to drive your content strategy, or even adjust your niche a little.
Here’s just one example: Let’s say you have a question on your quiz like “What’s your dream destination?” With answer options like “Italy,” “Jamaica,” and “Iceland.” If most people taking your quiz are answering “Italy,” then it’s probably a pretty good idea to start writing more blogs, e-newsletters, and social media posts about la dolce vita.
There are tools you can use to set up an online quiz that syncs with your email system. Two to check out are Interact and Riddle.
I’m curious — have you tried a quiz before for lead generation? How did it work for you? Let me know in the comments below!
Do you have any or know where I could find quizzes like this to get an idea of what it should look like? I’m a brand new agent so I’m figuring all this out as I go.
Samantha, feel free to take my SuperStar Diva Quiz (https://go.selfishmetravel.com/SSDivaQuiz)
Quizzes were my only lead magnet since February 2021 until this month and have built up my email list (also non-existent at that time) and even resulted in a few clients. I was able to build it via ThriveThemes as a separate component before they bundled their entire catalog of plugins.