Signature Travel Network’s annual membership and partner conference in Las Vegas in 2018 provided upward of 2,200 attendees a chance to see and hear about what’s next in tech and marketing opportunities.

The cooperative is easing the burden of marketing and selling by taking many of the repetitive tasks off travel advisors’ desks, automating and streamlining outreach to clients, and helping advisors excel at the more nuanced work of managing their relationships with their clients.

1 Putting Advisors First

The conference theme, “As Unique as You,” communicated the concept that Signature is not in it to win it, but in it to help its advisors win it. All marketing tools, social media tools, email platforms and publications are white labeled and sent out with the advisor’s logo and information – no Signature Travel Network imprints are visible.

“We are a cooperative and that sets the tone. But what has made us different ... is that very early on Signature decided to do for members what they could not do for themselves,” Signature President and CEO Alex Sharpe said. “We leveraged the power of the cooperative, and we see that in the many training and marketing programs we have. But everything we create is done in the advisor’s name.”

2 New Client Messaging Tool

Newly available through SigNet is a tool that enables advisors to conveniently respond to a client’s message from their desktop, regardless of the channel the client uses – be it Facebook Messenger, WeChat, iMessage, a text app or other platform.

“Those messages will be sent to a central processing cloud where Signature will push them to a web application (or app) so that advisors can answer clients from a desktop,” said Karen Yeates, executive vice president-information technologies at Signature. “Clients will receive answers back in the app from which the original message was generated.”

For easy reference, Yeates noted that “messages will be stored in a central location within the application for historical access, and activities will be sent back to ClientBase to ensure advisors have a single location to track all communications with clients, rather than having to check three or four places to keep track of one client.”

3 Highlighting Uniqueness

“Our theme this year is fitting. Each of our members is unique and serves unique clients, so personalization is the key to marketing the right products to the right clients,” Sharpe said. “We got them thinking about how they are unique in what they sell and how they serve their clients.”

Signature Travel Network includes some 284 member-agencies with 589 retail locations. Signature-member travel agencies generate more than $8 billion in annual revenues.

As demand for travel far and wide keeps growing, the cooperative continues to expand its offerings while streamlining the burgeoning workload for its travel agencies.