Agent to Agent: Importance of Growing Your Client Base

Dear Tammy: I’ve been a travel agent for a couple of years now and have so far really enjoyed helping my clients book their travels. While I am pretty busy most of the time, sometimes I feel like I could take on one or two more clients. Are you always growing your client base?

Tammy: It’s good to hear that you’re doing so well as a travel agent! Your choosing to be a travel agent means that you really enjoy helping others. It also means that you have an interest in learning about all of the various places in the world that people can travel to. When choosing a profession, it really is important for people to choose something that they can imagine doing for the rest of their life.

If you're starting to think about taking on new clients, just be sure that you’re able to give them the time that they deserve. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin. You have to be able to provide the best travel-related services for all of your clients, and if you don’t, then they will look for another travel agent to assist them.

Yes, I am always looking for ways to grow my client base. Growing a client base is the key to continuing business growth and continuing profits. I’m also always analyzing a customer’s profitability in order to understand their lifetime value. I'm always sure to ask them for their opinions or feedback on how a process can be made smoother for them, because their opinion counts!

For the last 25 years, I’ve been growing my client database by using lead generation. I also put a lot of focus on free giveaway trips. I went from 2 people to now over a quarter-million people, so it works!

You can use a customer relationship management system if you aren’t using one already as this is one of the best ways you can collect, save and analyze your customer info.

Revising your marketing strategy may be a good idea if you haven’t done so in the last year or so. This is necessary because objectives and demographics can change often and you want to be sure that you’re still on track.

Volunteering for local speaking engagements that you feel would be beneficial to your travel business is also a good idea as it can lead to a lot of networking opportunities.

Understand that when you attract new customers, you need to make sure that you’re doing everything you can to retain them long term. This includes doing things like keeping your website content updated so it’s always fresh and offering informative newsletters.