Q1 – Sales Automation & The Wizard!
We measured our customer happiness and how we can further improve the product with our customer survey, sent to customers and new users on the site. We achieved a Net Promoter Score of 83 with a fantastic 86% of people saying the likelihood of recommending Timbuktu to a friend being 9 or 10/10. The main benefits people who’d used Timbuktu saw was having both the ability to plan their own trip with useful information and the added support and advice from our safari experts.
We launched an automated website chat-bot to help our visitors find the right tools for their stage of trip planning. This in turn has increased the capacity of the sales team as more of our visitors are using our website planner as opposed to having to ask our sales team for help.
In addition, we created three new versions of The Wizard allowing travellers to instantly find their perfect trip based on their interests. You’re asked a series of quick and easy questions about what it is you want from your trip and with some of our safari magic we create your perfect trip ideas.
Q2 – Launching Transfers, Trip Ideas, Lodge Snippets & DCMN
We launched Transfers allowing people to select how they get from A to B with accurate prices including car, plane, boat and even helicopter!
We also introduced Trip Ideas which allows guests to flick through suggested itineraries at different budget levels for all our existing trips, helping them to choose within their budget range.
We have been writing Lodge Snippets for each property across Africa with high level content to help our travellers easily decide where to stay (What you’ll love, Insiders tip and Something to think about). See an example with Chinzombo Camp.
We signed up 7 blogs that are embedding the Timbuktu widget and working on an affiliate, revenue share partnership from which we have already seen influenced sales.
Q3 – Saying goodbye to some great members of the team
Q3 was a tough quarter at Timbuktu. Despite consistent growth, strong sales performance and some big tech updates, we had to scale back the team slightly due to cash flow in order to become profitable as a business.
We built and introduced a new version of the Trip Editor to make it easier for guests to create and build their own trips with suggested next regions.
We started writing new and improved planning guides for countries across Africa in order to improve conversion on the site and increase organic traffic to the blog. Q3 saw 42,000 organic visitors (90% growth compared to Q3 2018).
Q4 – B2B, Special Offers, Post Cards & 2X Growth
We built the first version of our B2B platform, which allows independent travel consultants and agents to easily create trip ideas and quotes for their travellers, accept payments, and generally better manage the booking process. It has already been proven with one independent travel consultant who has been using the platform to sell to her guests over the past two years. We are now testing the product with a small group of pilot agents with a view to launching in Q2 2020. This is a hugely exciting model as it’s leveraging off the existing technology and content we’ve created with Timbuktu and is extremely scalable.
Special Offers are now officially in motion which is very exciting as it will allow our guests to easily access unique deals across Africa and use them to plan their own dream trip. It will also make it easier for our sales team to help our guests to find great savings and increase our margin.
We sent out hand-written Christmas Postcards for the second year running to all our travellers around the world which seemed to go down extremely well!
Q4 saw a turning point in the life of Timbuktu and us reaching profitability which is hugely exciting! We achieved average monthly sales of $624k and year on year growth of 116%.
January 2020 saw sales of $815k and year on year growth of 216%. This also took us to profitability over the last 12 month period.
