Heads In Beds Show - Building Assets For Your Vacation Rental Marketing

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

In this episode, you will learn what valuable things you can implement right now that will benefit your vacation rental marketing forever. Using email marketing to build a solid database of potential and returning guests. 

Hey there, and welcome to episode two of the Heads in Bed show. I'm your host, Conrad O'Connell. So today we're going to talk about what you can put in place now that's going to benefit your vacation rental marketing forever. So in the last episode, we spent some time talking about email marketing, we spent some time talking about SEO strategy and really what are the channels that you want to invest in that are going to help you long term. So today we're going to dive a little bit deeper into what the individual tactics are that you can put in place now that are going to continue to benefit you over the long term. So today we're going to go a little bit deeper into the email marketing side of things.

We're going to go a little bit deeper into some of the practices and techniques and strategies that you can put in place that you are going to see benefits from. So let's get into it. Let's start off with email marketing. So when you consider how you're creating your email marketing strategy for your vacation rental business, in our last episode, we talked a lot about collecting email addresses from people coming from listing sites. So naturally, the question is, well, how do I do that? Some of our clients typically will come

through and have maybe a rental agreement or some kind of contract that the guest may sign before they actually go ahead and stay in the property. Very common for lots of clients that we work with to have some sort of requirement of documentation or again, a rental agreement before they go in. And most of those agreements have a field on there for email. So naturally, with the guest permission, or making sure that that's clear inside of the rental contract, if you have their permission to do so, you can add that person to your email marketing database of choice, and then have someone that you can market to over the long term. So if that's scalable, that's something that works for you, there's a way to keep track of it, then that's a valid strategy of building emails from people who have stayed with you before.

The next thing, of course, is that people are probably contacting you all the time. Once your website starts to get enough traffic, or whether it's just people contacting you via social media, whatever the case may be, as you market and promote your vacation rental properties, you're going to find that people are going to contact you and you're going to have a chance to get their email address. So again, with their consent, with their permission, you can also add those people to your list. Typically, we'll find if we're adding these contacts into a marketing database system, like MailChimp, for example, we might want to tag these people differently. People who have specifically stayed with you might have a different tag applied to them, as opposed to people that have just acquired before. Naturally, the quality of these

leads and the engagement that you'll typically see from these people are going to differ. People that have stayed with you are probably going to have higher engagement rates, higher open rates, click rates, et cetera, on email marketing than someone who maybe inquired one time but didn't actually find a booking that made sense for them. They weren't able to actually book with you one time. So the things that you can put in place now is an email collection system, whether it's inquiries or people who are interested in staying with you, or whether it's actually past guests. It's a bummer when we start to work with a client, and we find that they have, you know,

years of their company that's gone by where they've done very little or no actual email collection of people that have stayed with them before. So the rental agreement is one way to do it. We also have some experience with many of our clients using a tool like stayfi, S-T-A-Y-F-I.com. That's a phenomenal tool that essentially is a wireless bridge between the internet or the Wi-Fi inside of your vacation rental property and your email marketing tool of choice. So when the guest actually goes to stays in the property, they go to connect to the Wi-Fi, a splash page or page comes up that encourages them to opt into your email marketing communication and use their email to actually access the Wi-Fi in the property. So we find that, you know, a high percentage of people that are staying in your property who are connecting to the Wi-Fi

are willing to opt in and give this information. It's very similar, honestly, to how a lot of hotels perform the same task. You know, you go into a hotel, you put in your last name and your room number, and then you're able to access the internet and the Wi-Fi typically for free. So in vacation rentals, a very similar concept. You go to access the internet. In exchange, I'm giving them my email address. And then I'm getting, you know, on the back end, I'm getting the free Wi-Fi. And then of course, with consent, with permission, we can add that person to our email marketing

list as well. So using a system like that or having a system of access, whether it's a welcome book product like Hostfully or Touchday, I think you can also collect emails from both of those systems as well. That's a great way to build people who are actually staying in your vacation rental. The kind of secondary benefit of using tools like that is that most vacation rental properties don't just have one guest, right? There may be two, three, four.

Some of the clients that we work with have properties that sleep 25 people in them. So where appropriate, instead of just getting a single email from a booking, even a direct booking where you may know the name, phone number, email, et cetera, of the person that booked, there might be 10 other people that are in that party or in that group that are actually staying with that person. So instead of just getting one email per stay, naturally that's a slow way to actually grow your email list. You can get 10 instead, right? As from each guest that's actually accessing the Wi-Fi during their stay. So putting a system like that in place early benefits you. Even if you don't do a lot of marketing to that audience in the short term, over the long term, you're going to see a lot of benefit from it because just by kind of letting that

system run its course, it's in your properties, you're collecting emails, you're going to end up with a few hundred or a few thousand really high quality, hopefully really engaged emails, once you may decide to do a more expansive email marketing campaign at some point in the future. And again, I think it's a scenario where you can't go back and do that later. You can't decide a year from today, oh, I'm going to go, you know, get Stafi installed in my properties and then get all the emails that I missed in the meantime. So that's something that we think has a lot of value. Another thing that we think benefits you is having your analytics and having your tracking upfront and saved and archived as early as possible. So when you initially build out your vacation rental website, you may find that you don't have necessarily much traffic coming into

the site. That's to be expected. But what we do recommend is having Google Analytics installed on that website so that you can actually get a sense of how many people are coming and then you can measure your traffic as it grows over time. So unfortunately, over the years, we've had some situations where we've worked with clients and they have either no analytics

installed on their site at all, so we just don't know how much traffic is coming to the site, or they maybe did a redesign and instead of saving that analytics data from their old site, they just created a new profile or they didn't actually archive

or put that data in a single place that could be referenced later on. So installing analytics and tracking scripts and reporting as early as possible, even if you don't look at those numbers and do a lot with them in the short term, benefits you in the long term once you can actually see the impact of traffic and conversions and online bookings as you continue throughout your business. So once you have emails being collected, once you're measuring the results of your performance on your website, you can also have that performance linked or saved from your property management system as well. You're starting to put some ingredients in place. You're starting to do some things that are going to really benefit you over the long term. So those are our tips for

today. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope to catch you on the next show.