Heads In Beds Show - Ch-Ch-Changes: Do They Kill Your Direct Booking Biz?

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about changes happening in 2024 including 'cookies' going away (or are they), third-party tracking, email DNS verifications, privacy-first rules and more.  Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingGoogle Analytics 4 CookiesEmail DNS changes🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. all right paul good afternoon it's a rainy afternoon over here how are things going in your neck of the woods uh you know i i'm i see a little sun outside so i'm pretty happy you know it's it's it's we're recording this during master's week so i'm just happy generally speaking it's uh it's a good time it's it's this is the only time we get to watch everybody golf together now so we could have that discussion for a little while there but uh yeah it could be a long one that could be it that could be that could be uh maybe a two-parter um but yeah no it's it I feel like, I feel, it feels like spring right now, I think.

And rain, that feels springish. But how are you doing, sir? Yeah, the Masters feels like one of the tournaments, obviously, that kind of escapes like the normal just golf world and it escapes out to like the broader, you know, general public will know about the Masters maybe a little bit or they'll have heard of Augusta or something like that. So I think the listener, even if they're not an avid golfer, might be like, I've heard of that before. And yeah, this is like a pretty notable week some people think this kicks off the season but the season's been going on since January but yeah

there's a certain gravity to it and um you know you never know anything could happen there's always entertaining I feel like um plays and you know players there and I agree with you there's always you know discussion to be had around the people that are playing and what else they do when they're not doing that sort of thing, but probably not appropriate for today's topic. But one thing that I alluded to there is the fact that things change drastically in the world of professional golf recently. And there's always things changing in our world too, isn't there? Right. With respect to marketing, ad targeting and so on and so forth. And there's people in industry that seem to think that these changes are automatically really negative. And maybe the, you know, you and I saw these and we're sharing some of these

things last night, some articles and media that was being published, and we didn't necessarily agree with that. So here's kind of our take on the news, you know, as people that are maybe a little bit more in the trenches, and kind of what our perception is of what's happening, you know, and Google does change things regularly. We'll talk about Chrome, we're going to talk about cookies, we're going to talk about tracking, we're going to talk about email DNS. We're going to talk about this just broader movement of like privacy first. And we're going to go through some of these items and just see what is the actual day-to-day impact for your average vacational manager out there that's trying to market, trying to grow their business. Is there things out there, Paul, that they should

be aware of that are going to kill their direct booking business? Or is there a little more nuance to it than that? What's your take? I think there are. I think there are definitely some things that are going to impact the direct booking business. Seeing someone go to the point where your business is going down. My hope is that there's a few headlines out there that are a little bit of a scare tactic and trying to get people to think about things differently. I'm okay with that. But I do. I think that if you've been listening to us and some of the things that we've been talking about over the last

almost two years now, I hope that we've kind of set you up for success to have some of the things in place to make sure that you're not experiencing this, that a Chrome update is not going to completely change the way you market or you sell or your website operates. Same thing with emailing, that there are some best practices that you should have in place to make sure that you're not getting in trouble with some of Google's new updates. with some of Google's new updates. You know, like some of the things that Google and Facebook and Yahoo and all these larger entities are doing, I can understand it from a user perspective. They are. They're trying to give the end user a better experience.

But it's not necessarily at the detriment of businesses who use these channels to market and to drive business. So, yeah, I think that we're going to give hopefully a peek under the covers there of let's dig a little deeper into some of the things that are being said. Let's acknowledge that, yeah, there are some changes, but let's also maybe give something more than just a face value answer that may be meant to scare in some cases. So, so yeah, I think, you know, we've got definitely a good list of topics here that we're going to cover. And, you know, I, I think that this is something that as we have more people in the space that, you know, I mean, I respect a lot

of the great minds in this space, but I also want to make sure that we're adding our, our flavor, our coloring to things as well, because there are few people in this space that have touched as many partners, as many businesses, as many companies as we have. So I think that it gives us kind of a unique viewpoint to be able to, you know, save me some of the stuff that we're going to say today. So. Yeah, well, let's go down this one. So we'll put a link in the show notes to a search engine journal article. Now, remind me the date of this article, Paul, when this was actually written. This is back December 11th, I believe, of 2023. So from our recording date, we're actually about five months back because we're April 11th here today.

So this is something that we'll address this year in a couple of different levels. But certainly something that is going to impact the way marketers are doing their jobs is their cookie tracking. This is nothing new. If you've signed up for any newsletter relating to marketing, advertising of any kind, you've probably been getting these updates. Cookies are going away. What's going to happen in a cookie list world? How are you going to do this? How are you going to do that?

How is this going to impact your tracking? It is taking it up to a slightly higher level. Most of the stuff, like when we're looking at cookie tracking, a lot of that is based on attribution. So it is. It's trying to figure out going from cross site to cross site or going from this site to this site. What is the path that that user is actually taking? that user is actually taking. So yes, we want the clearest visual of the sales funnel that we can possibly have or that user experience that we can have coming down. But it's not going to impact Google Analytics. Ultimately, your primary, I would assume most people, your primary reporting tool is still going to remain intact. Now, if you didn't switch over from universal analytics, you haven't had tracking for the last eight months. So that's a whole nother thing. You should have had that done by July 1st, 2023. Again, if you didn't, I don't know what you've

been doing. We're now closer to July 1st, 2024 than we are July 1st, 2023. So you can't be that savvy from a marketing perspective if you still got universal analytics installed, which now has not given you an analytics report in, I don't know, eight months, nine months at this point, something like that. Correct. I saw some sneaking through. I'll give some credit to me. I saw some creaking through to October, maybe November. But let's say, conservatively, you have had a flat line in your Google Analytics for the last six months. Minimum. I'm sorry. I hope you made those changes before that. That's one of those that it's inexcusable. If I were the marketer there, I would expect this to be yelled at. I would expect someone to be pretty angry with me if I didn't have reporting data in place for the last six months for my branded website, where I'm probably generating some owner interest, certainly some direct booking interest.

How are you measuring the success of your digital marketplace at that point? So when we're looking at the Google Analytics side of things, I think it's a bit of an overreaction to say that this is the end of your reporting and your tracking and everything like that because Google's been giving us the, I mean, maybe we'll say, well, crumbs, the breadcrumbs along the way to nurse us to the right spot here. Like this is not new. And if it is new, again, I think you've just been maybe a little bit behind the times or you're not focusing on some of these things that have been pretty explicit. Like you're going to have to make this change. And Google's kind of been telling you when too. They've given you about a two year timeline here. You weren't doing these

things up to this point. What were you doing? And yeah, how are you going to fix it now at this point? What are your thoughts on just cookies and the ability to track and report and do all that to target people the right way? What do you think the impact is going to be there? Yeah, my take on this is that a lot of the primary channels that we use for marketing advertising don't need third-party cookies. So I confirmed this before we hit record, and I was like, let's just be very articulate for the listener. When you install Google Analytics for default tracking script on your website and you you install a Facebook pixel on your website, those are not third party cookies. So those are never and were never and have not ever been locked. So I guess the way I'm thinking about it is kind of like saying, I'm driving from my house back home to Massachusetts. And if they said that some

random side street was closed in my journey on the way there, but there was another way around it, I wouldn't worry about it. If they told me 95 was closed, I'd be very worried because that's the main way that I'm getting there. I feel like that's kind of how I think about these changes is that the side street

of third-party cookies is these things where cookies are being syndicated, data is being syndicated. Okay, I put a tracking script on my website. The data is not solely flowing back to company ABC,

but it's also flowing back to companies X, Y, and Z. That's what Google is killing and getting rid of is this idea of all these third-party systems. But if you're installing a script that's directly going back into that system, so again, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, those types of things, Metapixel, I guess I should say, then you really have nothing to worry about. So into your point, this has been happening for some time. Now, the recent change, maybe the reason this flagged for some people in the industry to take a look at it recently is that

the Chrome update that actually does these things removes third-party cookies permanently did just drop so the the again it's kind of like warning you six months in advance hey this road's gonna be closed on this day and you hear it and you don't really you know because you still go on that road every day you just maybe ignore it and then all of a sudden you go up and that day it's closed and you go oh how could this road be closed like i guess that's kind of what i'm thinking here is that now people are flagging this because this is now actually happening in real day-to-day use. But again, if you're using the default systems that all the vacation rental managers that we've worked with now for seven plus years are using, then I don't really see what your impact is going to be here. Dare I say your

impact will be zero. Now I do, I do notice over time, this was kind of one theme that I wanted to bring up and we can talk about it with analytics. We can talk about it with this privacy first idea is that over time, I feel like our data does get a little bit less granular. You know, it used to be in universal analytics. I could tell you the exact location of someone, you know, where they were on a city level. I could tell you exactly like what time they made the reservation. I could tell you exactly what properties they looked at. There used to be feature. I don't know if you ever used this one, Paul, in universal analytics that was called user explorer. We could watch someone's journey. And a lot of that stuff has gone away. So I do think we're getting, on the aggregate,

we're getting a little bit more aggregate data than we are more refined user level data than we used to get before for, quote unquote, I'm putting this in air quotes so the listener can't see, privacy reasons. So there is some degradation. It's like me seeing the world with my glasses on without my glasses on, like I can still kind of see, but it's not quite as clear, right? Like it's, I could find my way around, but it's not optimal. That's kind of how I feel lately about analytics tracking and GA4 is that a lot of the same information is there. Some of it is a little more obscured and some of it is gone to be fair. I do think some of the cross device tracking and things like that is not as good as it once was. And I, to your point earlier, I do understand why

Google is making the decisions that they can make, but to make a claim like and things like that is not as good as it once was. And to your point earlier, I do understand why Google is making the decisions that they can make. But to make a claim like this is going to kill your direct booking efforts is just really kind of, I mean, nonsense is the friendliest way I can put that. It kind of bothers me, I guess, a little bit because people saying this in our industry do have a pretty large platform. And I feel like people are going to listen to them and go not maybe have the trust or maybe like a stick-to-itiveness to

like go in and dive in under the surface and realize that really this change is was planned predicted understood processed and has been something that google's been planning for a long time believe me google wants nothing to do with the idea of you having less visibility into your uh ads results that is how google's the whole engine of google works is that you give google money for ads google gives you clicks for said. Those clicks turn into things that are good for your business. And then you continue to give money to Google. That's the, that's the little flywheel. That's the ecosystem for Google. And if that flywheel is not running or it runs at less efficient manner than Google dies, basically. So there's nothing inside that company that would be,

it would be optimal for Google to have less data coming in, or they would hate for you to stop running your ads that you might be running to grow your vocational business, whether that's on the owner side or the guest side. So that's just, let's just get the facts on the table, right? Now, is there a right way and a wrong way to do that kind of tracking? I think so. And I think they're trying to do it on, in a way that's maybe more healthy and optimal for, to your point, the user. There was a creepy element that might've snuck in there, people being able to see exactly where you were and stuff like that. So making it more general is fine, but it doesn't remove your ability to say, I spent, this is what I think the vacational manager wants to do. I'm doing all this activity in my own marketing. We have our buckets that we

talk about, right? Search, social, email. There's a paid search and organic search component. There's a paid social and an organic social component. And there's mostly just an email function, right? Whether it's automated or doing newsletters or something like that. Your ability to track results from those marketing channels is still good. Very good. Maybe bordering on excellent in most cases. You can still see people coming to your website. What the amount of money that they're reserving.

You can see where they're coming from. So if they're coming from email, if they're coming from paid search, or they're coming from paid social, you can tag things, UTM parameters, and see where that traffic's coming from. So I don't know what would're missing here, I guess, is what we were thinking as we were coming up with this show today, but go ahead. And I do, and I think that there's some level of,

if you want more, if you were using Google Analytics for more audience persona creation and trying to understand that and trying to do that, here's the thing, you can still do that. There are still that and trying to do that. Here's the thing. You can still do that. There are still tools out there that do that. We've been working to get more advanced analytics in because there's something to be said for having more of that first party data coming out. If you can get some additional ID information or if you can get some of that and be able to use that in Target, yes, I think that that's beneficial. There's still tools to be able to use that in Target. Yes, I think that that's beneficial. Like there's still tools to be able,

if you want to go more granular, if you want to develop more of a user, again, identity, persona, whatever that is, do a user explorer, there's still those analytics tools out there. So that's something that, but you're right, generally speaking, if you are looking at the metrics

that run your business, the key performance indicators of your direct booking website business, those didn't change. Nothing changed there. And your ability to market based on that information has not changed either. Going back to just the privacy first part of things. Yeah, we have seen privacy affect what we're able to see in Google Analytics. I think we've seen it more, actually, in the Google Ads side of things. And the best example is that search terms list. I mean, it's never been one-to-one.

You've never known exactly the search queries you get for every click and for every impression. However, Google hiding behind the privacy mentality the privacy mentality of oh no we don't need to show the user search term well i i like seeing the user search term i like to know the actual intent that they put into doing that but like this isn't again this is not new that google is removing some information that we found to be valuable as a marketer and and yes so if we don't have that information anymore, now what do we replace it with? And if the concern is that there's nothing to replace it with,

I'll step on that soapbox with you slightly. I'm probably going to step down pretty quickly there, but I do. I'm like, I can understand being concerned with that being the reason. Because that does, that truly does bother me that for whatever reason, we just stopped giving data that was helpful for marketers. That doesn't make a lot of sense. And the privacy excuse doesn't work for me. But let's not delay and worry about that.

Let's work on solutions that are going to help you regain that visibility or gain a different visibility that's still going to be helpful for your business there. And I think we've talked about this idea before too, which is this idea of what are your alternatives? So let's say you decide, okay, the data that I can now gather from analytics is now not sufficient for me

to feel comfortable investing in ads. Let's just go through that fictional scenario for a second. Not a crazy far-fetched idea in my mind. What is your alternative? So you can put money into other marketing channels, other media. You could do more video advertising. You could turn off your search campaigns and turn on PMAX. You could turn on Discover. You could turn on YouTube. You could go to TikTok and say, I'm going to market my business through TikTok. You can market through different channels. We just turned on Pinterest ads for a client as a test because we're trying to test the effectiveness of that as a discovery channel.

Hey, you're searching for this area. What about this place? Maybe you want to stay here. There's kind of some logical ideas there. So these are all valid, I think, conclusions to come to. But I would be shocked, personally, if it turns out that the, again, like you're saying, the loss of the search term data or the little bit of loss of tracking fidelity, if that little 10% or 20% loss of data, if the removing of the glasses, so to speak, impacts your marketing that much where it doesn't work at all or to the clickbait, kills your direct booking business. I just don't see that as realist.

That conclusion doesn't make any sense to me. I can't look at any of our clients that we're working with today who are doing really well, who are doing, let's set a number. Let's say doing more than 100,000 in reservations on the website directly every month. So if I take that bar and I take all the clients that we're working with that are above that bar. And by the, I always say this to people too, like these businesses were very successful long before we showed up. So I'm not taking credit for it, but if I look at all those businesses and they, they tied my hand behind my back and said, you couldn't do like search marketing, for example, you couldn't do BBC ads, or you couldn't do Facebook ads. Or if they like, they would still be doing pretty well because they built a great business.

So I think part of part of what I worry about here, I guess, is people who have built really mediocre businesses. Maybe they're large in terms of revenue, but they're mediocre in terms of the experience they deliver to their customers and to their homeowners and to their guests. to their customers and to their homeowners and to their guests, then worrying a lot about these little, you know, things in the margin tracking and stuff like that, when really they might need to be thinking more about how can I improve the experience I'm delivering? Because when people want to go towards something, when people are actively seeking out, I want to stay with this vacation rental manager, they go online and they see great reviews. They've heard word of mouth from a friend or family member that stayed there and those companies exist. Then I feel like they always can weather any sort of little storm of not having the right data perfectly here or getting Facebook

audiences removed over here. Because all the great businesses that we work with that are in that boat have fared just perfectly fine through any changes that have occurred back to the title of the episode and things like that. So I feel like you'd be most worried about this if you're not doing a great job and if you're constantly reliant on new customer acquisition through advertising, and I don't know exactly how to say it, but it's almost like you're having to fool people. Like I deliver a subpar experience and I need to push a lot of ads and a lot of visibility out there. So the people come check me out, but when they come check me out, they actually don't really rebook that often. They don't really come and stay with me again and so on and so forth. And then that is a different sort of game, if you will, than what I

think the best vacation rental managers do. They don't do that. You know, they have a system to constantly acquire new guests. Of course, they have a system to constantly acquire new homeowners. You know, you know that system very well and how people might do that on that side of things. They do a great job of keeping the guests they have super happy. They leave really good reviews, you know, 4.85, 4.95 averages over a long period of time and then they get 10 20 30 40 percent repeats every year if you look at it 10 at first maybe once they get going it might get as high as 40 the ads are always a piece of the puzzle but it's never the puzzle the puzzle is not the advertising and acquiring traffic the puzzle is creating this flywheel like we're talking about that actually

spins itself more effectively more efficiently as you get going and then these little things don't impact you as much. So that's kind of my broader thoughts, I guess. We can go through some of these other items that we have in our outline, but I just wanted to go through that logic as well and see if that made any sense to the listener. These are, I think you hit it right there. It was that these are going to impact businesses that don't have that steady foundation, that don't have the best practices in place. That's what these are going to knock off. So if the content being put out there is based on trying to educate some of those, okay, sure, I guess maybe that's gonna work here.

But that's not the case for a majority of the businesses in this space. I feel comfortable saying, especially if you're working with any businesses in this space. I feel comfortable saying, especially if you're working with any vendors in the space, any marketing agencies, if you were with anybody else, you shouldn't, like this shouldn't be putting you back on your butt.

You should be, you should have been ready for this. You should have education points along the way that have been kind of bringing you up to this point. So yeah, I think that maybe that kind of bringing you up to this point. So, so yeah, I think that maybe, maybe that's a different way, different way to look at it. There's that like, we're assuming that all this stuff is in good time. We're assuming that, that a vendor or an agency or someone on your team has been staying ahead of this. And that this isn't going to,

to be a something coming out of left field that you never saw. Yeah. I think we talked about this one time before. So if I'm repeating myself a little bit, I apologize. But I think I told you about a client that I worked with a long time ago. Then he kind of went out on his own and he was doing some of his own Google Ads management. And then he came back to me years later and he hadn't changed much of what I'd done, which is not really optimal. And so like, for example, I was using broad match modified as the keyword match type that doesn't exist anymore, but Google never turned off. There were still like standard text ads in there. You know, we had to swap all the responsive and things like that.

But you know, the funny part was he was still getting like a 25, 30 to one row ass on a brand campaign, then like a build, a building level campaign. Cause he had a bunch of units in a single condo building. And I was thinking in my head, when I looked at it again, I'm not potting myself in the back. I'm just thinking, but like when you set things up and he's a great operator, by the way, and to be clear, he deserves 95% of the credit. But the 5% that we did of setting up the campaign to where when people search for the name of a condo building,

they find your website, they see your properties, they see great reviews, they see really clean, well-photographed units. They see a lot of these basics done well. Do I wish we had put in RSAs? Do I wish we had responsive search ads ins? Do I wish we had responsive, less responsive search ads in there? Do I wish we had upgraded to phrase match instead of modified broad? I do. And I think the performance would have been a little bit better had those things

occurred, but the fundamentals were solid. And when the fundamentals are solid, the marketing is almost just like enhancing what's already there. It's taking this, this piece of clay and it's already molded and it's putting all the finishing touches on it. And I think that's how marketing should always operate in a vacation rental business. Now, maybe marketing is more important than other types of businesses that we might work in, where it's, we're selling a commodity and it's kind of like, well, marketing is kind of your separation, right? Because if you have the same hotel room as everybody else, like what makes you choose, uh, you know, hotel A versus hotel B, you know, a Hilton versus an independent, well, you might trust the Hilton, you know, you're going to get a good experience and so on and so forth. But in our space, like

you can prove that you are the four seasons of whatever destination through your marketing, through your media, and by doing the fundamentals really well. And guests are savvy enough to know that you can deliver and they can find that and see that. And those people are always going to have, it's kind of like a magnet. They're going to draw the right guest into them by what they're putting out there, as opposed to repelling them with like really bad reviews and really, you know, problematic, you know, website problems and things like that, right? Like there's, and there's what I'm getting at too, is there's always things that we can improve upon.

There's always those little 10% optimizations that can make things a little bit better. You know, hey, we got this new ad type. Let's try this. This might work a little bit better and so on and so forth. But for the most part, really great, like marketing work and really good operations is pretty sticky. Like it lasts for a long period of time. It lasts for months.

It lasts for years. And so having the marketing agency on your side can be useful. But I would argue it's not something where I don't think you should be reliant on your marketing agency to where you absolve yourself completely of your responsibility.

Right. It's like you want to be a great, you know, Ventura use the word partner. We don't use the word client. But I do like that idea because the idea of we are working on this together but it also means their shared responsibility our responsibility is to execute on some of the marketing ideas but you have a heck of a lot of responsibility too and our our job will go smoother and we'll get a better outcome when you're doing your job well and i think that's something that you know can get

overlooked at times you know when people look to marketing as the savior or whatever the case may be um yeah let's go in a different direction. So we beat up, I feel like, the analytics tracking sufficiently. We got maybe quite a long topic at the end there. There's been some other changes. So there was some commentary as well about the email marketing side of things. Maybe you could talk about, I guess, a few things. There was some DNS paperwork, if you will, that we had to do a bunch of recently. And there were some other things that happened on the email side. So what are these changes and how again might they impact the typical vacation rental manager out there yeah and we we've seen this a lot because we do a lot

of emailing uh on the venturi side of things so this has certainly had an impact on what we do um and deliverability therein but this is something that um and Yahoo have both worked on their spam, spam emails and spam content, which I don't even want to think about what's in my spam emails. I'm a spam folder in any email address right now just because there's probably some value in there and there's a whole lot of garbage. and there's a whole lot of garbage. But I think that kind of the headline that caught me in the discussion that was happening was, oh, all these domains are going down. All the deliverability is going down. And if you're not segmenting properly,

you're not going to be able to send these emails anymore. Well, if Google and Yahoo's new AI tools are capturing you as spam, it's not because you're being spammy, one, but it's probably because you didn't do the initial setup right. is so much about domain and DNS and much less about actually having, I mean, having Google and Yahoo, air quotes, catch you in sending spam there. So I, this is something that we work hard on, making sure those MX records are in place, those text records are in place, your CNAME's in place,

making sure your DMARC is in place, making sure you have all of the necessary items. And we'll put a link in the show notes here from, we've got the MailChimp one here, but you need to have your domain authenticated. Like, again, this is a table stakes type of thing where if you're having deliverability issues, this is a technical item that you didn't set up on your end. This isn't Google. This isn't Yahoo. And it may be innocuous. You may not have

realized that you needed to do it. That's why we're here to kind of raise that red flag a little bit and say, okay, yes, Google is trying to remove spam. And if you're sending spammy emails, yeah, there's a chance that you're going to, if you're not following those best practices, I'm not going to talk about can spam best practice. I'm just talking about email best practices. You are going to end up in people's junk folders, in their spam folders. That's just the reality. That has not changed since the 20 teens. So I think that that's, yes, the fact that AI can do it a little quicker now and catch people a little sooner and yeah, deliverability is going down. It's actually

having an impact. Yes, that's, that's a change. But again, ultimately what it comes down to is if you're doing the proper setup up front, this should not be an issue as long as you're continuing to follow those best practices of email delivery. So obviously my feet are pretty strongly in the ground here. What are your thoughts on this? And how do you see this as a, again, possible degradation of your email marketing efforts generally? It is funny though. I will say it feels like over time our email open rates have trended down slightly but i go i went back and

looked at some of the reports that we sent a long time ago and i was like you know what even five years ago we were still getting open rates in the high 20s low 30s on most lists so it's like it doesn't seem like it's gotten a little bit worse but i don't think it's like drastic i do remember a while ago when gmail went to the tabbed interface there was like a primary tab and then there's other tabs and like free gmail accounts that doesn't look like this yeah in my workspace account but it does look like this in just my free gmail account my personal email and everyone you know called that as the death of email marketing and yet somehow again like on gmail we still seem to get high 20 low 30 open rates on average we always have clients that seem to do much better you know

we've got the small list of like highly engaged past guests where they can edge up into the 40, 50, 60% range. Pretty uncommon, pretty atypical, I'll be honest, but it is out there. And then we have the clients that have large lists that they really don't clean. They don't keep them well-maintained

as far as like engagement. You know, they're actually opening emails, dealing with them and so on. And they have open rates in the high single digits, low teens sometimes, which is really, you know, I would argue suboptimal them and so on and they've opened rates in the high single digits low teens sometimes which is really you know i would argue sub-optimal especially if there's people on that list that haven't opened in you know two years or three years or something like that it's probably not going to benefit you to really keep emailing them so yeah you know we're working on this thing right now internally um which is this idea of

prerequisites so if you're going to do email marketing what are the prerequisites that you would need to do email marketing well and it's kind of this idea of like when you go to college, like you can't take the 301 level class until you've taken the 101 level class. And if you're playing a drinking game and the first time you took a drink was when I mentioned my book, then here we go. 30 minutes, nine seconds. But in my book, that's basically the premise of what we, when we were putting together the outline, that was kind of the premise, which is that there's this layer one, layer two, layer three, layer four, and so on and so forth. And with email marketing, I think you highlighted it well. Some of the basics are really not super complicated. Like you said, it's more of a checklist. Best practice, I think, is a good way to describe it like you did, where it's like, here's the five or six or seven things we have to set up properly DNS record-wise, domain-wise, list-wise. Like, what type of list are we emailing to? Have they opted have they agreed to hear from us great let's pop them into mailchimp or the equivalent type of service that's that's one way to do it if they haven't agreed to hear

from us we can email them per can spam back to your earlier comment there but there is a different set of rules and best practices that would be more optimal in that case so i do think over time marketing channels can die i mean there's things that we used to use that we don't use anymore. So nothing is guaranteed to us in this world at all. And certainly not in the marketing world. Is that any different? Where just because we're doing something today, it doesn't mean that cold email might not work at all two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. That is a reasonable conclusion, I think, to come to. But there's always been some form of, I want to reach out to a small business and get their attention. It used to be direct mail, right? I used to maybe send a physical mail packet to 10 000 small

businesses somehow because my llc is registered i get uline catalogs all the time i don't know if you ever seen these things before but it's like oh yeah i'm like i don't think i'm the type of business that needs like 8 000 cardboard boxes but if i did like uline might come to mind first because they've been mailing me this physical catalog for like, I don't know, five years at this point. I think I get them like twice a year or something like that. So there's someone that's like, you know, making a profit Uline in this case off sending physical catalog, direct mail things. And it's a silly example, but the point is to kind of illustrate that there's always

going to be ways to reach out to whoever your target ideal customers and guests is. Right now, I think Gold Email is a viable channel. I do think that you're doing well if you get like low, low, low single digit response rates typically. So it's not something that I think you should just rely on as like, this is always available for me to, to, you know, and who knows that may change. Like this is something that I do believe, which is that you should be, you know, stick to what you're doing, but you should also be willing to adjust and adapt when things aren't going well. And knowing when to quit, knowing when to pull the plug in a marketing channel can be a hard decision because it's probably optimal to leave a little bit before

everybody else does right like you don't want to be the last person out there who's still cold emailing you know and it's like uh you know like at some point i'm sure there was cold faxing right like i'm just gonna fax a bunch of businesses at some point there was someone still trying to cold fax even after these businesses had long gotten rid of a fax machine right like that's just an example of something that you know comes to mind And I'm sure someone older in the comments is going to go, oh, I'm sure fax spam was a thing. And they're going to have some feedback on that. So yeah, again, are these, I don't know.

I did a LinkedIn post on this the other day too, right? People want to call something dead. They want to call SEO dead. They want to call email marketing dead or whatever. And like some of these things have been around for 25 years at this point, right? There are these as marketing channels and could they die someday?

Is it possible that we're all going to use a different form? We're all going to have a QR code, not an email down the road to identify ourselves online. Possible. Like that could happen, but it's not the case today. And I think you just have to look at things a little bit more objectively and you know, just figure out what is ultimately going to be the most optimal, you know, path for you going forward. And I guess that's just what we're trying to do here. I guess we're trying to give good advice, the advice that we would want someone to give, you know, a friend or a family member or something like that who owned a vacation rental business, not say things just for the sake of saying things and the sake of getting attention,

but things that are actually, you know, useful information for people. Yeah, they do. And I think that going back to what you were talking about with, you know, some people who are using maybe substandard email best practice, I mean, or email practices, not best practices, and leaving some people, you know, leaving some old emails in there, that probably will have an impact over time, making sure you are cleansing that list, making sure you are segmenting and sending more segmented emails that do engage more. Those will be the signals that Gmail and Yahoo will be looking for to say, are you a spammy deliverer or are you not? I think that, I mean,

similar to what we know is happening behind the scenes on Google, Google knows how people are interacting with a website. They know all those metrics. That's why the overall experience on that website is going to play a role in SEO. I mean, it is. It's content. It's link building. It's all this stuff.

It's the experience. They know who's engaging, who's not, who's giving people an answer, who's not. Same thing. If Google starts to identify that you have more people putting the messages in spam, like they're physically putting them in there or they're reporting it as a negative experience, those are more important signals than having old names in your list and having the negative outputs of email engagement. I think that we can still be smart with it and we can still use those best practices of, hey,

I'm going to send this cold email list to 10,000 people. Okay, 5,000 people didn't answer, 2,000 people had a positive. Okay, those 8,000, they're gone now. So these are the 2,000 people I'm emailing. And it is, you should be trying to get to a smaller, more confirmed list, more direct list, because the more direct list you're going for there, it is going to be more customized. It's going to give people that experience that hopefully is going to drive them down the funnel further and get to that direct booking path and do all those things. So it is, it just, it feels like it's too easy a scapegoat to use. Like that's maybe that's what it is.

These are too easy of excuses to throw out there as an agency. And I hope that agencies aren't throwing those out there because that is a non-preparation that is now showing itself in a very real life way. So I probably jumbled up the email stuff there a little bit, but ultimately it is still. Yeah, you're still going to have to use the best practices and you're going to have to be set up technically correct. Yeah. Yeah. I think we beat it up, beat it up sufficiently at this point. And ultimately I think we were, we were texting back and forth. We were just disappointed that,

that I guess we saw what we saw a little bit ultimately with respect to maybe this idea of clickbait or something like that, or honestly just people talking on the topic that just aren't in it every day. You know what I mean? Like I shouldn't comment on things that i'm not in every day doing every day and it was a little disappointing to get to the conclusion that um your direct like the idea that direct is not working well because of the the ad guys are doing it to us the the platforms are harming our ability to market yeah i just don't think that's true at least not in the

sense of death maybe in the sense of again to recap what i said earlier a little bit of loss of fidelity and things like that. So I don't know, normally you have like a nice clean ending and we think through our agendas a little bit more. This one was a little bit more free forming. But if you're a vocational manager out there, I think it's more about divvying up and deciding what are the things that I can work on that are the most impactful? What marketing channels can I work on that can drive the most traffic, the most qualified traffic? How does that traffic convert? How am I doing a great job to take care of that guest once I find my website, both from like a design aesthetics layout perspective, and then delivering on that experience that I'm promising? And how do I find more people like the guests that like me, right? Like that's the that is this business. This business is a treadmill in

some respect, where you find one guest, fantastic, they're there for four days, and then we got to do the whole thing again, 10 times a month, you know, hopefully in perpetuity, right? And it can be great in that way. But there's a certain marketing engine that has to be built, that delivers constantly. And certainly shutting off things because of a little bit of misunderstanding about how tracking cookies work would be a very silly decision to make one would expect. So I want the best companies to win. And I think that hopefully, you know, people listening are probably the companies that want to do a better job and wants to do a great job with their marketing, with their business. And ultimately, you know, I think all these platforms that support some of our efforts

with direct marketing, like Google and like Facebook, although we tell it's like a brother, right? Like I don't have a brother, but I imagine I have two boys, you know, so I kind of see how they fight and they argue and they disagree. But at the end of the day, they love each other. You know what I mean? And I think that we should love the channels that we get to market on. The fact that we get to run Google ads and get instant relevant traffic to

our business, small business website today by giving Google 10 bucks a day is awesome. I think we should celebrate that fact, do the best we can within that channel, continue to grow and not say silly things. And then we can all have a good time. So that's all I got. I don't know, Paul, maybe we'll come back next week with a more well-structured episode and have a lot more notes, but keep on keeping on. If you're a vacation manager, we are in the fight with you, so to speak. If you have any questions, ideas, comments, feedback, et cetera, you can find Paul on LinkedIn. We'll put links in the show notes as well. That's one way to message him. You can email him as well from that venue. You can also do the same thing. Connect with me on

LinkedIn, or you can email me, Conrad, at buildupbookings.com. It's a pretty easy way to get in touch. So I got to hop because we got to do some other fun recording stuff. But Paul, thank you as always for recording with me. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, have an awesome day. Thanks so much.