Heads In Beds Show - Email Marketing 101 For Your Vacation Rental Business: Get More Bookings With Better Emails

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

In this email marketing overview episode, we dive into the basics of gathering and marketing via email for your vacation rental business. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellChinese Spy BalloonHere's The PuppyBuildUp Bookings Blog Post: Email Marketing Campaign Ideas🔗 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. How's it going today, Paul? Just fantastic. Just where I think we're, I can see the end is inside of winter. And that's what we've been talking about. It's, I can see the end is inside of winter. And that's what I'm

talking about. It's I, yesterday was 30. Today is 30. There's actually some ice melting. Now there's still a foot and a half of snow out there, but the end is in sight. I'm cautiously optimistic. We're going to get out of this. How about you? You had a little activity down, down your way at this over this weekend. Massively eventful weekend for me who usually doesn't do anything. So three major plot points here in the O'Connell house. Number one, Saturday, you actually kicked this off by texting me and saying, how's the balloon? And I initially went, what are you talking about? I didn't know you were referencing. Then I walked outside and the Chinese spy balloon was directly over my head. So shout out to the Chinese spy balloon. It might be one of the few, I know it's

become a little partisan, but I think this is mostly a bipartisan issue. We don don't want the chinese spy balloon there was some debate on when to shoot down the chinese but they shot it over the coast here in the carolinas in the myrtle beach area here they shot it on saturday i got a not a front row seat but i got a 15th row seat to watch them shoot it down there was airplanes in the air unbelievable like one of those things you will forget about in a few months and then someone will bring it up and you're like, Oh, yeah, I remember that. So that was Saturday, right? Sunday, a puppy arrives in our house without my consent or knowledge. No, I'm just kidding. There was consent and knowledge. Yeah, my wife was very eager and very excited about this puppy. So we got the puppy Rosie on Sunday. I'll put a link in the show notes for everybody else to tweet it out. And

then I'll put a link to the Twitter in the show notes so people can see the puppy a little golden retriever that was fantastic and then headed out after she picked up the puppy this was already planned beforehand the days got messed up and played a beachwood for 18 on sunday and had so i was sitting i was standing on 17 i know people hate hearing like golfing stories standing on 17 needing a birdie to hit 79 and of course dumped it in the bunker and got it up 12 feet away and missed that and went bogey for an 81 so that is the cruel mistress that is a golf as you're needing a birdie on a 210 yard par 3 to oh yeah that's that sounds about right right there yeah no chance yeah but like i said for me very eventful weekend usually don't have much that much going on so

i don't even know how to i don't even know how to transition i was gonna say that was that was quite the it is that's those chinese weather balloons are hopefully not something that we have to transition away from often but yeah just kind of how things go i guess from new technology to old technology we'll have a marketing minute perhaps next week i think today we want to dive right into the email marketing side of things so we haven't done an episode yet on email marketing but i think we both agree it's important and although a lot of people will say, oh, this isn't the most exciting or sexiest form of marketing, but my goodness, how many people, how many managers do we talk to? And I'm sure you have history on the guest side. I'd love to hear your perspective. And then maybe

there's an owner angle that we can go down to. But anyways, how often do I hear people that are like, oh yeah, I have a list of X and I never emailed the list. I see this all the time. So this is always my take on it to get us going here, which is that email is always going to be the lowest cost investment marketing you can do. So if you have a list of past people, past guests, and it could be potential owners as well, although I think it's less volume there typically, but if you have a list of past guests that you can reach out to and you're not doing, you're completely leaving money on the table. And it doesn't even require a lot of effort or skill or energy or anything like that to make a decent email. Like the tools you have nowadays for email are there. So if I hear if there's people listening, they're like,

oh, I don't get a lot of direct bookings. That might be the first thing I ask you. What do you do with your email list? How do you grow it? And then how do you manage and send to that list? So that's today's episode, which is a list of ideas. We may not have the bandwidth today to go into every little narrow thing, exactly how to do the emails. Maybe that's for a future episode, or at least we'll give you a smattering of ideas of how you can create like campaigns and messages and workflows around email and talk about a little bit how to set it up. So what's your perspective on it? When did you kind of first get into email a little bit in your kind of past with vacation rental stuff? And do you share my vision of low cost? I do. It's one of those things that you've hit the nail on the head.

Once again, with the, I have this great list of owner emails, or excuse me, of guest emails, and I'm not using them. It's a tale as old as time, unfortunately. I've seen it on the owner side too, not as common. Right. Obviously, I toggle to that just pretty much on default. But it is. On the owner side, it's very similar where I've got 100 owners. I've got 150 prospective owners.

I've got, heck, I've got 20 or 30 prospective owners. But I think on the guest side, it is, you have so many people and usually with CRMs or property management systems now tied in together, have all that guest data there. So to not leverage that and to not send anything, if you've got two, three years of past reservations in place, that could be tons of people.

And to use email, it is, it's such a low cost channel to use. Now you can spend a lot of money sending emails too, there's no doubt about that. But there are just so many quick hitting ways to communicate with your potential guests, recent guests, prospective guests, prospective owners, all these things. And that's the thing, there's so many ways to segment these lists and really make sure that the messaging is just on point to exactly what you're asking someone to do,

what it is, whether it's getting feedback, whether it's offering a discount, whether it's trying to remind people, putting booking reminders out there. I think we've all seen the general ideas of what you can use, but it's definitely a channel that I think has to be used consistently. Like everything we do is, it's not just sending one email out

once a quarter or something like that. It's not just sending a single email out. It is talking about drip sequences and all the things you can do to really proactively communicate, sure, reactively communicate to guests and potential owners there as well. I think it is. It's something that if you're not doing it, you are certainly leaving some type of money, revenue, equity on the table. There's so much of that. Brand awareness. There's just so much there. Exactly. I think it's one of those areas more so than most of the other marketing channels that we see, where it can touch every part of the customer's journey there. It can be something where it's all about the soft sale. It's about the retention. It's about that brand building, like you've talked about.

It's really something that has to fit into every part of your communication strategy. It's really something that has to fit into every part of your communication strategy. I think when you're building on a content strategy, being able to relate everything back to an email strategy is very important there. Now, that's something that maybe is a little outside of how people think about that. But the blog content that you're writing should be something that's used in emails. Again, the deals that you put together at the beginning of the year, those should be communicated out in whether it's a special email or whether it is a newsletter email. So that's a lot. Certainly. I'm bouncing around a little bit there, but what are your thoughts? Where have you seen

the most effective or what kinds of emails have you seen be most effective as you've been doing those things? I think you touched on, maybe this is how I would describe what you're touching on, which is that email is a blank canvas, right? You can put whatever you want on the canvas. So the creativity is somewhat up to you. And maybe that does paralyze people a little bit where they're not sure what to do. So they don't do anything because they're like, I don't know what to actually put in the content of the email. So today's episode, we could talk a little bit about that, like the messages that would make sense in there. Another thing that I was thinking as well, just as a piece attached to what you were saying, is that it doesn't take a lot of skill to do email. Like you don't need to be, it's not like SEO where there's like a zero sum game and there's only one person that's going

to rank number one and you're competing against the budgets of Airbnb and Vrbo and stuff like that. Or with paid search, we've talked about that in the past. That's about being profitable, but still like it takes a certain amount of skill to run paid search and understand how to do bid strategies and things like that. It's not the most easy to understand interface. I think that but if I had someone brand new green out of college, and they had an interest in marketing, I think I could get them pretty competent and email in a few weeks, I wouldn't be a significant learning curve for them to understand what to focus on. So I think even if you're even if you don't have the budget for an agency or anything like that, if you're just a host, and you're listening to the show, and you're not doing this,

I think you can learn it and get pretty decent at it pretty quickly with regards to like sending out the messages and things like that. So anyways, I thought I'd dive in and talk a little bit about, we have three tiers here that we've created internally about basic deep targeting and then like a layer targeting, extended targeting is what we call it. So the basics, the things that I think really matter, and this assumes a few things. It assumes you have an email, let's get through the basics, you have an email provider set up. MailChimp is one that we often recommend that I think really matter, and this assumes a few things. It assumes you have an email. Let's get through the basics, right? You have an email provider set up. MailChimp is one that we often recommend. I think they're pretty solid, but there's a lot of them out there.

I do believe that email software at this point has reached almost this feature parity, where I don't really think the difference you get between like ActiveCampaign and MailChimp and HubSpot or these different tools really is that significant. Like they all do 95% of the same things, to be honest with you. So it's a very mature market, this email marketing software platforms, because there's so many of them and they've been around for so long. So if you hear me say Mailchimp and you go, Oh no, I'm on active campaign. It doesn't matter. Like you're going to be able to do everything that we're talking about today. The platform that you choose to use really doesn't make a significant difference

in my opinion. Some have a little bit more flash and pizzazz than other ones, but it's not that, it's not that important. So it assumes that you have, let's say you have the email provider already set up. You have your sending domain set up. You have, you know, you already have a website set up. Let's assume that as a way we're going to talk about email collection here in a second. And then some things that would be useful, but not required, like having stay five offline email collection. Some people do that through stay five. Some people do that through a guidebook product, like send a link to the guidebook. And then to access the guidebook, you have to put in your email. Those are both valid ways to approach it. We also have some clients that do that through a guidebook product, like send a link to the guidebook. And then to access the guidebook, you have to put in your email. Those are both valid ways to approach it. We also have

some clients that do that through rental agreements. You put your email address into a rental agreement, that rental agreement could then be scraped and put into a system. These are all valid ways to collect. I think Stafi is just the best and the least friction method to collect offline email addresses from your guests. So we'll talk about that in a second. But let's assume you have at least one of those things set up. If not, you can get those things set up. But yeah, the first thing to start with, in my opinion, it's just a welcome series, welcome messages. This seems like a relatively straightforward thing, but we see this miss all the time. And I sign up and we're talking to a prospective client. I go to their website and I first try to see, are you even asking for

my email prominently? Or is this stuff, there's some template sites out there from some of the big agencies in the space. They built the same template site over and over again. I think you know who I'm talking about. And at the bottom of every website, they do have an email footer sign up. There's like a thing there, but it literally just says sign up for our newsletter. And then there's an email field, which like technically that works. There's no like mechanical problem with that. But do people want another newsletter?

No, they want something of value. They want like a discount or they want a guide or they want something. So I think the first thing is, are you even trying to collect emails? By trying, I don't mean you have a form somewhere on the site and like you're trying to collect emails. Like you've made it enticing or appealing to actually sign up for your email newsletter

or your email list, whatever you want. That's I think the first thing is like, consider if you're even making yourself desirable for people to sign up. And then post that once I actually sign up, you'd be shocked by how often I sign up for email addresses and I don't even get one email back saying that I've subscribed.

Nevermind an actual series of emails like we recommend, where there's a four or seven email series over a week or two week period. And it's here's all the best things to do. Here's the best properties. Here's our pet friendly properties. Here's our oceanfront properties. Here's our ski and ski out depending on the market depending on the destination. So the pop up on the website, giving people a reason to sign up for the list. And then that four email series and this is like day one basics type stuff that we recommend everybody do. And I think that's a great starting point. So do you have an experience with those kinds of things? The welcome series, the pop-ups, what's your frame on those? Yeah, that was certainly something. I think

the key was getting the messaging right or getting that deal right, discount right to a point where we saw consistent buy-in there. And I think it was, you can't just put up, hey, save 5%, save 10%. Like anything else, you really do have to make a compelling offer. Now, when you do, when you think about the long-term value of holding onto that email address and being able to email them and then connect with them and communicate with them, I don't think the 15% or the 10% is really too much to give up on that booking again for that single booking. I think you can justify that cost with the potential lifetime value that you're going to have with that potential guest, potential owner there. But the pop-up, I think that is the most effective. Now,

I think one way you can take that, and I'm sure it's something that you do right now, is that really segmentation is what's so key to all email marketing and making sure that messaging is as explicit as possible. So I think with those pop-ups, if you can have a pop-up specifically for your own, for your homepage or specifically able to send out for blog posts from a blog specific pop-up or for property images or for property overviews of that. Something that's going to really, again, make sure that we're focused in on the messaging that they're looking for. I think that's so effective, but yeah, it's one of those things with very low lift to typically put a pop-up on the site, whether it's an accident 10 pop-up or just saying whether it's the amount of time, maybe you're on the page for seven

seconds, maybe you've scrolled down to 50% of the page, whatever that is, whatever you've defined is enough engagement to pop that pop-up. But I don't think there's a better way as far as getting in front of those people, the initial time after that. And it is, it's whether that's within the first 24 hours, within an hour, I've seen different timing of the sequence, but getting that consistent messaging out to people over a period of seven to 10 days, huge as far as just making that connection. And hopefully people are going to re-engage and are in that immediate frame of mind where they're top of funnel and we bring them into the middle of funnel or middle of funnel and we bring them into the bottom of the funnel, whatever that is. But I definitely think

that's something that it's one of the most important email strategies that you can have. Just really setting that up to that initial conversion optimization and then going from there. Yeah. And one thing you said there was the idea of a percentage discount, but I wanted to also float the idea out there. We've done some testing and we typically find that a small fixed dollar discount works better than a percentage discount. So a $50 discount code may actually convert better than a 10% discount, even when 10% would be a much deeper discount than $50, which doesn't make any sense. But there's something like in the brain of like big, big number, good, small number, bad that I think plays into it. So test it for yourself and your market. And then

for luxury markets or luxury clients, we have some of these where they're like, we don't discount period. That is not our messaging or that is not our brand ethos or identity. Totally understand. We've done things there where we waive fees. That's been something that's been appealing or we give them extra bonuses. So book this and use code grocery at checkout and we'll give you a hundred dollar grocery voucher that you can apply to your provisioning or use this code and we'll give you a free light checkout or use this and we'll give you a golf cart for a day on your rental or the first day of the golf cart is free if you decide to book a golf cart with your stay so there's other bonuses that you can give as the first

time email offer that aren't discounts but are appealing but i just wanted to say that too you mentioned a percentage consider that if you're willing to do percentages consider percentages but also be willing to test a fixed dollar discount we've shown that converts a little bit better typically to have a small fixed dollar discount as opposed to percentage and then a software wise one tool that we recommend we use quite a bit is called opt-in monster for the actual pop-up so the piece that you were explaining a minute ago about on second page view on after they've been on the site for two minutes all those kind of things you can set very complex rules of the opt-in monster we have one client who has very specific criteria of when they want to show the email pop-up never too early and then

never too late they don't actually don't want the pop-up on their checkout pages they don't want the pop-up on certain pdps property detail pages so we have the rule set is very long for them but it gets the right person it gets the right pop-up i think at the right time for people to see what they care about i haven't gone as far as what you suggested though where you maybe have different pop-ups like a different pop-up on the blog versus on the home page or a search results page that's something i'd be able to test testing maybe we have some clients that would be willing to do that, especially clients that we work with that have a lot of blog traffic. We have clients where half the traffic on their site is blog, like informational content,

and then half is like property rental traffic. So it'd be interesting to see if we tried a different pop up on different pages, if we'd get a better conversion rate, signup rate, et cetera, and one versus the other. I hadn't thought about that, but that's a good idea. Yeah. Okay. Once you get them in that sequence and then you have them going through those, again, you send different series of information based on the, you know, a forest email sequence

is pretty common. Seven email sequence. You could obviously take it further depending on your proclivity and budget for doing that. But what happens after that? What do they get put onto? Most of our clients, and this is our most common thing that we do for them, they'll get put into a general newsletter list, right? And we may have a little bit of segmentation on there, they signed up on a pet friendly page, we may tag them as pet friendly or something like that. They may have come in on an oceanfront page, you might tag them as oceanfront or something like that. But again, just the basics are like once they're on the list is everyone on the list hearing from you at least once a month if they as long as they haven't booked in the last, let's say 30 or 60 days, something like that. And as long as they

have checked out in the last 30 days, I think there's a reasonable there's a reasonable time where you might want to kill them or pause them off the list temporarily and then bring them back. But for the most part, everybody on your list, other than those people, should be getting an email once a month. And again, we see people here all the time just dropping the ball. They're not even reaching out or trying. So yeah, the monthly newsletter, it's simple, but people don't do it. What's your thoughts on that? Anything special you got to put in there? Or is it mostly just like a, hey, don't forget about us kind of message? do it what's your thoughts on that anything special you got to put in there or is mostly just like a hey don't forget about us kind of message yeah it is it's one of those i think the

first like newsletter email i wrote just helping some partners out was a win back email it was it's been a while since we've communicated with you and it was this is they were just starting in the just restarting up the email marketing side of things and they hadn't emailed in the last 18 months. So it was an opt-in, first of all, to make sure that we were still okay to send to some of these people. But the other side of it was,

is that, hey, let's get some engagement. And that particular email, we also allowed them to set some preferences. You like to travel with family or you're a business traveler or you're a luxury traveler as well. So I think that's another way you can use those, some of those newsletter emails. I think

you don't want to be too crazy with that, but it does. Being able to put a poll in there, put some questions in there that really do, if people are willing to engage with that newsletter, if you're giving them something that is willing to be engaged, is engageable. I don't know if there's a better way to put that, but if there's blog content, if there is a poll, making it more interactive, you can start to bucket those people. If you've got the right email software there. Okay. This person does like luxury travel. This person does like to travel with kids. And then again, it's all about that preference and preference emails and preference marketing down the road and being able to segment

and get that messaging just right there. So go ahead. Yeah, sorry. One thing I noticed real quick is that any post that does well on social media typically is good newsletter content. Some of ours, even like memes, or we have a photo that did really well on a client site. That's more in a rural kind of cabin market. And a bear was like in front of a cabin door. And people love that image. Like the bears like sitting up looking at the people and they took a picture of it and put that in the email. It works as well. So if you're stuck with, I don't even know what I would post. We'll look at what gets engagement on social media, whatever gets a lot of comments and likes and stuff on Facebook or Instagram probably will do pretty well in an email as well. But yeah,

I just want to add that in as you were giving other examples. Oh yeah, no, I think that's exactly it. And newsletters, it is. I think how I was going to wrap that up is newsletters don't have to be every two weeks, every week. Every month is nice. Make it consistent. It is. If it's every six weeks, make it every six weeks. Certainly, we would recommend it being a little more frequent than that. But admittedly, there are people who, again, if you're running the thin house and you can't put it out there as frequently as you'd like, at least make sure it's consistent. At least make sure that messaging is compelling enough that you are. You're going to drive some more engagement. You're going to drive some more

interaction. Hopefully you're going to drive a booking or two more, but certainly it is all about that consistency because people do. If you do get that consistent newsletter out there, there is that anticipation and expectation that it's going to come every Wednesday at the same day, every, the fourth Wednesday of the month in the morning. And people start to anticipate and get ready for that. And once you've lost them, that initial engagement, I think it is so very hard to get them back. Once you set them up for set your users up, your prospective guests, prospective owners up for a monthly cadence, make sure you're giving them that monthly cadence because again, you're trying to build that brand loyalty. You're trying to build that guest loyalty, owner loyalty.

That's a great way to do it. But when you upset it, so hard to get it back. We've worked with smaller hosts and managers in the past that send every quarter and that's a light workload. They're consistent with it. They send every quarter, they don't miss a quarter. And if you stayed somewhere one time four years ago and you get a few messages since then,

I think it's a little bit more palatable. To your point about consistency, you can burn the list. And we've seen, we've had clients who have encouraged us to be aggressive, and we warn them the risks of being too aggressive. But we proceeded with their plan. And we have some examples where I think we've burned a few lists of over sending. And because here's the thing, when you have nothing to say, it's really hard to send a message every week, right? Now, there's new things happening all the time, and you're in a destination that has a lot of change, or you're constantly doing discounts or promotions or specials, and you're a large property manager, and people are opening and engaging with them, yeah, maybe there's

a time and a place for a bi-weekly or a weekly type send. But I think it's really challenging for most managers to keep up that kind of pace and not get very stale, very boring, very repetitive quickly. So I think the challenge there with doing that kind of messaging is how to make it interesting. If you can do that more power to you, if the numbers like use your numbers, don't just take our advice here at face value, like research it in your particular case, but be aware that it's very easy to burn a list if you send every week. And it's very hard to your point to get them back. Once they unsubscribe, it's extremely difficult to get them to subscribe again, because in their head, they think, ah, these guys, they just spam me.

Just like technically, it's not what's occurring. They opted in. But just because they opted in doesn't mean they want to hear from me every week. It's like my aunt. Like, I don't want to hear from her every week. She's crazy. If she emailed me every week, I would definitely unsubscribe. So, yeah, I think there's something to be said for that kind of pacing.

Keep in mind the pacing that works well for you. I agree with you. Monthly is a perfectly reasonable cadence to commit to. It's not going to be a huge burden on you or your team, or it's not going to be a huge cost if you're hiring it out to an agency, but people are not going to forget if you're at least on that monthly cadence. But let me go into some other ideas here just to kind of get through some different ways that people can use the email themselves. So another one that I had here that we talked about quite a bit is what we call automated greetings. So for example, we talked about StayFive a minute ago. They should sponsor the show,

by the way. No, I'm a big, yeah, Arthur, I'm a big StayFi fan, obviously. But one thing that we do quite a bit when someone, the benefit of StayFi is that they hit that Wi-Fi, they sign up on that modal, they're in the property, we get their email, and then we send an automated email right away. Now, that email isn't really a marketing email, you could argue, because they're already booked. So it's not like we're going to get any more money out of them, unless you do upsells or things like that. We do have a client that does beach gear. So that is part of the welcome email. They sign up and it's, hey, have you already booked. So it's not like we're going to get any more money out of them, unless you do upsells or things like that. We do have a client that does beach gear. So that is part of the welcome email. They sign up and it's, hey, have you already booked your kayak rental? If not, click here and book a kayak rental. So there is like revenue opportunities

there, but more so here's my logic in that it gets them used to opening emails from the client or from the host or manager. So if you stay somewhere and you open an email right away from the host or manager that you're staying with, well, great. Now I've got an open now, now I'm in your address book in some respect, I'm in your mind a little bit. And that's kind of the way that we use those automated greetings. So it could be, um, this could also be one of the emails that you send when you confirm a booking. I've seen some terrible booking confirmation emails in the past where there's no brand on the top. There's no, it looks bad. There's a long ID number. It looks horrible. Some of the PMSs I know send default booking emails and you can't

change or edit them. You're somewhat limited by your PMS in some cases. These aren't always emails you send through like a marketing tool like MailChimp. But if you can modify or edit that and make it look a lot nicer, consider doing so. We have a client that uses the track PMS product and I think their emails look a lot more solid on booking. Like there's branding in there. There's a nice picture. Here's the next steps. Here's a link to your guidebook. Here's the property itself if you want to share it with people. And I think that's an important email. That email is going to have a very high open rate. So I think it's worth considering what you put inside there from a marketing standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, from a brand standpoint. And then again, all these other automated emails that occur. Here's

your door code email if you have one of those, or here's the when they check in, here's that email. These are all marketing touch points that will bring the guest to you. Some are done on the PMS side. Again, some are done on the email marketing side. So it depends on like your exact tech stack and how they works. But regardless, it doesn't matter. If you can make it better, make it the best you can with regards to getting people to engage with it.

So all those automated trigger-based or greeting type emails, I think are all worth reviewing and adjusting. Anything there that you've like seen work well in the past or what's your perspective on that? I think it's really about, and there are so many, depending on the property management system, I can only speak to my experience with the track there, but we were spending, we were sending somewhere between 60, 70, 80 trigger automation emails.

And those are obviously based on actions that aren't necessarily, you're not necessarily taking, it's guests that the guests are taking. Actions that they're taking on the website, actions that they're taking just in the reservation process. So I do, I think that is the, once again, you're hitting it on the head where those are just as important as your nice branded newsletter emails, because it is, and that may be the only branding that someone experiences from you. So that small email experience isn't so small when it's very, it's carrying vital information about your stay, your getaway. Again, getting to the door codes, getting to the maintenance orders that are going through, requesting a maintenance order, doing something like that. All of that is just another touch point along the lines of your brands. I think it is important to think about all the other parts of the property management system that are working to run your business, but there's so much of the

marketing itself that is conducted through the PMS and just throughout in-stay, pre-stay, post-stay, all those options. You really do want to make sure you're not just looking at it from an operational side. You're looking at it from the marketing side. And your marketing, whoever's leading up your marketing efforts, should be pretty invested in the property management system and some of those emails that are going out. So I think that's something that you can, I think there's another area where you can potentially overdo that and over communicate. too concerned about over-communicating with guests because I think ultimately in a lot of cases, that's what guests are looking for, that over-communication to make sure nothing bad does happen there. But I've also seen some property management systems that don't do a great job of putting those triggers and automations in place and the emails themselves. Yeah, they're

a little thin, they're a little tight. They're just not informative. And you do, you end up, it gets cyclical. It goes down the road where people don't know where they're going. They're just not informative. And you do, you end up, it gets cyclical. It goes down the road where people don't know where they're going. They don't know where they're checking in. They don't know. The guests are going to have a bad experience. And that's all based on some of these communications that they had with your email platform, with your PMS system, and maybe internally with your team members. I think there's just so much there on the property management system side of things that it's always good to have that do that email audit within the system and understand what emails are going out. And if there's a few that you don't know about, which it happens, if they're set as a template in place, you're going to want to know which communications are going out automated in an automated fashion, which ones are going out based on triggers or some

custom features in there as well. Yeah, exactly. So I think the logic there is like follow, review your system, see how it looks to do a booking even and go through the process yourself and see each email, how it looks, send it to your own inbox, open it on your desktop, open it on your phone. That's critical as well. Nowadays, like most emails are open. So that's a valid thing to consider as well. So I think there's a, again, there's a lot of like individual emails that are worth going into there, but I think the high level kind of advice there is look at that, evaluate it, review it, make sure it matches your brand and your messaging that you want to get across to the guests for sure. We have another idea here that we are working on

currently. Unfortunately, we've had some clients have some issues recently with regards to like flooding, natural disasters, things like that. So Donna, my team has created this strategy she's working on called JIC emails, which stands for just in case. And it's basically a list of approved emails that you might want to have messaging already approved ahead of time for things like our clients in the Carolinas, it would be Florida, it would be hurricanes for clients in the West Coast, it might be wildfires for clients and, you know, other places, there might be other things that are happening tornadoes, I don't know, we live in an unpredictable world, unfortunately. So I think having a list of emails that you can send out in natural disaster or any sort of sort of concerning

situation for a guest is valuable, including in the email, maybe and this was kind of one of the tones of the email that we sent was like, there was flooding in this area, this property is not affected. So all the people that were staying in this other side of town, they got an email that was basically like, there's nothing wrong, all the roads are open, everything's good. But that calmed down the guests that were worried they were able to keep the booking, they weren't getting inundated with phone calls and cancellation requests. And I want my refund and this and that um it was like here's the situation but having some of that email stuff content written out ahead of time may be useful so i'd consider that this is like you're bored on a tuesday one day and it's it's off season what do you do let's work on our

jse emails like it's not a bad idea to consider that and then when you need them they're there and you're not panicked to produce them for you so that's something that we're working on right now i don't know if you have anything you want to add or any disaster scenario, email messaging you've done before, but. Love those because it is, we've all, and more so probably in the last few years, we've all been through some type of disaster email there, whether it's COVID, whether it's natural event. I truly do love that idea because you, timeliness is so important there. If it is weather related, if it is health related, if it's anything like that, we want a response out usually in four to six hours or two to four hours, or you don't want to

be waiting 24 hours, 48 hours waiting on content or some type of image or an asset or something like that. I love that idea of working proactively and making sure that you've got those set up. It's just, it's the, I think it's the cost of doing business in the world we live in now is that people are looking for that instant satisfaction of a response or answer. If you've got that pre-built in place, all the better for the experience for them. Exactly. Just a little bit of copy edits and we can get that out.

Unfortunately, we have ones for our Carolina, Florida clients that we're building where it's like Hurricane X and then X is going to put the name of the hurricane in. We can sit here and pretend it's not going to happen, but it's going to happen. I know there's going to be another hurricane. It is what it is, right? So you got to be prepared for it. I was in the Boy Scouts. What's's the motto always be prepared right always be prepared and that's a good that's a good way to do it so getting out of that ickiness it is one of those things we would recommend it's not the most fun marketing thing i'm not gonna lie we have other ideas here right so like post departure

automation targeting the touchdown briefly but after the guest actually departs what do you send them a lot of people especially this is really really critical for our Airbnb guests when we don't get their real email address. Again, stay fi, Arthur sent us a check, but a stay fi is a valuable thing for people to have to get their real email address. There's other ways of doing it through the guidebook and other things we said a minute ago. But what's the next 90 days look like after you check out?

What do you get after that? Those are things to consider. You can request reviews. That's one element of it. Repeat bookings. You may want to trigger off the checkout date. So again, that may be done on the PMS side. It could be something that you import and put into like an email marketing platform like MailChimp. We have clients where we do that. We download the post departures once a week, we put them into MailChimp,

and then we trigger emails based on the checkout date. So they're actually going to get 330 days worth of emails. Now they're spaced out quite a bit, but they're going to get a year's worth of emails. And the logic is that point want them to rebook and stay in that property again, pretty valuable, especially in a repeat booking market. So those are things to consider. We also have interest based and what we call messaging based content that goes out there. So within the message, like within the email, you may be thinking like, okay, you guys are convincing me I'll do newsletter. What's what do you want to put inside of it? So it could be the group that you're targeting. So it could be here's things to do with families. Here's family friendly things to do in the area. It could be, group that you're targeting. So it could be, here's things to do with families. Here's family-friendly things to do in the area.

It could be, here's a romantic getaway and it's marketed to that audience. It could be, here's the best places to go fishing and it's marketed to that audience. It could be, here's the best times to go skiing. The lifts are empty Wednesday at 11 a.m. So make sure you head out then, like it's not as busy. There's a lot of different things that you can leverage

that people rely on as you, the local host or manager, that they wanna hear from you on that kind of stuff. There's a lot of value in that. You're not just pushing and hawking your own properties. That's, hey, we learned this information. We have this awesome new restaurant. The cocktails here are amazing. Go check them out. That type of information, I think, is what really appeals to people. So that's my logic to you on any sort of email that you're doing. As you begin thinking about the messaging strategy and the interspace strategy is what does that person care about? How can I make the email useful to them? If the email is useful to them, even if they don't book

today or tomorrow off that email, it's fine because they're going to keep opening them. And then you're top of mind when they do come back, right? So most of our clients, when we go and look at the analytics and we see email, it's usually like the fifth or sixth most common traffic source on the website, but it typically will have one of the highest conversion rates. It'll typically convert at 2%, 3%, 4% as far as people clicking through, because once they click through, they're ready to go. Like a good portion of them are ready to book at that point. It's just a question of the dates, the budget, the price, all that kind of stuff. But email, I think even if people are opening and clicking on the emails unnecessarily a lot, it's still a brand impression

in their inbox. Some people are still opening and engaging with that email, and they're going to see some of the content you've sent out, not every single piece of content, but some of the content, and they're going to think of you when they go and they consider booking their next trip to Hawaii or Florida or Texas or whatever the case may be. So I think there's a lot of brand touch points that are really valuable here. And the more useful you make the email, the better you're going to do. And again, some of these ideas may help a little bit. What's your thoughts on that? What are ways that you think you can make the email more engaging? Is it interest-based or what's your thoughts on it? It is. I think anytime you'd be able to do things interest-based,

I think that's helpful. I think some of that is dependent on the market. In your area down there, you can probably find some pretty good golf-related emails, golf interest-based emails. I think in people going to the Northern Minnesota right now, this time of year, they're probably looking for ice fishing,

snowmobiling, stuff like that. Clear winter activities there. So I think it is. I think that's anytime you can remind people, stuff like that. Clear winter activities there. So I think it is. I think that's anytime you can remind people, I think that's where those posts stay. Remind people of that experience. Remind people of what they did. I think that's where that having that CRM

or that property management system and being able to talk back to, hey, you golfed while you were here. Hey, you went to this restaurant while you were here. I think that's some of those on the appreciation emails being able to say, hey, here's $15 off or $50 off your next meal at the on-site restaurant while you're here. I think that's that additional added touch point that whenever someone is able to relate it back to the experience they just had, I think that they're more likely to look at that rebooking as

an option there. So I think obviously being able to get reviews is a nice option there. I think less so on the rental side of things, more so on maybe the hotel resort side of things that the loyalty program. That's certainly something where I think loyalty programs are something that we should consider in the vacation rental space and find ways that would make sense to put together some type of loyalty package or whatever that looks like. But being able to put together a loyalty package and present that in a way there that it does, it gives people what are the benefits of booking with you long-term or continuing to book with you. Again, is that the restaurant? Is that the local activity that they can do? I think when you've got a hotel or resort and when everything is on site, it's a little easier to do that. You don't have to forge partnerships or relationships

with third parties, but I think the more you can engage with people on that level and really make them think about what they're going to do next time, what they did this time, again, either updating it from what they did this time or recreating that experience, it's a good way to do it in email. And I think you can paint it in a way that it does. It really presents what they did this time or recreating that experience, it's a good way to do it in email. And I think you can paint it in a way that it does. It really presents what they just did and what they can do next time. So there's the visual nature, there's the text nature. And again, put a promo code in there and get a little bit of a discount back. Email is just, it's nice. It's a nice conduit to be able to communicate more effectively more personalized manner so i anytime you can personalize it that's i think that's going to end up to your benefit

down the road if your guests are willing to provide that information so that you can customize i think that's phenomenal yeah if we could put a bubble on it there i think that's a good place to end it where it's this is your opportunity it's low cost typically it's it's not the huge time investment that you need. And also one thing we didn't say, I don't think we said this earlier, but get started now. Like even if you have a small list, get started. Yeah, because don't be the person who we're talking about the top of the call that it's 10,000 emails deep and says, I never got around to it. And now you actually almost be like any goodwill you could have been generating this whole time, you don't really get to then leverage off it later on. So even if your email list right now is 60 people, like I would do it. I had someone we talked to the other day, one of our clients who we worked

with for some time now, we've done a case study with him and he started his email list right away and there was seven people on it. And I think two was his buddy that went with him and stayed in the property the first time through his PMS. So we started the email address back then. Now it's a few thousand people. It doesn't sound like a lot, but these are two luxury properties and he has people that are very interested in staying with him. And he's already filled out most of June, most of July, half of August on these three properties as we stand here in the beginning of February. And I think most of it has come from people who have stayed with him before or people that know who have stayed with him before. Don't wait, don't delay. Don't wait till you're bigger

to do this and think, oh, I'll do it then. You're going to waste a lot of opportunity that you could have had in the meantime. This is the thing to focus on. Again, I always talk about how would this episode make sense to people if I send them later on. This is going to be the episode I send to people when they go, I'm not doing anything. I don't have a lot of budget. I don't have a lot of time. What can I do? It's going to be email. That's going to be the channel that I think you can leverage and see a lot of success with. I think that's all we got for right now. One thing that we would appreciate email wise, you can send us an email. You can send Paul an email. You can send me an email. You leave us a review. You send us an email. Maybe we give something back to you. I don't

know what that could be. We'll leave it open-ended. But we like getting emails from listeners. Any ideas? I also got an email the other day and said that someone said I talk too quickly. Good to know people are listening. Good to know people are listening. I'll work on slowing it down a little bit.

That's a work in progress. I apologize. If you have to listen to me on 0.9 speed or whatever, I think we can always offer that. Go to your podcast player of choice. If I talk too quickly and slide it down a little bit, if I talk not fast enough, then jack it up to 2x and then you can... I'm just saying.

I have joked that you and I can have an hour-long conversation in 30 minutes just because the pace at which we speak. It's efficiency. That's what I'm saying. We can get more into the episodes when we talk as fast as we do. We're going to have to look at it here. If if we're too fast slow us down a little bit we're not fast enough speed us up a little bit you have the control it's your podcast player

and then while you're in that podcast player go ahead and leave us a review that's right all right let's put a bow and thanks so much paul we will catch you on the next episode