Heads In Beds Show - Understanding The Lingo For Your Vacation Rental Marketing: Email Marketing

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about all of the key terms, lingo and platform understanding you need to excel with email marketing for your vacation rental business. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, good morning. How's it going? Well, you know, it's another one. level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul.

All right, Paul, good morning. How's it going? Well, you know, it's, it's another wonderful day up here in lovely Minnesota. It's I think we I feel like we've got our colors coordinated today. This is golfing weather for us. Wait, it's golfing weather for you because you get to live in the beach market. I get to live in the whatever this market is up here. So how are you doing, sir? Yeah, it's blue polo day here apparently unofficially at the head to bed show which the listserv won't see but you and I see And yeah, all good stuff. I made it I made way out to the golf course yesterday

You know Paul they invented these things called planes. You should definitely look into those things I think there's many of them available multiple days per week that take you to the beach market for Less than less than a hundred bucks or somewhere in that range. So which is crazy when you think about it. That's like one, maybe two tanks of gas, you know, and it can take you on a metal tube in two hours, like six or 700 miles, and then you can be where you want to be. We you know, we complain about airline travel all the time. It's kind of an amazing human invention, especially how safe it is when you think about it, honestly. It is quite stunning. That is something that we are very fortunate. We realize how fortunate you know, three, four years ago when COVID all came around, it's like, oh, this is

not nearly as convenient as it is to just zip, zip, zip across the country. So yeah, it's I suppose that is an option. Yeah, think of like our ancestors or like people who settled where it's like, all right, we're like in Massachusetts, we're going to go to Colorado. It's going to take us like two months and like a dozen of us are going to die. And we're like, oh no, like I want four more inches of leg room. You know what I mean? Like it's just such a funny like turnaround when we think about it of like how unhappy we are. I think that's a Bill Burr bit where he's

like the wifi and the plane goes out and you're like complaining about it. And he's like, you'll find the plane. It might be Bill Burr might be someone else. But yeah, it's like you complain about it. Things that are, you know, that are obviously amazing and you just like, ah, you know, you just get so mad about it, which is a ridiculous premise. Exactly that bit you're talking about. I mean, it's the settlers who they did the wagon train for 10 years for a summer and then you came back for 10 years. I don't think so.

So I digress. Oh man. Yeah. Well, things that have been around for a while, I guess, when I go back in my memory, well, things that have been around for a while, I guess when I go back in my memory and search for things that have been around a while in the marketing world, email marketing has been around for a while. And it's probably like,

I would feel like this is a fair statement. It's probably one of our least covered topics on the show, not through any sort of intentional thing, but because maybe it's one of those things where the newness has worn off or there hasn't been a lot of like really, you know, significant changes in our approach to email marketing over the last little bit. But every once in a while, we'll get a

client who will say something to the effect of like, ah, does this matter? Or like, is this really moving the needle? And the answer is like, for the right clients, like email marketing is often, it's rarely the first, I've really not seen that. But it's, it's not uncommon for us to find a client where email marketing is their second or their third most common traffic source. And therefore their second or third most common and attributed direct booking source

in terms of the revenue coming to their website. We have clients who literally can point back to email campaigns that people have clicked on, and they can point to three, four, five, six, $700,000 a year of gross booking revenue off their email marketing efforts that we run for them. So you and I both know that email is still there. Maybe it's just that not, you know,

where things are changing all the time, and there's like super, you know, modern innovation going on. So perhaps that's the reason why we don't often talk about it. But we thought we'd do one of these lingo episodes, which is kind of an idea you came up with a little while ago, just to kind of reset the deck a little bit. If you haven't done email marketing in a while, or you're doing it currently, do you understand all the terminology and all the language that people are using? So that was kind of the idea for today is to kind of go through email marketing high level,

let's talk about some lingo, let's talk about just some little tips and tricks underneath each of these things. What do you look for? What is a good open rate? What is a bad open rate? What is a good click rate? What is a bad upsubscribe rate? All these kinds of things.

So take, lead us off here, Mr. Manzi, what are you thinking on the first one? What are the first things that people should think of when they think of their own email marketing efforts? List segmentation, I think is a number one. We see it in a lot of different faculty, you know, faculty there. It's, you can't send every email to every person

and expect to have quality results, list retention, all of those important things. So I think it is, I think making sure that you have your list segmented in a way that is going to speak to travelers, to speak to owners, speak to specific types of travelers. I think the more you can segment, the better messaging you can send

to those individual people you're trying to reach. And hopefully you can personalize that messaging to a way that is really going to, again, increase some of these other numbers that we're gonna talk about there. In the list here, breaking down by guest preferences, by location, by booking history. It just does, it allows for those highly targeted messages

of hey, some of those anniversary emails, hey, it looks like you booked your stay six months ago or eight months ago or 12 months ago. Are you ready to book that next one? It really does, it makes people feel, whether you're sending it to everybody, whether it's automated or anything like that, it does make people feel like,

oh, this message is being sent just to me. And that I mean, it is you everybody's read that email that feels like a clear sales or spam email or something like that. It's not for you. But really being able to dig down and create a highly targeted message. I think it does it really pays itself off. And I can tell you especially it pays itself off on that owner's side when you do have to kind of I would say massage that relationship a little more you know the B2C you might not have a whole lot of direct communication

with that traveler going back and forth but you probably will on the owner side of things so making sure that you are segmenting that list owners versus travelers or specific needs of each of those groups I think is super important for ensuring that your emails are effective. So what do you think about that? No, I agree completely I think it's so funny people tend to follow and follow in kind of two different camps on this in my experience There's some people who actually try to do too much segmentation where they're like, you know Let's try to send an email only people who book pet friendly five bedroom houses. And it's like, that's great if you can automate it. You know, I've worked with people in my career

who have figured out ways to like automate that, or they'd use like spin tags, or they can like customize, you know, doing something like, hey, Paul is better than just saying, hey, guest. For example, on the first line of that email. So I think that's always the line that I draw internally is what segments can we build, but also what segments are meaningful?

You know, like knowing that someone's pet friendly or not pet-friendly might be meaningful insight if you want to send an email that has specifically pet-friendly listings to someone who has brought a pet previously, versus just sending general listings to anyone who's not brought a pet previously. That might be worth the change or the modification in the design or the content of the email.

But going through and saying, like, they brought two pets versus one pet, and then, you know, showing different properties, that may or may not be worth it. Like, that's kind of where I've fallen in this camp before. And some of our clients honestly, candidly, I'll be honest with you too, don't have the budget to send out a bunch of different emails, right? So like a lot of our clients do send out one email, you know, broadly to a lot of the list, at least on the guest side of things.

And in my head, I go, I wish I could make this a little bit more offer, you know, custom to each specific person receiving it. But doing that may require us to generating five or six, seven different emails, even if the tweaks are relatively small, it might take two, three, four, five times more times, therefore the client doesn't wanna necessarily pay for that depending on the budget and the performance of those emails

and things like that. So I will say a good chunk of emails do go out to the whole list, but that's kind of the, like we talked about a length before, it's like when you're doing any marketing activity, it's always like, what is waiting for waiting for me the other side if I do that next step, if I, you know, modify or tweak it a little further, I see a lot more meaningful performance of it. So I think yeah, and then contrast that on the other side, people that

like do know segmentation, like I had an email list, and that's it. Like, I don't see a check in day, don't see a checkout day, don't see property associated with it, don't see any preferences. And I'm like, gosh, these people could be like, the happiest guests of all time, or they could literally hate your guts. And I have no idea. I don't know anything about them. So it's like, let's just start to send them things and see what happens. So as with all things in marketing, the the answer is usually somewhere in the middle, what segments do we find meaningful? What traffic do we find meaningful? And I could put that into potentially different emails, or tweak it a little bit and go from there. So I think that's that's a good way

to think about it. But you mentioned those metrics, like two things that come to mind. So we can get and do these together, open rate and click-through rate. So in a perfect world, we would have really solid and detailed open rate tracking. The problem is in the real world that we live in, open rate tracking is a little bit malformed or it's a little bit inaccurate, to put it lightly.

So I always struggle with clients. I'll tell them things like, and I believe this to be true, like we are targeting, we want probably roughly 25 to 35% of the list to open the email on average, according to the data that we get from Mailchimp or from HubSpot or whatever email marketing system that we're using. But you and I both know it's not always perfectly accurate. So, you know, I always struggle, you know, we just had a conversation recently with a client about removing a bunch of inactive people on the list. Well, they may be blocking open rate tracking, depending on what email marketing client they're using on their phone, on their desktop, etc.

So you could be removing someone off the list that loves getting your emails, they quote, unquote, open them, but it doesn't attract in the analytics. And I always struggle with like, you know, we told the story before in the podcast, but like the classic example, Tyanne told the story recently of like a guest who stayed on 10 years ago, and then booked again, like this past year. And they were on the email list that whole time, like I knew it was going to come back, I just didn't know when. and it took that long time for them to pay off. Now that's not super common. I admit, you know, most people aren't going to go 10 years between bookings. Most clients that we work with haven't been around for 10 years. So

it's tricky, but I really struggle with the idea, particularly of the past guest of removing that person off the list. I feel like if you're going to do some kind of like open rate massaging or understanding like what that number actually means, maybe do a second of only people have subscribed but not stayed. Maybe that would be a little safer segment to potentially remove versus doing things where you're removing people who have stayed with you before. Again, I'm not saying that it's never the right idea. If someone stayed with you five years ago for a conference and they're never going to come back to that area again,

maybe that's the right play. But again, I struggle with that one a little bit. So open right, how many people are opening the emails. Usually give measurement of how effective your subject line is, how relevant your center profile is, and people see your campaign So open rate, how many people are opening the emails, um, usually give measurement of like how effective your subject line is, how relevant your center profile is. And people see your campaign and open it, even if the subject line is kind of bad, usually a good sign that people look forward to getting your emails. And there's some positives there. Click through, right? Obviously,

I mean, people actually click on links or, you know, property pages or something in the actual email itself. That is a lot more reliable in my experience on the guest marketing side of things. Click tracking is more reliable because they actually go to the server. So they click and then they go to like Mailchimp servers, then they go to your website. So they have a little bit more accuracy on click-trade tracking. You can't block that as easily, so to speak, as you are tracking open rate tracking. So I find that to be useful metric. Again, what are good click-through rate numbers?

Depends on the campaign, what you're trying to achieve. We have clients that get a 1% click-through rate, clients that get a 6% or 7% click-through rate, and they both sometimes perform well. So those are like reasonable expectations as far as number of people clicking on the messages. But I know on the homeowner side, Paul, you're not always, when you've done this kind of stuff in the past, you're not always actually aiming for a click rate. Sometimes you're actually aiming for it open and more of a reply. So maybe you can speak to these two numbers, open rate and click-through rate on your side of things. I think it is. I mean, on the open rate side of things, the default is to say, oh, that's because the messaging isn't right. No, it's not the

messaging. They haven't even gotten to the messaging there. And I think you, you know, pointing out the effectiveness of that subject line, that's really a lot of what it is measuring. It is measuring your business, your email profile or domain, whatever that strength is, that brand loyalty that they've, that they have already, you know, gained or earned with you. But it is really, it's a matter of, is that subject line compelling or not? Or is it making into the inbox

so that it is able to be viewed or opened or anything like that? So I think on the open rate side of things, sometimes we looked at it more as a technical of is it being delivered? And I think in deliverability, I don't know if you've got deliverability down here, but yeah, we do have deliverability.

I'll touch on that a little bit here too, but that's half of actually getting them to open it is just getting it into that inbox there. So that turned into just as equally a metric for deliverability as it does for anything else. On the click through rate side of things, I think because you are doing a lot more cold, cold email on the owner side of things, I think because you are doing a lot more cold, cold email on the owner side of things, I think click through rate is not necessarily something we were as focused on,

mostly because what we were doing with a lot of those cold email was trying to get that reply, you know, kind of trying to keep a lot of, a lot of things open-ended, making the emails themselves very plain text, like someone is writing to you on a one-to-one basis, they're just writing it from Gmail or something like that. But it is not having a lot of clickable elements

there necessarily to go back to navigate back through because that also can affect the deliverability there. If it's, you know, the email is too large, if there are too many links, if there's extra video, extra images, anything like that. So a click-through rate was still something that we want to be higher, certainly if we've got something that we're actually,

we're putting a CTA that we want people to take action on. But a lot of times on the owner side it is, it's kind of hoping that that response is going to come back. Certainly you can put links into an ROI calculator or your landing page or something like that. But again, kind of going back to that initial conversation of there is more of a direct one-to-one conversation between the homeowner and the business owner as opposed to not so

much that one-to-one communication on the traveler side, unless it's support, unless it's something like that or something, I'm at at the house now I need this I need that door code stuff like that so those are still very important overall metrics for us but I think we just it's how we're interpreting them and what we do as a result of those numbers going up or going down and seeing better performance from there so I wish on the owner side that it weren't so much cold emailing. When you do see some of the numbers, your open rate maybe is you know five or ten percent as opposed to twenty or thirty percent on the guest side. Click through rate maybe is half a percent or maybe your response rate is is half a percent or one percent. It's just those numbers don't look as good. Just

kind of like some of the overall digital marketing numbers, you know, the cost per click tends to be a little higher, impressions are a little lower. But I think the thing to focus on is if those are coming through, you know, from if you are getting a click through, if you are getting a response, if you're getting in those things, the value on that homeowner being in your portfolio long term can be very fruitful for you. So different value on the tail end of things, I would say.

Yeah. Well, and a good example too, and not getting rid of someone on the list. I know Brooks talked about this a length on his side of things where it's like people may be on that list for many months, years even right before they sign up. So again, one of those things where it's like, I think that generally can be like a little bit penny wise and found foolish. I mean, we help clients with it if they want to remove from their list, like, like, I mean, not going to stop them, you know, we'll give them guidance and some feedback on it. But I do struggle with that one quite a bit. All right, next up, so maybe again, kind of going back your way, maybe quickly on this one quick turnaround personalization, I think this does

matter a little bit more on the homeowner side, again, it kind of ties into segmentation a little bit, but even simple things like the subject line being like, Hey, Paul, a note for you versus, hey, a note for you. Like that's gonna work a little bit better from a very perspective and a click through perspective. But what are some things that you've come to your mind from a personalization standpoint? And I could talk some of the things that we've tested as well, I guess.

Yeah, so I mean, on the personalization side of things, I do, I mean, because we have so much personal information about these owners, I mean, we're going through the FOIA for these absentee owners. We have first name, last name, we have email in most cases, phone, all that good stuff. So it is. There is an ability on the owner's side to personalize more and to include information about specifically the property that you're looking to bring on your portfolio there. So I think that is something that the more

personalization that we've gotten into those emails, the better they performed. That is, there's really no doubt about that. Because it is, I think it's kind of the similar thing of, and you've seen some of the postcards that people have done as well, as they're trying to bring on new homeowners. It is when you see a picture of your own home on that postcard, and we've seen some people try this where they're putting everybody's individual homes for 50 or 100, it's the same thing. You do that in an email and make people feel

very personalized of here is your specific booking link or here is your specific owner link or something like that to go to your future listing, something like that. I think that really gives people, it makes them feel like on the owner side, you're gonna take really good care of my home if you're getting to putting this much care into contacting me and communicating to me

about why you want my home. So I think it is anything you can do to make those owners feel like they are you're talking specifically to them and not 1000s of rentals that you're trying to bring on your portfolio. I think that's super helpful there. But you know, on the guest side of things, certainly I touched on it a little bit, but you go into how you're using it to personalize those emails and using that guest ad because I think that'd be super powerful there. Yeah, I have a really simple example actually, for the first one, which this sounds like a simple enough insight bit actually getting it to work has been super powerful. We have a

client who basically promises homeowners, maybe he should ask us first before he makes promise, by the way, is a fun little sidebar. I don't think you listen. So if you're listening, you know who you are probably as I give you this campaign idea, I'm just giving a hard time because we joke about these kinds of things. But anyways, he promised every homeowner, I will market your listing first, back out to your previous guests. So in other words, we have a list of just make it simple 10,000 people, but those 10,000 people might have stayed in an array of inventory, some of which by the way, this got really complicated when the properties inactive, what do we do? That's kind of more complicated. So the good news is we've kind of figured it out. It's working well now. But basically, that means is that if my family, I go and stay

in property 123, property 123 has to lead off the next email that we get from that particular property manager. So it's very personalized. That's a good thing. Hey, here's the property you stayed in. Do you want to stay in it again? The downside is that it took us a lot of text to figure it out. So again, going back to this comment, too, of like, what is worth it? I think in this case, it's been worth it. But it was definitely a lot of work to get it to there. But that works very well, because people see the property they booked before they want to click on it, hey, can I go back and I, you know, do it again, this is a high repeat destination market. So that

helps quite a bit, I think, with that effectiveness. Sure. You know, the example I always give and give this on recent recordings that we've done is that if you, you know, we worked with this property manager in Hawaii for a long time, very, very low repeat booking rate, despite very very very happy guests just people just don't go to Hawaii a lot it's kind of hard to get to very long travel particularly if you're on the east coast right so that's like a good example that I give of understanding what kind of market you're in I think these like drive to repeat destinations do a lot better with email

than some other clients it doesn't mean that anybody can't have some level of success with email but broadly speaking I think your personalization can work better if it's based on where they stayed before the type of property they stayed in before or even just like knowing a have some level of success with email. But broadly speaking, I think your personalization can work better if it's based on where they stayed before the type property they stated before, or even just like knowing a little bit of that context or information, I think it'd be meaningful or valuable. So I think I think that that's my take on it. Go ahead. Yeah, I would say the one other thing like the personalization,

I think personalization to the guest to the owner is important. But being able to bring your own personality, there's some personalization there of being able to bring your own personality, there's some personalization there of being able to bring yourself into the email. I think we don't talk about, we're not gonna talk about that in any of the terms specifically here, but I do. I think that being able to make it sound like you

and not like a business is very important. And it takes, I think it takes really good content writing more than anything else and having the, obviously the great inventory to work through as well. But feel comfortable injecting yourself into that with some of the other things you're doing because otherwise it sounds like, so the next thing we're gonna talk about, automation.

Automation on the vacation rental side of things is great because we love those welcome emails. We love, like I said, their anniversary emails and getting the door key on time. We're getting all those things, but there is the tendency of, I think, AI has opened our eyes to how much automation is too much automation. So I think on the guest side of things, we see just more automation coming out there because there are so many things in the property management system

that we can connect things to, whether it's interests of the overall guest or things on the guest portfolio, or whether it's just the actions they're gonna take along the way here. So like where have you seen automation be most effective on the guest marketing side of things? Yeah, this is kind of like our standard playbook.

I think this works no matter if you're a single property host, or if you've got, you know, 1000 listings, which is just a welcome series, you'd be shocked how often people sign up for that email list on the guest marketing side of things, often via pop up, which we'll get to this in a second, this idea of list growth, how do we grow the list, ultimately, all these things are great, but the better bigger list is the more stronger performance tends to come from it in general. But I think yeah, the most basic form of

automation in my mind is just like, people sign up for the email list, what are you sending them right away? And then what are you sending them over that, probably a seven to 10 day period where they're really most interested. That's when we were very aggressive on email send frequency. And a lot of our clients will be like, Oh, do you really want to send that much? I'm like, at first, yes, all the time. No, like we'll burn someone out, right. But at first, when they sign up, I

want to be reaching out to them frequently. So I can kind of better understand exactly what they're interested in. Maybe I could, you know, set, let them know a little bit more about what properties I have a little let them more about my company, and so on and so forth. So I think those automations are really, really valuable. The other automation to me that makes a lot of sense on the back end, and this kind of like automation and triggered emails are kind of one of the same in this respect, I would argue is, once they make

a booking to what do they get once they make once they check out what they get, you know, these are all things that and this is it gets a little tricky, I'd make a sometimes these things are done in your email marketing platform, like just say, MailChimp, for example. And then some of these things are done in your CMS layer, you know, track your streamline your owner as whatever the case may be. And it can be very tricky to like understand what needs to go in

each department. Generally speaking, we try to let the PMS do as many emails as it can. Now, sometimes the emails from the PMS don't look quite as nice as the emails that we can design. So it's always a little bit of a battle in that respect. Do we agree with leveraging or using subpar design if it means that the email automation works more reliably? I think that's a reasonable trade-off to make your life more

sane. But some people would pull a lot of stuff out of the PMS platform and put it into the email marketing platform like MailChimp or something like that. I've not seen yet. And I'm sure there's some vendors if there's a vendor listening down the road that will say, Well, we do that, you know, we can have the best quality of like, let's say MailChimp type email design. And we have the PMS layer, I just haven't seen it. So I'm

not saying it's not out there. I'm just saying I personally have not experienced a PMS platform that has the same quality of email, you know, building and like design and aesthetics that I can do there, versus what I can do in the email marketing platform that's more specific and tailored to that need. But yeah, the automation side of things, it basically in my mind is like, when they sign up, what do I send them right away and automating is awesome. Because like I'm just in the background, like people are just signing up on the website for my newsletter, typically through a pop up is kind of what we typically recommend. They're getting this automation and

my client doesn't have to do anything. I think that's awesome. And then, you know, on the back end again, once they check out or once they made a reservation, what emails are being sent there, either automated or what some people might call trigger emails. What do those look like? Do they reinforce what I'm trying to say? Do I have to reinforce my messaging? All those kind of pieces.

I think a lot of people overlook these things. So I think it's worth reviewing and auditing all those emails, which when you sum them all up, I mean, it can be 20, 30, 40 emails that someone may get, right, over the course of a stay, which is a lot, but I think ultimately that's the communication you're giving to your prospective customer. You need to be very careful

about what you're saying and how you're saying it. I think any of those automated emails need to go, like it is, and I get there's a lot of them, but someone from the marketing team has, that's still marketing, that's still email marketing. It may seem operational, it may seem something else, but that is still email marketing. And if there are not some set of eyes looking at those emails, I think that's another missed opportunity, just not looking at them. You may not make a whole lot of

changes to them, but at least keep an eye on them to know what's going out because it is. It's how you're communicating to the guest. And if that's not effective, maybe the metrics don't matter as much there, but again, if you're ending up having more support requests or things like that coming in because of the result of the content not being clear or something like that, that automated content not being clear,

again, AI is saying the same way. If the automation isn't helping, try to find some other ways around that there. But how do we figure out how these emails are working? A little A-B testing here. So I think that A-B testing is something that I think is some people do it a little differently. Some people are just doing subject lines. Some people are doing the overall content, the images you're using. It is, I think where I found the most effectiveness is gonna be on the subject line of things.

Really seeing, getting that first step right, getting the open rate right, getting it delivered to the right amount of people is good, but then we want it to be open. So where are you using A-B testing most frequently to get better results on the email marketing side of things. I think subject lines is kind of the safest bet. Certainly within the content itself, you could do some testing. But you know, ultimately, we've tried a lot of different subject lines. I

mean, some subject lines, to be fair, get amazing open rates, but there aren't subject lines I want to keep sending, you know, you and I have sort of lamented or you know, maybe talked a little bit a little bit trash offline without the red blinky light recording about some people in our space that use really, really, really misleading subject lines, right? We saw one the other day, I think I sent to you, it was a large property manager in the space that had a subject line that was like booking confirmed. And then they clicked and then you clicked into it. And it was like,

your bookings not confirmed yet, but it could be Paul click here and book and I was like, no, no, no, like, that is going to get a great subject line. And that is not going to be the right way of doing it. Or like, here's an extreme example. You know, I've got your son Paul, like that's good, that open minds that subject line is going to get a great subject line. And that is not going to be the right way of doing it. Or like, here's an extreme example. You know, I've got your son, Paul, like that's good. That open minds, that subject line is going to get a great open, right? But yeah, it's also going to get you some complaints and things like that. So you've got to find the right approach. I think curiosity is a good lever to pull, but I think you can over pull it with respect to email marketing subject lines. So be very careful in that respect. And I guess all things that you would want to be proud of sending out maybe as the bar that you and I have talked about before. So be very careful in that respect. And I guess all things that you would want to be proud of sending out maybe as

the bar that you know, you and I have talked about before. So get answer questions, subject lines, but but like all metrics, they can be gained and like all metrics, be careful about what you're optimizing for. Again, you could be optimizing for very high open rates, but it's actually upsetting people are making people angry or misleading people. I don't think that's the way to go versus a subject line that might be a little fun or a little cute or whatever you might want to say

there. But when they click into it, they're kind of they kind of know what they're getting, you know, they know what they're expecting and things like that. I think some people might take that a little bit too far. So yeah, that's just my broader feedback on subject lines in general, I guess, along with a B testing within them, which is like testing, you know, do I make it more curiosity driven or more features and benefits driven? That could be a valid

discussion, like, you know, seven new vacation rentals just added to our program, Paul, like, interesting to some people, right? Oh, new vacation rentals, or like, these new places are ready for your family, you know, in Gulf Shores, Paul, like that kind of thing could work better than something that's just like, you know, October 2024 newsletter or something like that, right, which is what some people might send out. And I've seen some clients buy like that before, which is not maybe the best way

of going about it. So that'd be my take on it, mostly a subject line testing with an EP. I would say, I mean, I think that you can be fun on the traveler side, the fear based. And again, I've seen it and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. It feels like that works more on the business side. Like on our side of things, it has to be cheeky.

It has to be fun. It has to be, you know, this is how you're gonna spend your day. Like putting people in that relaxed state of mind or that happy state of mind as opposed to that fear driven. Oh, this is the messaging I want to see before I book a vacation. So that's that's my thought on that you can use the fear driven on the B2B side not on the BBC side.

Yeah, it's we talked on this earlier, and you and I before we hit record again today, I talked about doing maybe another episode on branding versus direct response. Yes. I think some people will lean into a brand so heavily and so strongly that it impacts their ability to get any response from marketing and advertising efforts. And I think that's a dangerous slope to fall into. Obviously, you and I skew a little bit more towards this idea of like, performance marketing or direct response marketing or something to that effect. But you know, you and I both admitted that like, sometimes we're not the strongest or we are not the the kings of, you know, understanding design and the

branding elements that really make a brand more, you know, memorable, which I think is what we all are after at the end of the day, right? You want someone to come look at your properties, and then remember them. And if there are guests, you want them to come back. If they're not staying with you, though, you want them to be like, Oh, I remember that place that was over here. And I think some folks can certainly forget that at times, and it ends up being a little bit of an issue. So I think that funnels down to see email marketing, right? folks can certainly forget that at times and it ends up being a little bit of an issue. So I think that funnels down to email marketing, right? You can run emails that are very direct response, click your book now, or you can run stuff that's more like, here's all the new

things happening in my area that are more like just general flowery language about what's more of a news, you know, type of campaign. One's not right or wrong, depending on maybe what your goals are, what your stated outcome is, or what your brand stands for, you know, like what works well for one brand, what work well for another and vice versa. Like, like you can't, I think we've given this example for in the podcast, you can't go to Rolex and buy a Rolex watch, actually, funny, you can buy a non desirable

Rolex watch, but you have to buy enough, you know, like they have a certain way that they approach their branding, which is very different than a lot of other companies, you know, imagine it's like, oh, yeah, you can't book this vacation rental until you book one of my cheaper vacationals first, and I make sure you're a good, you know, good customer like that, that idea just makes no sense at all. Right. But there's companies where that actually is their approach to

their customers is how they treat them. So, you know, a lot of different ways to skin the cat, so to speak. And there's not always one exact path for everybody. And that's why you got to like, think of some of these metrics and then apply them to how it works within your business, and then go from there. Well, Paul, I hate to do this, we didn't get to obviously everything, maybe we need to come back on this one for a part two on email marketing metrics,

because there's more than I thought here. So definitely some more things to maybe cover down the road. But yeah, broadly speaking, I think we did a pretty good job kind of getting you up and going with all the lingo as a respect to email marketing. So yeah, what's the last thing people need to do?

I feel like I never make you do this. So I'll throw you a curve ball here. I think what they should do after they've listened all the way through these 30 ish minutes of brilliant insights. I think what they should do is go to Spotify, go to Apple podcast, iTunes. See, as a Samsung person, this is an yeah, he's not an Apple guy. Not Apple guy.

But you go in there, listen to that podcast, make sure you're giving us five stars a review, make sure you're following the podcast. We'd love for you to keep listening to us because I think we're giving you some value here and I'd love to make continue giving you some value. But hopefully you've enjoyed the time you've you've gotten a little value out of it and now you can enjoy the rest of your day and hopefully get some more value out of that because you're taking some of these actions and bringing them into your business. So that's that's my read for the day. Let's go. Let's go. Thank you. We'll catch you in the next episode. Appreciate you.