E-mail Marketing

Email is a direct, personal way to engage with previous guest and even those who inquired about your property. Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and mobile devices, pretty much everyone has email in their pocket or within easy reach. 

Having a database of previous guest plays a central role in your online marketing strategy. A prominent part of your website should be an email opt-in form. This enables you to capture the email address of potential guest and gives you the opportunity to nurture those visitors who may not be ready to book immediately but who are interested and want more information. 

Lead capture and lead nurturing are two critical stages of the marketing process. They give you the ability to intelligently deal with interested potential guest who may not yet be developed to the point of booking with you. Generally, these kinds of prospects make up the majority of all prospects and are crucial to filling your pipeline of future bookings. If you didn’t capture these interested potential guest, you’d likely lose them forever. Your only hope would be that when they finally became ready to book, they would remember your website among hundreds they may have visited and completed the booking cycle they began days, weeks or months ago. 

An email also enables you to maintain a close relationship with your e-mail list and makes it easy to offer specials and keep guest aware of what’s going on in your area. Over time, as you build a relationship with your email subscribers, your database becomes an increasingly valuable marketing asset. 

Creating a highly responsive list of email subscribers practically enables you to produce cash on demand. You create a compelling offer with a response mechanism and send an email broadcast to your list. You get instant feedback about whether the offer is a hit or a miss. It is a great way of cheaply testing offers prior to investing in more expensive media, such as print or pay-per-click advertising. 

Despite the growth and popularity of social media, your database of email subscribers remains one of the most important elements of your online marketing strategy. Social media reach has become problematic because only a small percentage of your followers will see your message. Even if your message could reach everyone, you would probably get drowned out in all the noise. Funny cat videos, jokes, and memes will crowd out your marketing message. It’s called social media for a reason. 

Even more importantly, an email database is an asset that you own. It’s independent of whatever social media property may be the flavor of the month. Remember MySpace? While I don’t think Facebook or Twitter are going away soon, it is a fast-moving space. If you build your business on someone else’s platform and it starts to decline in popularity, your key online marketing asset will be stranded. 

While email is a powerful media, it does have a few idiosyncrasies that you must be aware of. Here are some of the key dos and don’ts when it comes to email. 

Be human. Don’t write an email like a robot or like you’re writing a formal letter. Email is a very personal medium and even if you’re sending the same email to thousands of subscribers, write as though you’re emailing a single person. Feel free to be a bit informal. 

Use a commercial email marketing system. Don’t ever use Outlook, Gmail or any other standard email service for mass email marketing. These services are designed for one-to-one emails not one-to-many. Your account will either get shut down or blacklisted if you start mass emailing from these services. The great thing about using a commercial service is that they automatically take care of a lot of the legal compliance for you, things like having an unsubscribe option and your contact details at the bottom of your marketing emails. They also work hard to bypass spam filters and ensure good deliverability.

Email regularly. If you rarely email your email your list, they will start to go “cold.” If they have not heard from you for a long time, they may forget who you are and mark you as a spammer. Worse still, the value of your key online marketing asset starts to decay. To keep the relationship warm, stay in touch with your email list at the very least monthly. Best practice is closer to weekly, but it also depends on your target market. Just ensure when you email it’s relevant and value-building. 

Automate. Another great reason to use a commercial email marketing platform is automation. These platforms allow you to set up sequences that automatically get emailed to new subscribers. For example, when they subscribe, you could have your email marketing platform automatically send them a welcome email. A day later it could send them a value-packed email helping them to better understand your vacation rental and what you have to offer. A week later it could be another regarding events and things to while they are vacationing in your area. All this can be done on autopilot. An email marketing platform can be one of the best salespeople for your vacation rental business. It will never take a sick day, never complain, and never forget to follow up.

Email is a very powerful and personal media channel. It allows you to create compelling campaigns with a high degree of automation. When done right it can be a valuable part of both an online and offline media strategy.