Heads In Beds Show - The Reasons To LOVE Email Marketing To Get More Direct Bookings!

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down their most 'underserved' topic on the podcast: email marketing! They share their favorite reasons why email can be a huge benefit to your overall direct booking approach. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, so Paul, how's it going today? Another fantastic day here, working our way almost all the way to the end of January here. Doesn't seem like that's possible. But yeah, this is, again, like I talked about last time around, the time of year where I like talking to people.

I like seeing what those numbers are year over year. So how are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good. I followed one of those Twitter accounts. I don't know if you do, and it shows you what progress the year is already. And I saw one the other day that was like 6.7%. I'm like, that doesn't seem right. The year just started a week or two ago.

And it's, oh shoot, no, that is right. We're like already 6% of the way through the year. So here we go. We got to figure it out as we go. And it's going to be there whether you like it or not. So it's, you know what that is like a little bit, in my experience. It's going to be there whether you like it or not.

And perhaps the most unkillable marketing channel, potentially, is email marketing. So today we're doing reasons to love email marketing for your vocational business. One that we joked about before we record, we haven't really talked about email. We've done episode after episode about SEO, PPC. You want to get in the weeds on that. We obviously are more than willing to oblige. We've done guest stuff. We've done owner stuff and email, perhaps the forgotten marketing child at times, sitting there at the bus stop waiting for uncle Paul and uncle Conrad to go pick them up and or her up, whatever the case may be. And we haven't done it. So anyways,

today we're going a little bit deeper in the email marketing. On the guest side, there may be a little owner thing here and there, but most of today we said we're going to focus on the guest side of things. So what's your experience with email? You've done some email marketing in the past yourself, I think, on the guest side. How do you see it as a priority channel for vacation managers to work with? I think the easy way to say it is it's probably the lowest cost marketing you're going to do, because depending on any managing of the service, you might pay some costs there. But for the most part, it's a free service there. How you're getting some of those emails, probably a little cost associated there.

But I think it is. It's depending on how you're using email. And there are obviously a lot of different ways to do it. It's a really good way to communicate with guests, obviously, with owners, obviously, as well. Consistent way when we're talking about newsletters, making sure you're driving that value and talking about giving people those updates of what's happening on site. That consistent communication using drip emails, certainly that's something that can be effective in leading people down that path if they're not ready to either book a room or on the owner's side, potentially list their home

with you right now. So yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways that we use email marketing in this space. Again, and then going to the back end of it, Carter Bannerman even. So there's a lot there where email marketing plays a big role. Sometimes we just call it email marketing in the newsletters, but there's probably more just as a part of how we communicate with guests, property management system, stuff like that, where that's just as important. And we should probably have as close eyes on that as we do on the fancy newsletters

that we send out biweekly or monthly or something like that. Yeah, I do want to, let's put a pin in that to come back to it, which is like understanding where emails come from and why because I think that's a topic worth diving into. Yeah, I think you nailed it. It's really just having the direct connection. And it might be one of the more we I was saying earlier about how it's like this forgotten child. Maybe it's because we've all had email addresses for a long time. It's the first thing that you get right once you start to start to work on something, you start to get an email address, and it feels real at that point, or even my son, I set him up an email address. He's seven years old because you need an email address to sign into an iPhone.

So he has a neat way Minecraft. So it's he's seven years old. He has an email address. He might have that till he's 57 years old. Who knows if Google and Gmail stick around. So it's one of those things that does feel it's almost like a social security number a little bit, right? It stays with you whether you like it or not.

So having that direct connection is so valuable. And to be fair, over the years, a lot of things have changed with regards to deliverability of the inbox. Gmail has tabs and things like that. But the core hasn't changed. If you have someone's list and you have their permission to email them, we could talk a little bit too about CanSpam here in a minute. If you have the permission to email them and they're on a marketing newsletter list and they're engaging with you, it's like they're a member of your private club and you can reach out and communicate to them whenever you want to. And I agree with you 100% that it can be a very high return on

investment channel with regards to time or with regards to hard costs. The one thing that I would add on to that, though, is that people always leave this out is the hard part is gathering email addresses. But the incremental cost of actually going and marketing to a larger list versus a smaller list is actually very small. So for example, MailChimp may charge you a little bit more per month if you have 10,000 contacts versus 1000 contacts. But if you have the same quality at 10,000 as you do it as 1000 in terms of open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and so on, it's going to take, for example, our team, it takes us the same amount of time to put together a newsletter that goes out to 200,000 people as it does to two people or 200 or 2,000

or 20,000. So over time, I think is that these large property managers that have been around a long time, they've collected a lot of email addresses and they actually get the most benefit out of it. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't help the smaller property manager or the host. It's just, they don't get quite as much benefit because they're pulling a smaller lever. Whereas that large property manager it's been around for a long time is pulling much bigger lever, but the results can be fantastic either way. So I just don't get fooled into this thinking that it's printing cash. If you don't have a big list, it's not going to be potentially really profitable at first, but it'll get there to your point. And I think that's one thing that people have to realize is that being consistent is the

one of the key things there, building that trust, building credibility. So people know, Hey, these guys send me useful info. I get a lot of value out of the emails that I send to them. This is like a battle that we have to be honest to internally a little bit with clients. We get a new client and some clients want to be very property promotion heavy. Hey, we've got a deal. We've got a discount, push this date, push this property, et cetera. Other people were able to talk into being a little bit more,

hey, content plus property or property plus content. Some mix where it's like a little bit more 60, 40, 75, 25 and a little bit less click now and book this button. So I don't know if you have any like thoughts on that of what's the right ratio of to make that email valuable and useful. How do you organize the right information on that, if you have any ideas? Yeah, that's something that we did.

And I think it's similar to the problem some people face on the social media side. You have to balance the promo salesy stuff with, hey, this is still that channel where you can build trust and you can build credibility. People aren't just looking for discounts. If they've given you, now that may be how they initially signed up, but if you're giving them again, those blog posts or those top 10 lists, or what's happening in the area, really giving them some information about how they're going to plan their next trip with you or how they're going to plan maybe the trip that they haven't planned with you yet. I think that's really important. The balance, I think you always want to give that promotion. you want to put the

promotion area in somewhere. Maybe that's the middle or towards the end of the piece. But I think your main content in your email should be talking more about what's happening at the property or something that you're really trying to highlight. I wouldn't make it ambiguous about what the main focus of the email is. And I think that's sometimes a problem as we're trying to put things together. It's, all right, where does everything need to go? No, there should be a primary item that you're trying to discuss, like laying out a newspaper. That first front page should be that above the fold section is your key area.

Front page should be that above the fold section is your key area. So highlighting someone on your team, highlighting a new property, highlighting new properties tricky. We've got the owner interest there, but highlighting a new aspect of the area, highlighting a new trail that's opened up around there, really focusing on the intent and persona behind why these people are traveling or why these people are going to come to your area, why they're seeing that value there. So what are your thoughts on how you're laying that out and not making it too promo-y salesy? Yeah, I think your call to social is appropriate. I remember when I first started in the industry way back when I was working with

another agency, we had the social media manager at the time. And I think he said something to the effect, his philosophy was like 90%, 10%. So it was like 90% content. And look at this pretty sunset picture, look at this pretty property, but it wasn't even like a call to action to book. It was more like, don't you wish you were at this pool or, oh, this is our favorite restaurant. What's your favorite restaurant in the area? And then 10%, like click here to book now. And that was at a time, 2014, when you got a lot more organic reach on social. So you were a little bit more protective of that type of content you're publishing versus now it feels like we get

so much less organic reach than we used to. So we're just a little bit, we're not as, we're not risking as much traffic loss in that scenario. But certainly I think the frequency comes into play on that side of it, how often you're sending and why.

And like you said, the content of the email, are you actually doing something useful and valuable? Because we frequently get replies to our emails that we can see go into like MailChimp or the client's inbox, where they're like, oh, we're not planning a trip, but it was so good to read about this or so good to see about this. Or I think being a little bit of a news source and email isn't a bad thing. I remember in the Outer Banks, we have a client up

there years ago, they built a Publix, which you probably don't know Publix is up there, but they probably have them in Florida when you're going to be in Florida. Yeah, exactly. So they got them down there and it was like a big deal. We wrote this blog post and it was like Publix opening on this day and the Outer Banks. And it was like close to some of these properties. And no lie, I think that was like the most replied to email we've ever sent to the client. They're like, we're excited about the Publix. I'm just like, yeah, but look at these nice condos. You want to book those? No, we want the Publix. I'm just like, okay. Yeah. I think people, I think the goal should be, just think about it this way,

heuristically, or do people look forward to the email that they get from you? Or is it like, oh, here they go promoting it, promoting it again, and so forth. And I think that can quickly run dry and people get a little frustrated by it. But it's the frequency as part of that piece. It's building, like you said, the trust and credibility. And then yeah, what's the personality of your brand? What are you talking about there? Is the goal to just say, hey, come book a property with us and here's a bunch of different links? Or is the goal like, here's what we're thinking about. Here's what we're focusing on right now. Here's a favorite restaurant that we have. Here's a picture of us go into this awesome new experience.

And here's a picture of it. We have a client down in the Orlando area that we stayed with for VRMA. And a lot of his Instagram and email content that he publishes, we don't actually do it for him. We just do his like SEO and paid search work. But I like following his account because it's we're at the parks, we're doing this. We're doing this. Oh, and by the way, there's home features mixed in there. So I think he's found a good ratio. So that's my perspective on it, at least, which is that your branch, like you could

be a little bit. There's not like an algorithm with email, right? There's not like we don't have to satisfy the Google gods or anything like that. We can be a little bit more fun and show some personality in email. And then people look forward to it. They're going to engage with it more and click on it more. And most importantly, perhaps for this kind of business as well is to stay subscribed, right? Because they're only going to book a handful of stays with you, right? If they're

on your email list for a long period of time, you're going to do really good to get three bookings out of someone. That would be top tier performance if that were the case, right? But that could easily be over 50 months or 40 months between the first booking and when that third booking might occur. So over that timeframe, let's say you're sending one a month, you might've sent out 40 newsletters, right? So how do we, there are three times when it might actually convert and that's being optimistic. The other 37 emails they get, how do we make sure they don't, we don't upset them or get them in the wrong headspace where they scroll down to the bottom and click unsubscribe. So what's your kind of take on that, that the personality aspect to it of being fun with it, but having a brand voice and talking about your company in there.

I think it is. It's another branding opportunity. And if you're not like people are going to figure out right away, if you're just slapping something on a template, as opposed to actually being your true brand, being your true self. I love the idea of being, having that personality. That's where I think the ability to personalize it and put a little note in at the bottom. That's something where it doesn't have to be much, maybe a couple of sentences, just giving a quick, that could be a quick update of that's your little personalized section

of, hey, property manager says, or my thoughts of the week. I think it gives you an opportunity to share more of yourself. And again, that's something that people do relate to a lot of these property managers on a much more personal level. It's something that I think a lot of hotels, resorts, and other standalone properties probably yearn for that we do have this more personal level. So if you're not taking that personal level that you do on, we'll take it back to social media again.

If you are very active on social media and you're not bringing that personal level that you do on, take it back to social media again. If you are very active on social media and you're not bringing that over, bringing that sense of yourself, that branding, that personality, it's going to feel disingenuine. And I think you will, you'll have people who are anticipating something else, anticipating that different experience, and they're going to scroll down and they're going to remove themselves from the list. I love that idea. It's not meant to be like these aren't press releases that you're sending out every two weeks or anything like that. And there can be news, but this is fun.

Make it be a reflection of your business, yourself, and let yourself stand out from competitors too, because there's probably a reasonable likelihood that if they signed up for your newsletter at some point, they were on a competitor's webpage as well. They were on a landing page. They signed up over there. They might be receiving six different newsletters from the area. How do you consider it that way? And how can you let yourself and allow yourself to stand out more just by some of the things you're doing. Hey, maybe you want to sign up for some of your competitors' newsletters to see what they're doing so that you can either do something similar or adopt some of what they're doing or set yourself apart from what they're doing. Because I think that's the thought that you are the only person that they're receiving those emails from in your

area. It's probably a little naive to say the very least. Yeah. No, I love subscribing to other email lists. They're not a client or anything like that. I talked to them a long time ago, but no one that I've worked with. I think AvantStay does a great job on email. What they put out, I think their content is really solid. And I would argue they actually are pretty promotional, but they make it more fun.

It's like they'll have really unique designs. So I signed up for the Avon State email newsletter list and I've been getting their emails now for a long time. And I swear like one every other email, I sharing it to Don or John on my team who hit a lot of the email stuff. I'm like, Don, this is awesome. What do you think about this?

Oh, that is cool. So yeah, I love getting inspiration from other people. It's so funny because I feel like the big OTA is actually sometimes do a bad job with email. Like Airbnb's emails are like, you could be anywhere, click here and look at all of our properties. And they'll feature really interesting properties

because of course Airbnb has the best unique property inventory online. And as far as the OTA goes, that's the case. Vrbo's emails, I'm on that list too. And I feel like they don't know, the problem is perhaps that they're trying to do all this advanced customization automation stuff with like where I'm going

and they're confused as heck where I'm going because I'm constantly looking for locations if i'm signed in so i feel like verbo it's not my fault that my those emails aren't landing well but it's typically like a bunch of future properties like i don't really get much from verbo maybe i'm on the wrong list where it's here's like verbo doesn't produce content verbo doesn't produce information about myrtle beach they don't produce information about destin they don't produce information about san diego if you're a property manager in that market you can You actually have a big advantage. We've talked about this before with the local maps results. You actually have a little window there that the OTAs don't have.

Same with email. You have your list. They don't have your list. If you do both website email capture, and then you might also have some offline email capture. We can talk about that in a second too. Yeah, it's really the case to showcase your personality, special offers, deals. These things all work well. And then give people a little control. I don't know if we said that quite yet. You were talking about people unsubscribing, but certainly we want to stay top of mind. That's great, but we don't want to do so at the expense again of losing people. So with some of our clients now, if you go to the bottom, you click a change. Not only can you click unsubscribe, you can say, send me less email or change my preferences. And we have some clients

who are being a little bit more aggressive with the list, but only if people opt into it. So if they want to get stuff a little bit more regularly, they can opt into that or get my preferences. And we have some clients who are being a little bit more aggressive with the list, but only people opt into it. So if they want to get stuff a little bit more regularly, they can opt into that or get that experience. If they don't want to get stuff that often or that regularly, we could slow it down a little bit as well. And I think the other thing

that we maybe don't do as well as we could is really get more feedback of like doing little interactive polls and doing stuff like that and trying to figure out or even down to the user level, sending out more of those personalized, hey, what type of information would you like to see from our emails and stuff like that? Because I think if you get that feedback, you don't have to one or two people filling out a survey.

Maybe you're not going to make all the decisions in the world based on that, but at least you're getting some feedback and you're understanding what people like about it and you're understanding what you can change. Again, I think the same thing with your competitors or anything like that. Take a look and see. Get that feedback from the people who are opening the emails because if they are seeing something that they like, hammer that. Again, if you want to go into, as we're talking about, let's move into special offers and exclusive deals. If they're looking for more of that information, then make sure that's what they're getting. Give all the users, as much as you can control, give them the content that they're actually

looking for there. Yeah, for sure. A few other ideas of the benefits, and then I wanted to clean up some other things that we've been collecting along the way here. You can get some pretty good analytics from email. Be careful, though, of all these reports from MailChimp and the like, whatever system we're using. The open tracking is not as reliable as it used to be. The truth is that MailChimp and these other platforms don't really technically know with 100% certainty.

If someone has opened an email, click tracking, I find pretty accurate, they click on a link, they then get bounced to the server, and then they get to the website. So you might see a report inside of your email marketing system, we see these, where somehow you have a list of people that haven't opened, but they've clicked. So explain to me how that's possible. It's because a lot of systems lock open, so they don't actually know if someone's opening or not. Or on the flip side, I know this was the case with Apple for a while, how the default Apple Mail client worked is they were actually downloading images through a proxy server. So it was triggering an open, even though someone hadn't opened the email. So you would do a segment in your email marketing tool of choice, and it would say somehow Apple Mail

users have a 90% open rate, which is of course impossible. It's not really likely. If you're getting a 90% email rate, Conrad at builduppuglies.com, email me. I'll give you a job, pay me whatever you want. No, but so be careful with the analytics. They're all a little bit flawed. It feels like a imperfect measurement of best,

but you can get some decent data, right? The numbers we look at, we expect to see a 25 to kind of 35% open rate. That's pretty typical for a newsletter that goes out. But I always recommend this to people. I don't think we said this before. Always do a resend of non-openers a few days later. And sure, every once in a while,

you might potentially catch someone twice, right? But if they didn't click, you could also do a segment. Didn't open, didn't click the last newsletter. You send it Monday at 2 p.m. It's Thursday. Go ahead and resend it at a different time frame too. Some people, they get so many promotional emails. They don't check them all the time.

So if you sent the first one at 1pm or 2pm. Also, you got to find out what's right for your audience made to do some testing there. But once you find out what works well, send the resend to the non opens or non clicks. Yeah, completely different time, send it to 5pm, send it at 9am, whatever the case may be, try a different time, because you might just hit a different group of people at a different time in their inbox and their just lives and they were working on Tuesday, and they didn't really look at it. it and that Thursday they weren't and they were and they see it and you may get a booking off that it always surprises me our bigger clients where we do that resend which takes us like very little time and we just send it out to that 50 60 70 percent of people

that didn't open and then boom we change the subject line it looks maybe like a little bit of a different email in their inbox always change the subject line but it's the same content underneath and then we'll get three four five six more bookings out of thin air and I'm just like we just hadn't clicked that button and change that subject line, but it's the same content underneath. And then we'll get three, four, five, six more bookings out of thin air. And I'm just like, if we just hadn't clicked that button and changed that subject line, that would have been another five bookings that we missed potentially. They maybe wouldn't have come over. And it makes a huge difference the bigger the list. Obviously, the smaller list, like you may not be getting a booking from every newsletter that you're sending, but still take another swing at it.

Most of these systems have plenty of credits to account for the fact that you're sending that email a second time. And even if you're doing, especially if you're doing a monthly email, it's a good little one to add in there as well, for sure. Switching out that subject line is huge because the last thing you want them to see is in a Google inbox, seeing that number two with the exact same sender, the exact same thing. I think that turns people off more than having, again, two different emails from property manager X just because it doesn't, who was it a send? It might now it feels spammy when you get two of the same subject line to from two of the same centers. It just feels, and maybe I

need to get rid of this because this is overwhelming me a little bit there. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the key. I think if you're unsure, I like default position and slow down. Or if you see, wow, I sent out that email and I got a 1.5% unsubscribe rate. I just lost 50 people off my list or 100 people off your list. Listen to that. Don't just blindly power through and start to burn a list. I hate to say it. I've seen some burn lists in this industry, man. I've seen some people, large companies that have been around a long time, and they were so aggressive for so long with their emails that I go look at the numbers and I'm like, you're down to a 5% open rate. You're down to such a low level that sure sure on paper, you have this list of 10,000

people, but we send out an email and you get seven clicks. It's really not. So keeping the quality of the list high is really important and use the analytics to your advantage and be adaptable. Don't just stick to whatever you were doing. Okay. We're going to send it this cadence. Like you got to look at the numbers and see what's working and potentially get some benefit

from that. So yeah, those are some things. Let me clean up some other things here just to share some other pieces of the puzzle here. I was doing an update to our proposal copy. And one thing that we pretty much always talk about is email collection. Now the piece that we typically are pushing is onsite. So doing a pop-up on the website.

I'm a big advocate. I'm a big proponent of doing these pop-ups. I've said this ad nauseum. So people, long-time listeners of the show here will be like, yes, I know this already, Conrad. But typically for the new listener, you typically get much better opt-in rates from a small fixed dollar discount than you do a percentage discount. In other words, offering $50 off of your next booking typically

actually converts better, believe it or not, than 10% off your next booking, even when 10% is greater discounts. Because maybe it's more tangible nature of seeing the $50. To be honest, I can't even explain why. I have my theories. But definitely consider that. A pop-up with just sign for a newsletter might get a half of 1%, 1% opt-in rate. So if you get a thousand people to see that pop-up next month, you might be adding in a dozen, two dozen emails, something like that into your list. Not necessarily ideal. That same pop-up with a $50 discount could convert a two and a half to 5%. I've seen some as high as 5%. So that thousand people turns into 50 emails and then it compounds over time and you get a lot more emails coming into your list.

Yeah, we have a client. I'll pull the exact numbers if we want to be very scientific about this, but we have a client who's doing one of these small fixed dollar discounts has been doing that for a really long time. And I'll give you a sense of how many people they're adding each month, but it's pretty staggering. What's your take on pop-ups? I don't think we've really talked about it too much.

You seem pretty proud of pop-up, but maybe you can make a case against it if you want to steal mine. I think the, you have to do it right. The thing where we've most had most of our conversations is you have to either time it, make sure that people are engaged. You don't want it to be overwhelming. I have seen some people who do the full screen pop-up or do something like that, where it's just like, you're taking away the ability to interact with a website in any way. And sometimes I've actually seen it where they do that and then they make it almost impossible to click out of the pop-up. So I

think there are definitely some do's and don'ts and we've covered a lot of the do's, but yeah, make sure you're not intruding upon the user experience and you're improving that user experience there as much as you can. I think that would be the only time I'd say don't do it. I think exit intent has its place. If you're trying to recapture people at the very end there, and then based on how they're engaging with their page, it is. You want to take every opportunity you can to continue to connect with those people. Because if you're not using some type of first party data aggregator behind the scenes to try to find all that information and try to decode it from device IDs and stuff like that. Really, the only way you're going to actively be able to get some type of contact information is to hit that pop up. So again, just not intruding upon that user experience on the website is going to be the key. Otherwise, I'm heavily pro pop-up. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's the key, like you said, to do it sensitively and thoughtfully. So here's some numbers over the past month for a client, one of our higher traffic lines,

but still in a single market, a top property manager in that market. They've done 50,000 visitors. They have a small fixed dollar discount running, 2.68% conversion rate. So not necessarily the strongest conversion rate, but still a good one. So% conversion rate. So not necessarily the strongest conversion rate, but still a good one. So of those 49,000 visitors over the past month or so, 823, let me get you an exact number, 2.68. So we've added, or I'm sorry, yeah, 2.68. So we've added a little bit, we've added well over a thousand emails over the past month on this property manager's website. The onsite email collection can be really fantastic and you get a lot of benefit there. Again, I think we talked about this before but you can also do off-site

email collections so stay fi i'm obviously a big fan of them and what they do but it's not the only way to do it we have some clients that do it through like guidebooks or we have some clients that do it through like a rental agreement so there's more than one way to skin the cat i think stay fi is just the easiest best way to do it that would be my top choice for sure if i was recommending but if for some reason that doesn't work we had someone talking to us recently where they don't control the Wi-Fi. It's more of like a condo building type thing. So StayFi was out right away. Unfortunately, just nothing they can do there. But I said, hey, we can still do guidebook. We could still do a rental agreement and then have them opt in to get the emails that way. So there's other options available to you. Just because you

can't do StayFi or you don't want to do StayFi, don't just give up and say, oh, I guess I can't do offsite emails or I guess I'm going to miss every Airbnbbnb email be a little bit more diligent about getting that data in there because i think it helps quite a bit one thing i skipped over a second ago sorry i shouldn't have done this was the pop-up should lead to something as far as actually getting email back out this sounds simple but you'd be shocked how often i sign up for email addresses of like competitors websites to your point ball and then i get nothing not even a thanks for signing up i feel like that's a minimum right thanks for signing up that is yep yeah but it the minimum, right? Thanks for signing up. That is, yep. Yeah.

But it's like our second scope item, when new accounts when we're working on them is what's the welcome series look like? So they sign up for the email list. That's when their interest is the highest. So whether it's a discount, no discount, whether it's a percentage of fixed, whatever, they put their email in. It's please mark it to me. They're literally like raising their hand in front of you saying,

hi, I'm interested in your company. Would you just ignore them? Of course not. You'd be like, let me tell you more about our company. So these welcome series that we have, these get very high open rates. I've seen open rates as high as 75% on some of our welcome series emails, the first two or three that go out. So I'm really bullish on those. I think people just often miss the boat on these. And the good news is you don't really have to tinker with these that much. In fact, we built one for a client who then paused later on. And we went back and looked like

two years later, still running, still delivering great marketing information and i went in their analytics and look still delivering consistent booking still delivering consistent traffic back to their website so was it great that they didn't update it in two years no because there were some broken links and some old misstated misleading information in there but it wasn't like so egregious that it wasn't working or that they weren't getting some benefit from it so yeah huge fan of the welcome series i don't know why i didn't say that after pop-up. I should have, but anyways, love the welcome series. Things that makes a huge difference in like your overall success.

And what I also like is that it gets the person used to opening emails from you when they were interested. And they might fade off. Maybe they don't book in that two week window and that's okay. Then they get put onto like a monthly newsletter list, but big fan of welcome series. Don't know if you have any thoughts here. Maybe this is a good example of two of odor can apply

as well as gas for that initial. Yeah, that initial yeah that is that's i think he typically is going to be a little shorter sales pitch on the guest side of things where that that direct booking should come a little quicker but it's really important to be educating and nurturing those owners that are giving you that information and that is that's one of those things where on our side of things, timing is critical. So we want that welcome series to go, the first email in that welcome series to go up pretty quick there, making sure that we're, those property managers are connecting with those homeowners in the quickest possible way.

That's something that Jade from our team, I think it was two years ago now, had done the secret shopper study of how quickly people are responding to calls and stuff like that. But emails are no different. Getting that email sequence out, being able to send it out immediately and then get that feedback and be able to respond immediately if you have the ability to do that. That's the one thing with some of our email marketing efforts is that you don't always have that easy way to give that instant feedback of going back and forth. It's not like it's coming back into your Gmail account in some cases. So you do have to figure out a way.

I think that's the one area with newsletter marketing is how do you ensure that you can communicate back and forth with those guests or those potential owners after that initial send and receipt? How do you continue that conversation after that?

Yeah, yeah. I think that's ultimately what it comes down to is like emails not often, I said this before too with the clients, it's like most people just like PPC ads, this is often the case. They don't always click from the email and sign up right away if it's a homeowner, nor do they often click from the email and book in that same browsing session.

So when we look at analytics at the end of the month and we see like a low number of bookings coming directly from email, I don't worry about that because I know that it's getting people to the website. I'm a little bit more interested almost in the traffic number and low, like high open rates, low unsubscribe rates, certainly low spam complaints and high traffic, high clicks. If that's the case, then we're doing the right thing because people are interested, they're engaged, they're clicking, they're looking at what's going on, but they may not book in that same session. And that's okay. Like that's pretty common behavior for people to be

doing when they're using email. You're still getting a lot of benefit for your brand from that to being able to drive traffic on demand. Yeah. And as long as you've got that some type of UTM tracking in place, you're going to have that attribution so that you can look at Google Analytics and you can see in that multi-touch attribution report of how many touch points did this particular guest have? How many touch points did this owner have? And that was still one of my favorite reports to look at in universal analytics. And G4 is still pretty solid there. But just understanding, okay, this person had an organic search, a Facebook click, an email click, a Google ads. It is fun

to track the entire guest path and sometimes the entire owner path all the way through and understanding just how many touch points it takes. I think at one point, Google had put the number out there, it's 55 touch points. I don't think it's necessarily that anymore. I think we've truncated that buyer's journey a little bit, but it's still not usually, I know brand, I search for brand, I book with brand because I have dates in mind. It is a process to plan a trip in most cases. And most of it, you'll do some of it offline. Probably not going to do most of it offline anymore. That's just, we live in a digital world. So. Yeah. You mentioned brand there. Maybe that's where I can take us home here on brand because I always say this,

right? No one wakes up and searches for the brand of your company in Google without some event preceding it. And email is actually one of those things that absolutely commonly precedes that, which is that I've been getting emails from Avon Stay for forever. I've never booked with Avon Stay. I certainly would if I had the need for a large property and they seemed they were in my date range and we didn't have a client there, of course. But if one day I do a Google search for Avon Stay and make a $5,000 booking in their analytics, it might say Google organic, or it might say direct if I just go to their website. But in my head, I'm like, No, it's because I've been on their email list for the last two years. And I look at the properties are posting and a lot of them are awesome, right?

That's what it comes down to. And it'll never get the credit it deserves, unfortunately, because the way that the behavior of the traveler works, to your point, and then also the way that the brand search comes from, right, it's all these emails that are getting seen, it's, it's your to go way back to the beginning, it's relatively low cost, we're getting all these branded impressions from people that have stayed with us before that express interest in staying with us or they maybe have been one of our properties and we got their email through stay fi so it's the quality of that list can be very high if you do it right they're interested and we're just able to drip out to them once a month maybe once every few weeks hey here's what we got

here's what's going on check out what we're doing and then when they're thinking oh yeah we do want to go back to the beach oh yeah we do want to go to the lake this weekend. You want to be top of mind. And email's never going to always get the credit it deserves, but it certainly can provide a huge boost to your overall marketing efforts. And clients, we have these huge email lists. It's like a cheat code, I'm going to be honest with you. Being able to send out an email and get 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 bookings is really powerful. And you're only going to get there over time. So if your list is small right now, everything we talked about still applies to you, in my opinion, pop up, welcome series, consistency, balancing content and sales, all these things are super

valuable. And if you're a big property manager, you can do a lot more segmentation and send more relevant messages to people. But the core principles of just reaching out through email and leveraging this channel, I think, are so critical. It's one of my three channels that we talk about all the time, search, social, and email, right? You and I tend to nerd out on search.

That's just what we like doing. But email is certainly one of those things that should get its due. And that was the goal of today's episode. Anything else, Paul, that you think I missed or should we let the folks head on over to their inboxes and see what emails are waiting for them in their inbox? I think that is the perfect transition out of here.

We wrapped up this bow pretty nicely and we'll send a little value in their inboxes, hopefully. Awesome. If you want to send me an email or Paul an email, you could do so. It's Conrad, C-O-N-R-I-D at buildup bookings.com it's paul p-a-u-l inventory.com you can reach out to us and we will email you back to the best of our ability we do get a lot of emails but there's certain emails we get that we really like getting don't we from a marketing perspective

there's certain emails we don't like getting so send us one that we like getting because we'd appreciate that the other thing that would help us quite a bit is if you go to your podcast app of choice this is a also something that helps us quite a bit is if you go to your podcast app of choice, this is also something that helps us quite a bit. You go, you leave five stars, people can listen to the show and then more people can hear our thoughts about this advanced vacation rental marketing topics. Paul, that's all I got for you today.

We appreciate your time, effort, your energy, everything that you bring to the table. Appreciate you and appreciate the listener making it this far. So we'll catch you in the next episode of the Heads and Beds show. Thanks so much, bye.