How to connect Stayfi and Mailchimp to increase Direct Bookings

Welcome to a very special edition of the Boostly podcast. And this is a little tune up series. As you will have seen if you watched a previous episode. I am helping Pad Suites, which is also known as Mr. Sean Rocky G from Airbnb Automated. We've got the amazing Hayley and Kristen. I'm helping there get more direct bookings. And we had a coaching call, we went for a few things and full context. They are 95% reliant on Airbnb bookings. A little bit of verbo, a little bit of direct, but we haven't got the systems and the structures set up in place. And this is what they want to do more. They want to get more direct bookings. There's no website as of yet. They use Sync BNB as their. As their pms. And we looked at a few things and I said, listen, the main thing, what we need to start doing is we need to start building your database. You've got no way of building a list. And so I put them in touch with the Amazing Arthur at Stay Fine. And what they've done, they've got over 100 properties. And what they've done is they're trialing stay fire with 14 of their units in Dallas. So they're spread around the states. They're in three different states, over 100 properties and growing. And so we're going to test out stay fire with 14 of those properties. And we've just been able to get back access to the dashboard. And I wanted to walk you through to show you how to properly set up your Stay Fi account on how you can grow your email list. So let me just share my screen before I do that. If this is the first time that you are watching this podcast. Hi, my name is Mark Simpson. I give hosts just like you, the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence to go and get more direct bookings. And it all begins with little actionable steps. We're going to be really proactive and this is the start. And I cannot wait to show you the results from this and particularly from StayFi. If you don't know what StayFi is, Stay Fi is basically when you go into Starbucks and you want to use their Wi Fi, a splash page comes up and you have to give them your email address to use the WI Fi, just like when you go into Marriott or any of those big chains. And this technology isn't new. It's been around for a long time now, but it's never been very good. I used to mess around with this in 2012 the technology wasn't there and there's definitely been nothing geared up for the hospitality industry. And Arthur and his team at Stayfi have come in. It's fantastic product. It works. Them primarily based out of America and Canada, they are coming to the UK and Europe. If you want to go find out more. Boostly.co.ukforward/stay fi s, t a Y F I go and check them out. Right, let's share the screen. So this is your Stayfi dashboard. Okay. This is what we're currently in right now. As you can see, the getting started is is here. We're going to ignore all of that. I'm going to let Kristen and her amazing team crack on with that. What we're going to focus on is the splash page. Now this will be what your guest sees. So when they walk into the property and they want to connect to the WI fi like everybody does, this is the message that they will see. Welcome to Pad Suites in Dallas. Please enter your name and email below to enjoy complimentary WI Fi. Okay, really super simple. You can choose the image, you can choose the logo, etc. Okay everyone, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I want to take a super quick break to talk to you about Hostfully. So I've been telling you all all about their award winning platform. But one of the great things about this company is that they are very eco conscious in the world of short term rental management. Go check out their blog right now@hostfully.com they have a few interesting articles about how you too can make your business more marketable to the younger generation that is really talking about this topic and taking it very seriously. Go to hostfully.com and as you are there and whilst you are there go and check out their digital guidebook. It's free to get started with and also booking a demo call about their award winning PMP property management platform. They're the exclusive sponsors of the Boostly podcast. They have been for many years and hopefully for many years to come. So for me, to all the team, thank you and let's get back on with this show. Now this is the most important bit. You come down to where it says marketing consent checkbox, what you want to do when you want to have that. Require marketing consent to connect to Wi Fi and pre check. You can mess around with that text if you want but it's totally up to you. So it looks like that it's pre text and they have to tick it to basically have marketing content which is fine. Which is what will Link up to mailchimp, which will be the all how to get around all of the GDPR ness and all that lovely stuff that gets thrown at us. Okay, so this is what it looks like. This is what it will look like for the guest when they arrive. Not just for the lead booker, but everybody in their party. Now, the redirect URL. Now at the moment they had it go into their Facebook page. But as you can see from the Facebook page, it is bare. It's one of the things that we're going to help them with. But in, in the interim, I saw that they had a really cool video on their Facebook page. So what I want to do is I want to link it to there. Now I've messaged the team and I said that instead of this, what I would love to see is a link to a YouTube video of Haley, Kristen, Sean and the team just all introducing themselves. I think that'll go really well, really nicely. And again, I encourage you to do that as well. But this is what we've got. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to update that. That's saved. And the cool thing is is you can, you can add many different types of splash pages. You can test, you can, you can change it. It's totally up to you. So however you want to do it. Really cool. Now the main thing, what you got to do now is you've got to integrate it with your email marketing provider of choice. So you've got ActiveCampaign that I personally use at Boostly. You've got Mailchimp that I, I also use and I have, I've got videos and showing everybody how to use mailchimp properly. But you've got everything. Doesn't matter who you may be. You can also connect it up to the fantastic guesty owner as track and hostfully touch day. Oh, it's lovely. It's all there. All right, so let's connect it to mailchimp. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on that and we're going to connect it up. Okay, so as you can see, we have connected it up. All we needed to do was to get an API key that you can obviously get from your mailchimp and you just have to do a little bit more of connection. Simple enough, took two, three minutes to do and to understand, but it's the same for whatever you would use. So now what we have is we have connected up our Mailchimp to our StayFi. What we've now done is we've created our splash page and what next is going to happen is StayFi is going to activate the hubs that are at each of the properties of 14 in total and once that's happening we will check back. At the moment there's only one person subscribed to the email list and that's me. And then when we check back on this we will have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people connected up to the StayFi. So StayFi is a fantastic way of generating emails. I'm hopefully going to have an interview with the founder of Stayfi over the course of the coming weeks and months to explain more about this. But if you want the easiest, quickest, fastest way to not only get the emails from your booker, but the emails from all of the guests in your property, StayFi is a fantastic tool. It's very cost effective, very, very, very cheap for what you're getting. And as you will know by now with me, email is one of the best return of investments you can do when it comes to marketing and I'm excited to show you the results of what we get with Pad Suites, Stay fi, mailchimp and all of the cool things. So thanks for sticking by. Thanks for thanks for watching this video. As always, I'll be back tomorrow with a daily podcast episode. In the meantime, if this is the first time that you have discovered Boostly, please do hit the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe, download, but most importantly share this video in your community. Whether it's a Facebook community, LinkedIn community, whatever community is, share it with hosts around the world. Because these tactics and tips are going to be vital for you to increase your direct bookings. See you tomorrow. As always, thanks for stopping by. And as always, be proactive, do not be reactive.