How to increase direct bookings via email 🚀

Cool. Cats and kittens, welcome quarantine to season eight, episode 25 of the Bruce Lee Podcast. I've got to do a little disclaimer. I've been doing live videos all the way throughout the last six weeks now and tonight is Friday the 17th of April. I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little burnt out. So there's no live video. I did have a guest on. They couldn't make it. I was trying to get creative with what I could do, but in the. I just thought, you know what? I've had this little banker that I've been just saving in the background and it was sent to me by Damien Sheridan and Damian put on event just before coronavirus hit the uk. It was called the More Bookings Direct event. And he sent me my full recording and I haven't watched it yet. So I thought what would be good if we could all watch or listen to it together. It's around about 30 minutes long. You know, for those of you that are listening to the podcast, you've got the podcast running your car or on your walk. Don't worry, it's. It is very much audio. But those of you that do get to watch it, watching it live with me, you're going to get a lot of fun, basically, because if anybody's seen my talk, you'll know that I try and do things a little bit differently. I'm not one to stand there and just drone on. I do like to make my talks interactive. I do like to make my talks fun, so you get to witness it firsthand. Tonight's talk presentation is going to be all about email marketing. I recently read a study, a consumer study, the main takeaway from it, and it was recently released by Fuel Travel and the big takeaway from it was is that you have to be proactive in messaging your future guests. Because whilst we are still in amongst this pandemic and we don't know when restrictions are going to get lowered and when, we don't know when travel's going to be. We've all still got bookings that are still active and still there in our calendar. I can see it for, you know, for the granary where I am sat right now and I know that many other clients do have them, they're still unknown as whether they can accept and I'm not. Well, guess what? So is the guest. And the main takeaway from this study was to make sure you could be proactive in communicating with your guests. And email is the best way of doing so. Tonight's video that we're going to watch. Today's video that we're going to watch is going to talk about email marketing. It tells about the power of it and most importantly, it's going to give you stats, it's going to show you some cool things and it will give you a bit more of an insight of why it should be one of the main key marketing channels that you should be looking at. Not only for right now, which is April 2020, but for May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December 2021 2022. So that's today's podcast. That's today's episode. Please let me know a couple of things. Number one, put in the comments below whether you're watching it live or on the replay. Number one, where are you watching this or where are you tuning in from in the world? Number two, give your business a plug drop in the website, drop in your business page for Facebook in the comments below. Number three, what I want for you to do is let us know whether you're watching this live or whether you're watching on replay. And most importantly, see that it's Friday. Seeing it's Friday night. Drinks, let us know what you are drinking with. I will cheers to you. All of that in below. And again as always, do me one big favor. Hit the share button. Share it on your personal wall, share on your business page, share it in a group, but just tell one person about it. I will obviously be watching alongside with so I'll be chatting in the comments. So come and see that if you're watching this live with me. If not, I just want to say thank you so much for Hostfully. They are the sponsors of the Boostly podcast data. The people that fund it make sure that I can keep on doing it. So please go and check out hostfully.com they are offering right now one free digital guidebook so you can set it all up and you can wow your future guests to your property. It's free, so you might as well give it a go if you want to upgrade to the premium and this cool premium advantages. I won't talk about it now, but you go on the website to check it out. Put Boostly2M, put that in the in the promo code and you get two months free. When you're watching this you will know exactly what I'm talking about. So if you're currently listening to the audio only jump onto the YouTube, type in boostly YouTube more bookings, direct conference. The video will come up, watch it and you'll know exactly what I mean, right, everybody sit back, relax, watch, but most importantly implement and put these changes into your business.

My name is Maximson, I'm the founder of a company called Boostly. I'm the admin of a Facebook group called the Hospitality Community and it was created back in 2016 in Scarborough where I'm based. Well, I was based, family business is based and it was born because there wasn't enough help and guidance locally. I felt for hospitality owners, short stay accommodation owners when it came to getting direct bookings. It started for just Scarborough and Whitby and four years later it's got 3,800 members in plus and is 92% engagement which is unheard of on Facebook. It's got people from all over the world in and the book direct sort of motto and method and messages has grown on the back of it. I today I'm going to be talking in my little segment about GDPR and email marketing. So I had a phone call with Damien last year. He said I want you to come to this event.

Great.

Watch me to talk about. He said originally SEO. And I said david, I'm not sure I can have a chat about SEO. It's a bit strong, I don't think.

I can do that.

He said, okay, well what else? He said gdpr. I was like, shit. So here we go. So how GDPR can actually increase your direct bookings? And that is my face. Why should you be paying attention to email marketing? I have got these, these stats off the actual Internet. This is actually a proper survey. I didn't just make them up. So 4.3 billion email users by 2022, 333 billion daily emails being sent by 2022. For every £1 you spend on email marketing you can expect an average return of 32 pounds. I believe that email is still king with algorithms, social media algorithms becoming even harder to get your business in of your, your audience with pay per click, Google Ads and all of that becoming even more expensive. I think email has, will and forever will be the best form of marketing that every single one of you do. I believe that the reason why so many people don't do it is because there's a stigma around it where it is scummy, spammy and some people don't do it. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you how to send emails correctly. I'm going to to talk to you about the perfect time in the day to send an email. I'm going to talk to you about the GDPR Spring clean, as I called it, and how you can turn lookers into bookers. And everybody in this room, you are going to get packed off with an email template that I've used, my boosting members have used, and so many other people have used. So you can put it into practice. You can put it into practice literally at your lunch break, and you could have direct bookings by the time that you leave today, which is. Which is nice. But before that, seeing that I am the first on the. And if anybody's ever seen one of my talks before, you know, I don't really do talks normally. I like to do things a little bit differently, hence why I get banned from Facebook so much. So what we're going to do is we're going to get loose. I know Damien gave me to close her eyes, which I was panicking about, but thankfully, that wasn't the case. We're going to do something a little bit different. So we've got rock, paper, scissors. So what you're going to do, you're going to turn to your left, you're going to turn to your right, and you're going to play your neighbor in a game of rock paper scissors. You're gonna do the best of three. Now, I do have prizes for the people that win. On the way in the airport, I went to the finest shop I could.

Find, and I got goodies.

So a bit of sugar, a bit of adrenaline to get you going on a Tuesday morning. So on the count of three, you're gonna turn to your left, you're gonna turn to your right, and you're gonna play a game of rock paper, scissors. I need somebody to play against me. Damien, you're playing against me on the count of three. So there, there, Debbie, you can do it together. The winner will win chocolates on the count of three. Best of three. One, two, three.

Rock papers.

You get chocolate.

All right.

Do we have winners? Do we have winners? Yes. Put your hands up if you are a winner. Now, unfortunately, I don't have pancakes to give to everybody, but I do have some lovely chocolate eggs. So if you are a winner, going to bring chocolates over here, you can pass these around to the winners. And we have. We've got people still going. James is literally still going with me. I've just got the monitor.

I do apologize.

All right, now I've got a favor to ask. Now that I've given you chocolate, I have got a favor to ask everybody in the room. Hands up. Who uses social media.

Fantastic.

Do you use Instagram? So for those of you who don't follow my daily vlogs, I've got a one year old, a four year old and a seven year old. They are back in Spain and yesterday when I dropped them off at school, they said, daddy, why are you going to London? So I'm going to do a talk about gdpr. They're like, amazing. I want to see it. I said, well, I'm going to be busy talking so I can't take pictures of myself doing it and look a little bit odd. So I said, I'm going to ask everybody in the audience very nicely to take a picture of me on stage talking about what I'm going to talk about. And when you take those pictures, I need you to post them on your social media, whether it's an Instagram story, an Instagram post, a Facebook and make sure you tag me in. So a very important handle to remember. IstleyUK. A very important hashtag remember is more directbookings direct.

That's the one.

I keep getting that wrong all the time. I am so sorry. More bookings Direct. Morebookings Direct. Anybody who tags me in a post, whether it's an Instagram story, a post or whatever, I'll get everybody who does and one person I'll do a mark in review for which is worth £200. So I'll have an in depth look at your business and give you some help and advice. But you've got to got to put it on social media. Tag me in so I can see it. GDPR. Hands up if you missed the GDPR of 2019. So everybody knows about it. Good. So as you know, this law was brought in last year, which were basically something that needed to happen. We've all had spammy junky emails come into our inbox from companies that have bought our email addresses off X, Y or Z. So it needed to happen. But at the same time, the wording and the way it was put together was very scary for small business owners. They're made to feel like you could no longer get involved in email marketing. So I like to think of GDPR as not as a bad thing as such. I like to think of it as something that needed to happen and I like to call it a sprinkling. I've got to obviously say this because legal reasons, this is my opinion.

All right?

I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a GDPR lawyer, so please don't use it as the gospel. Please do get legal advice if you want to go on everything that I'm saying.

With this.

But GDPR is coming and it just means now that we are no longer. If you were doing this in the past, just import your guest bookings into something like mailchimp and just send out emails. You've got to actually get consent, whoever you're going to send an email to, but you can send them an email in the future. There are some amazing tools, some free tools out there that means that you can do so and get the consent. The one that I use and the one that I encourage all Boostly members to is someone called mailchimp m a I l chimp.com it's free and again you get all the tools and the tactics where they can give you a sign up form that has got the consent forms already built in. If you haven't got consent from your guests or people that have signed up to whatever list in the past that you can send them emails and it hasn't been done so in the past 12 months, then you're gonna have to start again. But now is the best time to start. Like I said in the original slides, so many people are emailed and so many people are active on email. And the trick about email marketing compared to anything else is that when you get permission to send somebody an email, you're giving them a one on one interaction into their inbox so there's no distraction. So it's not like a social media post where there's so many other things going on. It's a one on one communication. They're giving you a chance to get into their inbox. The stat here, 49% of customers like to hear from you. This is what people are saying. Like this stat was done in 2017 if the said they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis. The reasons why people get so bogged down with emails is because they think of their own inbox and they think how it's clogged with salesy type emails and all the things. So what I'm going to show you is how to create an email that will actually get read and engaged with. Now gdpr. We've all got email lists. We've got people, whether we've got one email or we've got 20,000 emails. The reason why I call it the GDPR Spring Clean is that you have to on a quarterly basis be cleaning your emails because people will sign up to your email list, people will engage for the first day or the first week and then they'll just stop opening your emails. Now there is no point and this goes for all manner of marketing social media email. There's no point having 100,000 email accounts for you to send an email and only a thousand people open them. Gmail, Yahoo, all these big email clients, they will much prefer your email account if you've got a list of a hundred. But every time that you send an email, out of that hundred, say 50 people open it or engage with it, you've got actual systems and setups in place where when you send an email you can see who's opened it, who's clicked it, but most importantly who hasn't. And what I do on my email account is every month I go in and I find out of all the emails that I have sent, who hasn't opened any, who hasn't engaged of any. And I just unsubscribed. One of the reasons why the boostly email list is so engaged, it's a 61% engagement. And again, it's another reason why going back to social media, the hospitality community Facebook group is 3750 members, but it's got an engagement rate of 92%. Because what I do every month, every three months I go in and anybody who has engaged within six months, we just remove them from the group because again, it keeps the group engaged, keeps the numbers high so that more people will see what we're doing. You have to be consistent. People start doing emails, they start sending bits and bobs out after the first month they'll send something, or two months in they'll send something and they, they don't get the results that they want and they'll stop. Big time of the year that I have my mass unsubscribing from emails that I sign up to is Black Friday. Because again, all of these companies decide on Black Friday sales and Christmas sales that they're going to bombard you with salesy. If they had taken the time on a weekly or a monthly basis to keep in touch and share value and share information and share information about what's going on and telling a story so much, then I wouldn't mind so much if they send a sales email. But consistency is definitely the key. Okay, so the best times to send an email again with things like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, not only does it tell you how many people are opening your emails, but it also tells you what time they're opening your emails and what days they're opening your emails and what devices and where they are in the world. People always ask when is the best time for Me to send an email and the response normally is in things like these. Well, think about who your customers are. Think about your customer avatar. If you're more geared up for the leisure industry, because we've got a lot of people who do leisure guests, then think about your customer avatar breaking down. Like what would they be doing on a day to day basis? Those of you that are geared up for more corporate industry and you've got corporate emails on your list, what time of the day would they be looking to use their emails? I know from working in a office background about Thursday, 3:00pm, you know, after you've had your lunch and you're just chilling out, that'd be a time when you might have to check your email. So start to think about your customer avatar, your ideal customer, and look at your stats, go off your figures. So look when people are opening them and then again, go, go off that. One thing that I always do on every email, whether it's for my clients or the family business, is at the end of every email we have some form of mention of a booking or to check availability somewhere on our. And again with the mail systems that are out there, mailchimp, etc, every time you send that email, not only can it tell you who's opened it, but it can tell you who has clicked on an email and where they've gone. So whether they've gone to your booking engine, whether they've gone to your website, whether they've checked availability and again, it's something that takes us five minutes to do. But when we send out an email, we've got a mention of check, availability, etc. We go and check who's opened it and who's clicked it. The beauty of this is that even though we're sending an email out to 3,000 people, we've had say 1,000 people have opened, but there's 30 people that we've seen click through onto our booking page. And instead of just trying to do the shotgun approach, you can just really narrow it down and find the potential guests to get in touch with. Go to boostly.co.uk mbd that email template is one free for everybody to use in this room. It's an email template that I've used many times and it works really, really well. I'll let you read the email and put it into your own words. You just copy, paste and send and let me know your results. You should all now be following me on Instagram. You're in for an amazing day. There's so much going to be happening. If anybody wants to reach out, you.

Know how to find me.

But thank you very much.

Hopefully you enjoyed it. If you're watching this on your computer or your TV or your tablet, pick out your phone and to take a picture of the screen, go over to Instagram, post it up on your stories and tag in ostlyuk or go on Facebook and do the same tag it in the stories ostleyuk. I'll see everybody that's done it and I'll share it on my Instagram. Let's see who watches to the end. Let's see who is doing that. And again, if you're watching this back on the replay, check still do do it and I will do the share on my Instagram. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. Whether it's live or on the replay, all I ask for doing all of these nights of totally free content is that you engage, you interact, but most importantly, you learn something and you implement it into your business. If you want to get little daily reminders, little tips, hints, active advice that you can be doing, go to booster.co.uk daily boost. I will send you a message straight into your WhatsApp inbox every single day. For now, I shall speak to those.