Mastering Direct Bookings - Email Marketing Strategies

What you think is the future for email marketing and direct bookings? What do you think is going to happen with the market in the next, say five years?

There's going to be some interesting advancements around trip discovery and planning especially we already see this leveraging some AI tools and also leveraging kind of social recommendations. I think that's a huge opportunity for the ability to book direct is it's so hard right now to find brands but maybe if a tool could, you know, instead of recommending Airbnb links, recommend I want to go to Sicily, right. And I don't never been there but maybe it can recommend local people to book with directly.

Having a blast. Going to get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee because it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you'll better but direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Hi, welcome to the Boostly Podcast. This is the podcast that gives you hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. Today we're shining the Boostly spotlight on an amazing service that you as a host need to know about. And if this isn't part of your tech stack, you need to be asking yourself, why aren't I considering this as part of my tech stack? It's a returning guest. We've got Arthur Kolker. He is the CEO and founder of Stay Fi. Now Stay, if you're a host you may have already heard of. Uh, we've got another episode which you can have a look in the Boostly vault where you can dive into Arthur and the story behind StayFi. We will briefly touch on that again today, but we're really going to be diving into some of the new features and the reason why you should be doing email marketing in general as a host. So welcome along. Arthur. Thank you for joining me.

Awesome. It's great to be back.

So, Arthur, just for the few people who haven't heard of Stayfi, can you give us the elevator pitch?

Yeah. So Stayfi is a guest data and marketing platform built specifically for short term rental operators. So we have a service very similar to what you've seen at a coffee shop, airport, hotel, where when guests join the Wi Fi in your properties, they have to enter their information. Things like email name, phone number, birth date on a splash page that you design so that we can collect that information not just from the booker, but everybody staying in your short term rental before they get on the WI Fi. That way you can introduce your brand to everybody who's staying there, collect their data, and then in StayFi, we also have all the marketing tools that you need to follow up with those guests and market to them effectively to get them to come back again and again and stay with you directly.

What would you say to somebody who's listening to this who doesn't currently collect guest emails? Why is it important to do so?

Yeah, guest data collection is the foundation to building any brand and it's the foundation to becoming independent of the OTAs. So Airbnb, VRBO booking, these are all the starting places that you need to be listing your properties when you get started with short term rentals. But the goal should be over time to get fewer and fewer of those bookings from OTAs so that you can not only become more profitable, but also less dependent on swings in demand or changes in algorithms. And you can really de risk your short term rental portfolio. So over time, by collecting data, you'll just find that more bookings will come to you directly and after a year, two years, three years, you'll have a database of thousands, if not tens of thousands of guests who love your brand, who want to come back and stay directly with you. And that's what's going to make your business prosper in the long run. And then if you ever sell your business, make it more valuable for any potential acquirer as well when it comes.

Down to the hosts out there. And I certainly sat in this box for a little while where I had email contacts, but I didn't necessarily know what to send them or when to send these messages. How does StayFi help with that?

Yes, we actually just launched a new enhancement to our email marketing tool within StayFi that basically shows and builds for you the emails that we know convert into bookings. So when you go into the email marketing tool in StayFi, we have two types of emails that we help build for you. One are automated emails and the other are periodic campaigns. So for instance, when you click on the Wi Fi welcome automation in our new email portal, it will walk you through, step by step, building this email where you just put in your logo, the colors, what you want the text to say, and we take up care of all the design automatically for you. And then you just, with the flip of a switch, about five minutes later, we'll have an email that's automatically sent to every single guest when they log into the WI Fi. That's Educating them about your brand, how to book directly, help market upsells, which we can talk about more as well later on. And then of course we also have some turnkey campaigns that you can also just click on our wizard. It will help build the campaign for you. You just plug in the properties, let's say you want to market or the local event that's happening in your area that's going to drive people back and then you can send that campaign to all of the guest data that you have within StateFi. It's also important to note that StayFi doesn't just integrate with the WI Fi data we're capturing, we also will pull in data from other sources. So when you integrate with your property management software, let's say whether you use owner as hospitable, hostfully, hostaway, guesty or streamlined track, the list goes on and on. We will actually look through all of your historical reservations and any that have real emails associated with will also pull those emails in. And then of course you can also upload emails manually from other sources. So you can think of StayFi as not just a way to collect data through the WI Fi, but also the tool that's going to centralize all that data and then also make it super easy to do marketing with our pre built campaigns.

I love that, I absolutely love that. And I think we should just bring attention to because as an early day host, I didn't really understand what an automation or a campaign is. Can we just dive briefly into those things? What is a campaign?

Yeah, so an automation or an email automation, also called a drip campaign, is an email or a marketing email that gets triggered when certain circumstances are met or certain variables are ticked off, let's say. So in StayFi, the most common one that you can set up super easily through our tool is a WI FI welcome email, essentially an email that's triggered when a new guest logs into the WI FI in your property for the first time. That's really important because we know certain things about the guests at that moment. It's typically the first day that they're there, they're in one of your properties and it's an email that's going to get a really high level of engagement and open rates. So with this welcome email we see typically 50, 60, 70 plus percent open rates and 5 plus percent click through rates, which is extremely high when it comes to email marketing because it's triggered at such an important time in the guest journey. And then when it comes to the content in that email, you can imagine when A guest logs into the WI Fi for the first time. They're going to be looking for some information that you can share in this email in a really easy way. Things like a link to a Guidebook or to StayFi's homepage, which is kind of like our own light guidebook product, so they can get information about their stay. It's also a great place to introduce your brand because most people who receive this email are not the booker and probably think that you're a quote unquote Airbnb. So it gives us a really great touch point to start educating the guests about why booking direct for future stays is going to be the best way to work with you as a host or property manager and to get the best rate as opposed to going back to the ota. So you can not only establish yourself as a credible brand, you can include this other information like property information your website links to upsells so that you can also give information to guests that's going to prevent them from, you know, calling or texting you or your support folks because you're presenting that information not just to the booker, but, but everybody's who's in the property at the moment, they log into WI Fi for the first time. So moving on to campaigns, those are one off emails that you're sending on a certain date. So instead of having an email that's being sent every single day, whenever guests are being logging into wifi, you're just going to send out this campaign, let's say on September 1st. That's about, you know, something happening in October, like come stay with us for Halloween because these are all the cool events happening in our town. That would be an example of a one off email. And we have some great examples and kind of pre built templates for one off emails in StayFi as well. So you can send emails, we know that convert for all sorts of different occasions through our email builder.

I set up my automations through my pms. So it just goes by, you know, day before they travel, they get a key code and all these different things. How does StayFi work with those automation? Do I need to do anything with those or are they completely separate or do that, does it replace some of them? Speak to me about that.

Yeah. So there's a big difference between what we consider transactional email or messaging and marketing. So everything in the PMS we're going to categorize as transactional. Transactional messaging are emails, but in many cases, because you're using this like unified inbox product, you don't really even know what you do know. But the form factor of that message could be very different. It could be through the Airbnb messaging, it could be an email, in some cases, it could be through booking.com. right. So that's why PMSs are awesome because they have a unified inbox that kind of standardizes all these different forms of communication through these many channels. With a direct booking, it might be email. When it comes to transactional email, in most countries, you don't need explicit permission from guests to send them this message because it's part of the natural flow of doing business. So all of the transactional messages, which again are also to the booker, we want to keep in your property management software or a third party unified inbox product that integrates your pms, which are also out there. Things like an ENSO connect. That's fantastic. Then when we jump over to the world of email marketing, now we're talking about very different types of messages because these are promotional emails that are being sent not just to the booker, but in the case of StayFi, to the entire reservation. And in most jurisdictions, you're going to need that additional opt in from guests in order to send this type of message. And that's why it's so important with the statefi captive portal, we're going to actually get that permission from guests so that you can send them these types of messaging. And then we know through a lot of the unified inbox channels, like after a certain amount of time, you can't message that person anymore. Like Airbnb, I don't know the exact dates anymore because it's changed over time. But Airbnb basically, like doesn't let you message them any more after a certain date. And so if we haven't captured their email, we're not going to get back in touch with them in the future. So in our mind, we separate transactional and marketing and we want to do transactional and the property management software and we want to do all the marketing emails through your email marketing tool, which could be StayFi, but of course it could be other tools as well, which we also integrate with. So if you're happy with mailchimp or Constant Contact or whatever it is, you can also just use statefi for data collection and then send the data we're collecting to those third party tools.

What you think is the future for email marketing and direct bookings, what do you think is going to happen with the market in the next, say, five years?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many. I mean, that's, that's a huge question. I think there's going to be some interesting advancements around trip discovery and planning especially we already see this leveraging some AI tools and also leveraging kind of social recommendations. I think that's a huge opportunity for the ability to book direct is it's so hard right now to find brands but maybe if a tool could, you know, instead of recommending Airbnb links, recommend I want to go to Sicily. Right. And I don't never been there but maybe it can recommend, you know, local people to book with directly. Right. So there's a lot of opportunities I think when it comes to AI trip planning recommendations of like how do we as an industry make sure that we don't completely again get disintermediated by OTAs like we did through Google search. Right. Which is the main people way people are like finding or going to Airbnb direct. So I think that's interesting one to rock to watch is how trip planning and discovery impacts what channels people are being kind of guided into.

Nice, nice. I completely, yeah, I think things will switch back a little bit. I think the power is going to move to the individual hosts a little bit more which is exciting. So thank you so much for this Arthur. Really enjoyed this. And if you've enjoyed this too, listening into this conversation and there's somebody else you think who would get value from this, please do share it with them. If you want to carry on the conversation, you can come and join us in the free Facebook group which is the hospitality community. And if you do want to check out more about Boostly and the Boostly podcast, just put Boostly into Google. You'll see YouTubes, you know, there's podcasts, there's books, there's all sorts. So thank you so much for, for listening and thank you Arthur for for joining us today. Any last words before we bring it to a close?

I would just say think about the non booking guests when you do marketing. That's my number one is I think they get forgotten. So consider how they work in your booking and post day journey to make sure they also want to come back and stay with you again and again.

I love it, love it. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time Arthur. See you on the next one.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.