Mastering Direct Bookings: Email Marketing Strategies

Want to take control of your bookings and find some independence from Airbnb? Meet Stayfi, the game changer in guest data collection and marketing. Now, Stayfi been around for a while, I've talked about a lot, but let me just delve into a little bit more about what Stayfi is and it does. So remember the last time you went into a coffee shop and you wanted to use the WI fi? What did you have to do to get the WI fi? You had to give him your email. Stayfi works exactly like that, but for your short term rental or your medium term rental business. And the beauty of it is that you don't just get the lead booker's details, you get the whole party. And this is fantastic because of a stay of maybe four people coming at your property, you've not just got one email, one piece of data, you've got four. And this is so important to boosting your direct bookings is to build a solid database. Now, after the Stay stay fight, encourage you to keep in contact with your guests and they give you the tools to do so as well. They've got email, they've got sms, you name it, they've got it and it's all automated. Now I reached out to Stay Fi and I asked them, what can you do for the Boostly peeps? What can you do for the Boostly crowd? And they have given us 50% off your first three months. Now that's an exclusive. Now to do that you need to go to stayfi.com forward/boostly b o o S T L Y. Stay Fi is S T A Y F I dot com. When you're signing up, you've got to put the discount code in Boostly B O O S T L Y. Then you get 50% off your first three months of every vendor, every supplier, everybody that that we have recommended over the years. The ones that everybody comes back to me with and saying that was the one, it was Stay Fi. I'm a massive fan of them and I'm so happy that they've agreed to sponsor and partner with this podcast and this show. And now it's time for you to reap the benefits. Go to stay fire.comforward/boostly. Use the discount code boostly and you get 50% off to your first three months. Right, let's get back on with the show.

All right, 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 StayFi. Now, Stay Fi, if you're a host you may have already heard of, 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.

And we're all about direct bookings and we love anything that will help us to get more direct bookings. We don't want to be paying money to the OTAs. So what would you say to somebody who's listening to this, who doesn't currently collect gifts, 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 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 just going to make your business prosper in the long run. And, and then if you ever sell your business, make it more valuable for any potential acquirer as well, you know.

Amen to that. I absolutely believe in email marketing 100%. And it's one of those things in my early days of being a host I didn't realize the power of it because I guess it's similar to going to a gym, you know, to compare it to something when you first go there, when you've only got a few contacts in your list, your percentages, obviously you may or may not get a booking from just a few contacts, but as that list builds and as you get more, a bit like doing more reps at the gym, the more success you begin to see, so the more you do it. So it's fulfilling, isn't it, in that way. So 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 DEFI help with that?

Yeah, so 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, 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 StayFi. 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, 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 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, into those things? What is a campaign?

Yeah, so an automation or 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's 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 everybody who's in the property at the moment, they log into WI Fi for the first time. Campaigns. Yeah. 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 WI Fi, 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.

That's really cool and thank you for explaining the, you know, the differences between them. There's two different directions I could go in here. The first one I'm going to go in is you've mentioned those campaigns for our listeners. Without giving away the secret sauce, is there any campaigns that you would say, hey, do you know most people should be doing this campaign at this time of the year is a particular kind of campaigns that you go, do you know what? This is really where I would recommend most people start, or does it just depend on their business?

I would say start with automations because at the beginning your list is going to be relatively smaller. And so an automation is a great way to make sure you're sending email marketing to everybody. You don't necessarily need to put in that extra effort to send like a monthly newsletter when you only have 50 people in your list. So I actually recommend Starting with the wifi welcome email, potentially an anniversary email. So nine months post stay, whatever the right booking window is like, people typically book two months in advance, three months in advance. Anniversary emails are very powerful. So nine months post stay, let's say just remind them that if you want to come back for next year, make sure or in a few months at this point important to secure your booking now as well. As you know this is how you're going to get the best price to do directly. So automation is the best place to start because no matter how busy your life gets or you get sidetracked and can't work on email marketing this month, you at least know something's being sent to everybody who's subscribing to your list. Then when it comes to the one off campaigns, I really think if you're a smaller operator, focus in on availability or gaps in your calendar because something that I think is an easy mistake to make is to make a beautiful email and put in four properties. But those four properties are booked solid for the next six months. So anyone that clicks through will just get disappointment because they'll be interested in this home and they can't actually book it for a very long time. Right? So instead I would flip it, look at your property management software or your calendar and say okay, next month I have these three properties and they're available these weeks. Let me craft the email around the availability that I have. So that way I'm weeding out people that are going to be disappointed because they can't, you know, they don't have available think not looking to travel those days. And then I'm kind of selecting for people that are interested in those dates and that way the people that click through or contact or email me back are going to have very high intent to book. So that's what we typically recommend for smaller operators is focus more on the availability you do have, especially if your calendar is pretty full because then you're very laser focused on the dates that you can actually fill with email marketing.

Thank you. That is, that's really cool. And I think those campaigns like you say the automations because the key thing that hosts worry about especially this time of year is, you know, it's just post summer season where you just don't get time to do many of these things. But actually if you set up automations in your business, you don't need any more time. You need the time to put in that work initially. But then it pays dividends for years to come, doesn't it? Once you've set up those, those automations, which is cool.

Yeah. Especially the anniversary emails. That's the one where we see, you know, let's say you operate in Hawaii. We get a lot of annual or ski towns, another big one, I'm sure. You know, you know, I know you're in the uk, but in your geography there's probably certain markets that are very seasonal that people come here every year. They always do a trip in this area. If that's the type of market that you operate in, that's where you really want to be. Kind of putting that FOMO message out to guests too, six months in advance, saying like, hey, we always book up in this high season. You better book now far in advance when the rates are higher, typically, because as those dates approach, you might start cutting the rates. Right. So it's all about capturing those direct bookings far in advance and creating that little FOMO of like, oh, you loved your stay here at this property, you better book now before it gets booked by somebody else 100%.

And one of the things that I recommend and that I've started to do is open up your calendar and let people know on your list that you've opened it just for direct bookings. You know, this is earliest availability. This is before we advertise it on the online travel agency Airbnb and booking.com for me, but VRBO perhaps for others. But then you can actually say, hey, this is your early opportunity and you save X percent versus the OTAs. You know, like it's, it's like you say, putting that message of they don't want to miss out. Right. The FOMO of it really kicks in.

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So one of the questions I would have, and for some of the people listening to this is 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, and all these different things. How does Stay Fire 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 StayFi 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 in 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. So we don't force you to use our email marketing tool, but of course we love it if you do. And we also bring you that added benefit of appending or adding additional data from your pms.

Amazing. And just the sheer fact that you can collect all of your guests data. And this is the thing where I speak to many hosts and they go, yeah, I'm collecting my guests email because my PMS has a form. And you go, okay, does that PMS verify that's their real email address in any way, shape or form? Is it just their Airbnb or you know, the, the one that only lasts like say two weeks, a month, whatever it is these days. But then also if that is a party of 10 people and they're coming along as, as a group, you've got that one email for the 10 people who might want to return. And this is the fantastic thing that is fair trade, right? When, when I book into a hotel, I now expect them to ask for my email address for me to use their Internet is fair trade. I give them my email address, I get the Internet right? And we as hosts is we're providing a stay. More people who do this, the more guests will get used to doing this within a short term rental and the better it is for all of us as hosts, to have that information.

Yeah, I mean, I consider it, you know, if you think about the Book Direct movement in general, right. Is the more guests that we educate about Book Direct, the better we all are. Right. So, you know, our mission is definitely, you know, we want every guest that comes through a home that uses Stay Fi to learn about. Not just, you know, learning about their property manager or their host brand is really important for that host, but it also kind of sets off the light bulb in the guest's mind where they realize, hey, for my next day, even if I'm going to a totally different place, I should try to find the local property manager or operator who I can book with directly there. Because I've learned that you actually get better prices that way. So for StayFi, right. Like, we've had over 3 million guests use StayFi across all the properties we're in. So we definitely view, you know, our part in this larger movement, along with Boostly and a ton of other great companies to educate guests about direct bookings. Because the more we educate guests about booking our own brand, that's going to obviously filter across to them, starting to say, hey, you know, why don't I start looking for these trusted brands in other locations so that I can book directly with them as well?

100%. And I'm loving all the kind of like the TikTok movement where they're actually saying, hey, if you book on Airbnb, it's this price, but if you find this, you know, then you can get it at a better price. And ultimately it's the same stay.

Right.

We're the same hosts, we're the same everything, but at the end of the day, the money's going directly from the person who's staying to the. To the host, which is no. No third parties involved. So one of the most important metrics to be looking at is definitely the number of contacts on your list. Is there any other kind of statistics or metrics. Sorry. That we should be tracking as hosts using StayFi and within our email campaigns.

Yeah, I say, number one, not just the number of emails you're collecting, but the percentage of guests emails they're collecting. So if you've had, let's say, a thousand guests in the last 30 days, you do collect 500 unique emails, 800, 900. One thing that can happen is if we just go into, like, the mechanics of how to set stay up is that often when you set Stay Fi up, you're going to have your home's original WI fi running as well as the network that we broadcast that has the guest network with the splash page you may see in the StayFi portal that you have, let's say you have 10 properties, eight of them you're collecting a lot of data, but two of them you're not. And the number one reason is the old wifi instructions are still available in some form and guests are joining that network and not the network with the slash page. So in StayFi it's important just to kind of look at each property and see if, if the amount of data you're collecting coincides roughly with the number of guests that are there, and it should be around 80 to 90% of adult guests we'll collect an email from. So if you have 10 guests, I would expect eight or nine email. Then when it comes to the efficacy of email marketing, definitely open and click through rate are the main kind of things you can optimize against. It's a little trickier and it really depends again then on your website and how that's set up in terms of being able to translate that into bookings. So if you have Google Analytics, you need to have something called E commerce tracking set up that will let you see which campaigns resulted in which bookings. If you don't have that set up, another really good way to measure the efficacy of email is promo codes. So maybe if you don't have E commerce tracking set up because you use and fortunately when some of the PMS native websites don't have that, they're kind of native white label website, not like something more advanced like a boostly website, which would be ideal in that case, if you can use a promo code, you can at least say, hey, I put this promo code in this email and I saw I had five bookings with this promo code. So you can very tightly correlate the ROI back to that email. So promo codes and Google Analytics are going to be the two ways to actually track how emails turn into bookings. I think it's also important to note that emails, you can think of it almost like a billboard in someone's inbox. It may not translate into a booking right away, but if you think if your brand is appearing in their inbox every month and they're used to seeing that newsletter from you, it's just important your goal is that when it's time for them to plan travel again, that you are top of mind or at least they remember to go check your website. Right? So that's really our goal is that we know that guests are not always they're actually very rarely in market for a stay. Right. Like, how many, what percentage of days of the year are you actually actively planning a vacation or a stay somewhere? We know those in market days are very seldom. You just want to make sure that when that does come around, that you've sent enough messages that you're top of mind and they will go and check your website. And then it really comes down to things like do you have availability when they want to travel for the right price? So there's other factors that come into play there, but you just want to make sure at least they come in check. And if you've set maybe those FOMO messages or reminded them that if they don't book now, they may not have the inventory for when they want to travel, that's how you're going to be able to capture that direct booking far in advance for that stay.

A hundred percent agree. And I think as I don't know what the quote is, there's a psychological thing that we need so many touch points, I think somewhere between like five and nine touch points of seeing a brand. And one of the things that we teach here at Boostly is that you've got to start that before they even book with you. So if they are, if they land on your ota, for instance, you know, I advise everyone listening to this to go and have a look at your listing. How often does your brand appear throughout that listing would be obvious that your business exists outside of that portal and you're starting to already get the message down. Now, if they book, say via the OTA the first time, or even if they see the clues and come and find your brand as we see in these TikTok videos these days, either way, then once they've stayed just having that message that comes through, like say nine months after the stay, or they, you know, they see regular messages. Well, when somebody goes, are you traveling this year? Part of their mind might just go travel. Oh, I stayed there. Oh, I got that email the other day, you know, and they might go back towards that. Oh, that was nice. That was pleasant. Let's get back in touch with them. And ultimately we're just trying to make it as easy as possible for them to come back to us so they're not having to search through old emails or go back on the ota. That is where they booked with to try and find us again. You know, like it's trying to make it as easy as possible. So I absolutely 100 agree and love the, the rhetoric.

Yeah. And I, I Think one thing we do see is that, yes, guests may find your brand when they're looking on, let's say, Airbnb. And even if it's 50 or 100 less, they may still book with Airbnb because they perceive there is some risk associated with direct and there is some protection through the ota, which is a whole separate debate about, like, how true or not true that is. But that's definitely going to be many guests perception. That's why we find that guests are much more willing to book the second stay direct, because once they've experienced the property, maybe even interacted with you, if you're small enough that you're sending everything from kind of your voice, or they at least think they've interacted with you, which know, people can debate about that too, about, like, how you present yourself and who's really answering messages. Right. But if you've presented a brand and you've demonstrated trust through the first day, then they're much more likely to come back on the second stay and book directly with you and you're going to overcome the hesitancy or issues about why they may have gone with the OTA the first time, even if it's more expensive. Right. So having that great stay experience is going to make that second booking come direct much, much easier and overcome those potential hesitations about why someone might receive an OTA as a safer booking route.

100%. Arthur, we could talk about direct bookings in this. I. I feel that we could carry on, but I want to keep it nice and short. So just a couple last questions for you. Number one is for everybody listening, how can we find out more about Stayfi? Where. Where do we need to go?

Yep, so you can go to stayfi.com what's really cool about Stayfi is you. There are no contracts and there is actually nothing that prevents anybody from going to stayfi.com creating an account and getting set up, just like many other software tools. So you don't need to meet with us, you don't need to set a contract. You can start with one property, a thousand properties. The possibilities are really endless. However, if you would like a demo and would like to learn more before you move forward, you can also go to stayfi.com demo and book time with one of our lovely sales folks and they can walk you through the platform and answer any questions you have. So feel free to go to sayfi.com sign up, get started, or if you want a little more guidance or to get a demo, you can do that as well, on our demo page.

Amazing. So that leaves us with the last question. I know Arthur, we've had you on before. So the question we often ask, you know, which is, is a quote and that sort of thing. Instead I'm going to ask you 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 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 walk 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 YouTube's, 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 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.

Thank you.