STR Collab: The Cornerstone for Rental Entrepreneurs

In this episode of the Boosie podcast you are going to learn all you need to know about Stay Fi and email marketing, text message marketing and their brand new homepage. So this episode that you're going to tune into is the second in our formerly known as the STR CO op, now known as our STR collab with Maddie from Mount myself and now we've brought in Arthur from StayFi. Please make sure you watch this to the end because we give you a link on how you can join our new community that we formed around the STR col and how you can get involved with guest requests, experts, etc. The STR collab is all about bringing together hosts like yourself between the 1 to 20 property mark. Whether you own, manage, rent to rent, whatever your model is. If you've got one to 20 properties, this is the place for you to be. The collab is for you to meet and network with other hosts in a similar journey of your portfolio and your property. That's easy for me to say. And we also want to bring to you the vendors that specialize in helping you. So we've got Maddie, myself and we've also bringing in Arthur Kolka from Stefi. The podcast goes for about an hour and the reason being is we had about 30 minute way to explain what Stayfi is and then the questions on the back of it were phenomenal and I've answered every single one. So let me just flip over. Enjoy this. Please make sure that you jump in the comments if you're a Stay Fi Boost Lee Mount customer and if you anybody else that you would like to be part of the STR Collab, make sure you join the community that we mention and also as well let me know in the comments below.

Fantastic. Thanks Mark. For those that want to keep following the journey and hear about upcoming webinars, what we're going to do with this co op community and just how we take it forward. Really what we've started to do is we're building the cornerstone for all the rental rental entrepreneurs out there so people that want to level up their businesses past an Airbnb listing and really take this industry by storm. We'll be building optimal tech and operational strategies, bringing more experts to the table. We're starting with expert led webinars, so bringing these CEOs to the table, you get to ask your burning questions and keep growing from there. We hope to do some community in person events in the future. I had the pleasure of doing one in Cabo last year where we brought about 30 hosts together, I want to say it was a blast. And so how can we just keep doing more of that in person? Community network building. So that's what this co op is all about. We happen to be living here in Facebook, so if you want to join the community, go ahead and scan this QR code. You can join. We post all past recordings of our webinars in there so you can see webinar number one. You'll get updates of all the community events taking place. Future webinars ask questions in there that you don't get to ask on the webinars. So anything community related happens there. So go ahead and scan that QR code if you would like and then we're going to get into it. So I'm going to pass it over to Arthur who's going to share his screen to talk more about this optimizing your tech stack, but from a direct booking standpoint and what that means with Stayfi. So Arthur, the floor is yours.

Awesome. Yeah, thank you everybody and thanks for having me and attending. If you don't know, my name is Arthur Kolker and I am the founder and CEO of StayFi. And Stayfi is well started out as what I would call a WiFi marketing company. So we brought to the short term rental industry a technology that we're all have experienced before, which is logging into the WI fi in a location like a hotel, a coffee shop, an airport, and having to provide information in order to gain access. And we brought that solution to the market back in 2019 because we saw there was a gap where vacation rental operators could not easily collect data from not just the booker, but everybody staying in the property. And the WI fi is the one tool that we know everyone will use during the course of the stay. So it's a great touch point to not only collect guest data, but introduce your brand. And then from there we've added all sorts of new technology that I'm going to walk through today to kind of enhance your branding, drive more direct bookings and increase your or decrease your dependence on third party channels like Airbnb and vrbo, which is the ultimate objective we're all here to do. So without further ado, I will share my screen and kind of walk you through a little background on StayFi as well as a little primer about how to get started with email marketing. And then a little bit about a new feature we launched called Homepage that can just really enhance your guest experience, drive incremental revenue and also engage guests with your brand so that they come back and book direct again and again. So like I talked about before, Stay Fi's mission, you know, we want to empower every short term rental operator, whether they have one listing or whether they have a thousand listings, with the technology to have a vibrant, independent and most importantly, a more profitable brand. Because we know that as you increase your share of direct bookings and build up your own loyal audience, your business becomes more sustainable and more profitable as you pay less in OTA fees and you have more leverage and ability to increase your occupancy rate because you have a whole new channel to market to which is your loyal audience of guests. So over time, collecting data is a great way to de risk your business and become more profitable. Because if Airbnb changes their algorithm or VRBO changes how they charge fees, you know, you're less open to these platforms, you know, causing your business harm when they change things that are totally out of your control. And so the first product we built is this data collection piece. And now we're building on top of that all the marketing tools and guest engagement tools. You need to go to the next level to not just collect data, but also monetize that data through rebookings and other things I'll talk about during the course of this presentation. And also because we are a WI fi tool, there are some non marketing related benefits to using StayFi. Things like monitoring your WI fi remotely, being able to get alerted if the Internet's offline in any property. We also do occupancy alerting so we can alert you if there's too many guests in a property. So there are a lot of operational benefits that can protect your homes, improve the guest experience, ensure no one shows up when the WI fi is not working. But today we're really going to be talking about the marketing piece. So just a little overview here. We collect data, we store it all. We also centralize all of the guest data you have from other sources. So I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but we also connect to almost every property management software out there. So not only do we collect data from every guest in your property going forward, we can actually go through all your historical data you've ever collected in your property management software, as well as any future bookings, and pull out any real guest emails in that software to add to our marketing tools. And then within StayFi, not only do we have email marketing, but we also have text marketing. So you have two different channels that you can use to market your brand and actually automate a lot of this marketing, which is I'm going to talk about today, so that if you are starting out or maybe you have a smaller list, how can you do kind of set it and forget it email marketing. So you can invest in building templates one time that are being sent to every single guest that stays with you. So you're not dependent on building new content every month, which can be a headache, especially when you're starting out and your list isn't that big. WiFi alerting is key. So no guests arrive to a property and they find that it's not working. So we'll let you know if there's Internet issues anywhere that you have a home or a apartment. And then finally, at the end of the day, we're going to help you build your brand through all these different products so that guests, no matter whether the booker or one of the other people staying there, they all leave knowing your brand, even if they came saying, you know, they booked a quote unquote Airbnb, which is we know the common language people use today, they even say that when they booked on VRBO that they booked an Airbnb. Right? So we want to build awareness amongst all guests that booking direct is possible with short term rentals, not just with hotels. And that actually because there's no rate parity requirements in the short term rental industry, there's actually financial benefits to guests when they book directly with you. So how does StayFi work? What does it all look like? Here's just kind of a visual overview of what the guest sees when they get on the WI Fi. When you use StayFi they first connect to the wifi network like they would normally, whatever you name it in StayFi. Then they will get a custom branded template which can be unique by property or across groups of homes that looks like this, where you can get the key information you need and permission to remarket to those guests. Then when the guest fills in this form, they're redirected to this new product within StayFi called Homepage. So you can give guests all the relevant links to your property, right when they log into the WI Fi, things like a guidebook, your website, upsell partners from Viator or the Host Co or Mount or whoever you like, Minoan, so that all the relevant links to your property are right there when the guest logs into the WI fi. And then finally, because we've now collected their data, you can trigger text, email, other forms of marketing to those guests and even send this homepage with your upsells to guests automatically too when they Log into the WI Fi. Here's some case studies and we work, like I mentioned, with companies of all sizes. So some of these, like Cozy or heirloom, they have 200 plus properties under management with Stayfi and they are driving, you know, savings millions of dollars using our product going from, you know, 0 to 30 plus percent direct bookings over the course of a year. And then we work with some smaller customers of all sizes. This one on the bottom left is actually in the Czech Republic. You know, they're getting, you know, up to 80% direct bookings. Cottage Days has around 20 cottages in Ontario. She already had a great direct booking game, was at that 60, 70% mark that Mark Simpson mentioned. And now she's actually 100% in her high season thanks to StayFi. So no matter where you are in this book, Direct Journey, whether you're small, big, have a big brand presence, have no brand presence like Cozy, we can help get you on the path to becoming less dependent on those third party channels. Now let's talk a little bit about email marketing because that's kind of like the meat of what the StayFi data is used for. The first thing is obviously we gotta build an email list and there's multiple sources that you can source this important data from and you can use StayFi to gather data from all these places. So number one is obviously the current guests and that's using the Wi Fi like I mentioned before. And this is an example of a splash page that a guest sees when they log into the WI fi. And this will get data from 80 to 90% of all the adult guests staying in your property. You might be wondering about children, kids, you know, we have different. You can put on birth date 18 over checkbox. Parents usually log in for smaller children on their iPad, right? So you don't have to worry about collecting emails from, you know, five year olds who probably don't even have an email. So all of this is super customizable within the product. It can be unique by home as well. And then guests only do this once per device. So it's not like some annoying systems maybe you've used at a Starbucks or a hotel where every time you go there you have to log back in. With StayFi, once you log in, you're authorized for 30 days. So guests only do this once per device. Then within StayFi, our email marketing tool, you have the ability to make pop ups or forms on your website. Because if you're driving traffic to your direct booking website, you want to take advantage of every possible visitor to your website by collecting their email. And here's an example of a great give get option that someone created using StayFi. So in this instance you enter your name and email and, and then you'll get a guidebook and $100 off coupon emailed automatically to you. So all those kind of automations are easily built within StayFi where when you receive an email from a certain source or there's a pop up or a form, you can then trigger the value you want to send back to the guest automatically. And that's a great way you know if you're spending any money or doing anything to drive traffic to your website. You want to make sure you capture as much value from every person that visits. Even if they don't book at that moment, you want to make sure you capture their information. And then finally, this is an incomplete list, but these are a partial list of all the property managers we integrate with the software. And that, like I mentioned before, is another great source of guest data. So when you add email Marketing to your StayFi account, you connect, let's say hospitable. Then we will go through all your hospitable reservations and if you have any real emails associated with those, we automatically pull them in. We also send data back into each pms. They typically don't have an email marketing tool with maybe the exception of Track. But of course, you know, some of them can tell you like Guesty for instance, if someone, if one of the guest emails we send back ends up booking directly with you, even if they were an ancillary guest, they'll come up as a repeat booker. So there's some nuances and differences between each pms. But the bottom line is, you know, any valuable data you have there that you've collected already is instantly available to market to within StayFi and will pull in any future real data you collect from your property management software. Email marketing and StayFi kind of like what is our tool like it's going to be similar to any tool like you've used in the past, whether it's mailchimp, constant contact, et cetera. We are actually built on top of Campaign Monitor, which is a commonly used marketing solution. So that's kind of the backbone of the product. And then we've added a bunch of vacation rental specific features on top of it. So that's why we chose to partner with Campaign Monitor, because it allows us to start with a great base email marketing software. But then it's customizable enough that we can add a bunch of content on top of it that makes it relevant and specific to the short term rental industry. Right. We've also partnered with an agency called Switchback within there and they're kind of our email marketing agency of Ruckerd. So there is the option if you go to switchback services within StayFi. Let's say you have a larger business and you don't want to do email marketing, you want to outsource it to a third party firm, switch back and do all your email marketing for you. And they exclusively work with short term rental companies. So if you want to outsource it, they're a great partner that can run all of your marketing campaigns for you. And what's cool about this product is it's actually free for up to 200 contacts and you get unlimited send. So as long as you connect your property management Software or have one StateFi access point live in your properties, the email tool is free. And then once you go over 200 contacts, there's additional charges depending on how many contacts are in your database. So it's a great way to get started with email because you can play around with it because it starts out free, it's going to be cheaper than mailchimp or Campaign Monitor if you went with them directly for the same number of contacts. And then we have all the drag and drop free built templates you need that are built for short term rentals. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about kind of like what are the strategies you should be setting up in your email marketing tool and what are kind of like types of content. And there's basically two types of buckets that email marketing can fall into. One is automation, customer journey, Drip campaigns are all kind of names that you may have heard and these are really important, especially when you start out. We see a lot of people make the mistake of they start collecting emails, they don't do anything with them, and then they want to send an email 6 months, a year from now and then they see a very high unsubscribe rate because a lot of those people have forgotten who you are. So it's really important that once you start collecting emails, whether it's on your website, through StayFi, through your PMS or some other source, that you start engaging with them. And a way to guarantee that you do this is through an automation. So essentially whenever you receive an email from a certain source, you decide, you know, I'm going to send these series of emails over this cadence, let's say, you know, one email every 30 days for six months. And that way, you know, for six months every guest is getting a piece of content and they're not going to forget who you are. So that when you do want to send out a one time campaign with a promotion, a new property you've launched, you're not going to see a high unsubscribe rate and people are going to engage with that content because they remember who you are. So one time campaigns, like I just alluded to, is the other main type of content people send through emails and that you can think of like a postcard or a newsletter, right. All sorts of content I'll talk about that you can include in those emails because that's another area where people struggle with, especially if they only have, let's say, one property, like what am I going to send every month, right? Because there's not so much going on. So we'll talk about different strategies you can employ so that you have something relevant to your audience to talk about in your emails.

If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now we can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world, including increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested then all you need to do is go to boostly. B O-O S-T-L y.co.uk call and book in an appointment with one of our sales team.

Where to start with automation, the most important one is a if you use Stay fi or even if you collect like through a newsletter, right Is an automation after that collection point. So automating an email that after you collect their email that goes out and says, hey, introduce your brand, who you are, what you're all about. Assume the guest thinks you're Airbnb, right? Especially we're collecting information from non bookers. So you really have to emphasize, you know, that you're the actual provider and why they have such a great hospitality experience and that Airbnb obviously was just the website that they booked on. Then some great things to include, especially in a guest Wi fi welcome email are things like local recommendations, a list to a guidebook to that homepage product I mentioned your lake local favorite, you know, things to do in the area, information about the home because guests are typically in the property on the first day, then what we see is like a post departure email. So like 10 days later, seven days later, something like that, you can send another email that says hey, thanks for staying with us, give us any feedback. And then of course, most importantly, you know, here's why you should book directly with us if you want to come back. And if you do have other properties, that might be a time to emphasize, you know, hey, here are the other three properties we manage. If you're interested in returning other people ask for referrals at that point. So you can even ask, you know, make sure you explicitly, you know, say like, hey, if you know anyone else that wants to travel to XYZ area, you know, make sure that they contact us here because they can get a better rate than on verbal Airbnb. And if you're not driving differences in rates, then of course you can also have additional amenities or you know, items you give people as a promotional value to book direct as opposed to saving money via rate. So that's really up to you. But making sure there's some rationale about why guests would want to book directly versus going through what they may think that they trust more like Airbnb is important. Other automations that you can set up within StayFi pretty easily are things like booking anniversary or something like nine months post stay. You can send another email so you can base on the collection date, automate future email so you can say hey, nine months after this guest day, let them know like hey, if you want to return, you know, here's a reminder to book directly with us and you know, you'll save money versus going through a third party channel. Here's an example of an actual automation email and what the builder looks like within StayFi. So this is with a customer called Juniper Holiday and Home, which is in Michigan and they're a property manager. They started with I think like 20 properties with StayFi, but I think they now manage over 50. So they're growing pretty quickly. And here's what they're presenting when someone joins the WI fi. So here you can see on the left that they have an email that looks very personalized. This is welcome to the Dakota. What's cool about in the StayFi email builder is you have the ability to insert a bunch of custom fields. So this one is just built with welcome to Property name. So they kind of build it off one template. And because they use these custom fields they can still make it property specific and you can even insert links to the guidebook for this home or the homepage for this home so that you know, all the relevant information is presented automatically based on the property the guest is staying in. You don't have to make like 20 versions of the same email with different properties, right? So you can use custom fields to basically customize each email for the property the guest is in, all based on one template you built. Here they really emphasize their concierge services. So you can see like in the right, in the first big block after the introduction in the email is all these things that you can book through them. They don't use a third party tool to do these bookings. They built it all themselves. So they have all these local offers that you can book as a guest. And obviously maybe you've shared this with the booker previous to them staying, but maybe the seven other people staying in this property that person ever shared with. Right? So this way you're now presenting these upsells and concierge services to the other seven people staying in the property so that you can market those things and get incremental revenue during the stay. And then finally here they have this little modal about, you know, dreaming about your next vacation. And because they manage many properties, they really want people to go into this website, look at the other cool homes they manage which are in, you know, could be in a few different areas within Michigan. So people get excited about coming back. And we know with a lot of these traditional vacation rental destinations like in the Panhandle or here in Michigan on the beach, these are things that, you know, families go to every year or twice a year or three times a year, like three times over the course of the summer. So, you know, knowing your guests and like, do they return to this destination often? You really want to start building that relationship here. And then on the right here, this is what the actual builder within StateFi looks like. You can see here it's very visual and simple. So they enter the WI Fi welcome segment. So basically they sign up for the WI Fi, they get this email, but then you can see within five days now they're sending another email. They are more sophisticated. So they're sending this like, you know, did someone open this email? If they didn't, I'm going to send it again. If they did, then I'll wait another five days and send a different email. So you get very sophisticated in these kind of like logical branches of making sure non openers get the email again as opposed to regular folks. But that's, you know, you can start with something simple and then add more complexity over time. And then here is what a monthly net newsletter looks like from Juniper. So Automations is definitely where you want to start. And then once your list has, you know, a thousand, two thousand subscribers, that may be at the point where you say, hey, it's worth sitting down and cranking out a monthly newsletter to that whole audience that's sent outside of the automation. And here are some pretty common things that someone sends. So here you can see in the middle they have, you know, four properties. They talk about the concierge services. A key point here that I want to make is upfront. You can see their second piece is five star property management services. So when someone joins their they also have email sign up on their website, right? And when they collect emails there, they don't know if someone's a homeowner or a prospective guest. So when they send this newsletter it's going to a broader audience of both potential homeowner clients and guests. They kind of have this one newsletter to cover both audiences so that you know, they're always not just plugging booking properties but also their property management services. So that if someone who's getting this or signed up on their website happens to be a homeowner in the relevant area, they can also inquire about property management services, which is really important, important when it comes to growing your business if you are a property manager. Sweet. So that is everything to do with email marketing. Now I'm going to switch over to Homepage, which is a new product within StateFi which I just mentioned before, which is just a new way to engage guests after they log into the WI fi and also a very cool way to send relevant information to guests before they stay. So you can think of this product as like a link tree if you've ever seen one of those for your short term rentals. And each property gets a unique homepage automatically. And on here you can again place things like upsells, essential guest resources and custom buttons and then obviously information to book again to really nail home to guests that you are a professional short term rental operator, whether a property manager or an owner operator, as well as generate additional revenue through upsells and you know, really build your, you know, differentiate your brand from Airbnb and vrbo. Within Homepage we have two upsell partners that are like, you can sign up for within it. One's the host co and one's Viator. But then of course you can add any other upsell tool, whether it's Mount or Minoan or which is more about selling like goods that you feature in the home as well as in the case of something like Juniper, you may have your own concierge page you want to link to. So you can link to all of those things. And through all of them, of course, you get a rev share, which obviously depends on the partner. The host Cool is cool because you can sell your own goods and services. Things like early check in, late checkout, extra guests, pet fees, midstate cleans, pool heating. So we see customers making anywhere between 100 to $500 a month of incremental revenue through selling their own goods and services through the host Go. And then Viator is owned by TripAdvisor. And with that you get an 8% rev share in any tours and activities booked there. And they are global. So you can, you know, if you're in Spain or wherever in the world, right, you can feature tours and activities right in the homepage. So you can see here is how it actually loads. If you look at that image there of the phone, it actually, when the guest clicks on this tile, these will just appear there. If they click on that and book within 30 days, you'll get an 8% commission. So and you can choose which activities are there or have the top selling ones presented. So any upsell tool that you use, you know, StayFi is a great way to get that tool in front of every guest because every guest will see this when they log into the WI fi, right? And then when it comes to essential resources, if you use a guidebook like Hostfully Folio Touch Day, again, it's kind of like you're investing in this tool now, the homepage, because every guest will go there after logging to the WI fi. It's a great way to present that in front of every single guest. So you reduce inbound questions or calls from guests because they can get all the relevant information about the home there. And then what's cool is that all of these homepages are standalone websites for each property that you can share outside of just the WI Fi login experience. So within StayFi in our email and SMS tool, you can dynamically insert the homepage for that property into a welcome automation. So a good example would be guest logs into the WI Fi. You text them through StayFi a link to the homepage for that property, so they have a persistent link on their phone to all the information, whether it's guidebook upsells your website so they can access all of that during the stay and centralize all that information and make sure it's in front of every single guest during the stay. That wraps up my presentation, guys. So I think we can open up for q and a.

Nice 268 unread emails. Arthur, you're a very popular man.

Oh, yes.

All right, so that was great. And yeah, homepage has been one that I was very lucky to get a little sneak peek at STI Wealthcom and I know that a lot of people are talking about it, which is awesome. At Nashville we were staying at a place property that used Stay fi and so I gave my email up and the place that they sent me to was the website that I made the booking on. It didn't really make sense for me being the customer journey. So I have a homepage to send people to. It's a lovely natural progression. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing some, some results from that. So we've got a lot of people in here and there's going to be some questions. If anybody's got any questions regarding Stay Fi or homepage or anything that's up and coming, please do drop them in. But Maddie, is there anything you wanted to add on on top of that or Arthur, is anything you wanted to sort of mention on top of that? That'd be, that'd be cool.

I was gonna ask since we have two very good book direct people on this call being Mark and Arthur. How do you guys work together like those that use Boostly and those that you Stay fi? Is there a way to kind of work them together so that it creates extra magic? If you understand that.

Well, I'll start, I'll say, I'll say a few things. So one is obviously the quality of the website that you send guests to from whatever marketing you're doing, whether it's email marketing, Wi Fi, login, et cetera, matters a lot. And the PMS white labeled websites that they offer are typically pretty basic and may not engender the level of guest trust that you want. So having a professional website, I don't know what's. If you have stats on this will obviously increase your conversion rate and also allow you to present more things about your brand outside of just most of them are just like a very simple booking engine. But there's no like about page or like information about who you are and why they should trust you and how long you've been operating and your backstory and all that stuff that makes you build a brand. Right. So they're not really designed for that. I say in general. And then the other thing is obviously being Able to collect emails on the website is important, especially if you're investing in any marketing. Right. Because you want to capitalize on any of the data you're on. Any visitors to your website that you're sending there.

Yeah, 100%. I think we would have any property management software provider in this room and they would regularly admit, and they do very openly say that the website is not a key element of their business model. I'd love to know the first PMS that provided a free website because then everybody bounced on top of it. It was just a nice sales tactic to say hey, you'll get a free website when you join our, join our software. It is very limited as we all know, but it may be ideal if you've literally got no budget. I always say it's a nice scrappy start off point. And then as you grow in, in your business, as you grow in your revenue, when you grow in your budget, then that's when you come to a, a boostly and I would say that's when you would come to a booster. It's when you come to a, you know, a stay fire. That's when you'd start using MOUNT and these other third party providers. So it's all about where you are in your journey. And this is why the co op has been created because when you are getting going, whether you're six months in property one looking to get to 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever the model is you're doing, it's very overwhelming with the choice that's being made out there. And so when Maddie came to us with the idea I was like this is ideal because we, we all see questions in Facebook forums, on social media, wherever it may be about people asking for which tech should we use, what's the tech stack? And you know, we, we have a, a podcast series that boostly called behind the Host and it's one of the questions we ask is you know, what are you using? And the common thread is every 10 people that we ask that question to, we get you know, nine different answers. So we just wanted to come together and bring experts in who are, you know, the, the core of our business model at Boost. Lee I can't speak for Maddie or Arthur but we, we look predominantly for that 1 to 20, 25 sort of ratio of, of, of house of properties. And the reason why we do so is because it's, you know, but I always say the 1 to 10 people have got 1 to 10 properties have been sort of forgotten about for so long in this industry. Most you Know, there's, there's a time when specific companies wouldn't even talk to you if you went up to them at a booth or a trade show unless you had at least 10 properties under your belt. And so this is why we put this together and everybody that we bring in, we all work together nicely. We, we can all bounce off each other. And so one of the questions in there is, you know, I, I assume that host co amount can coexist together. Absolutely. Everybody here is about collaboration. So. And as Arthur said, the most important thing is when you're going to send them to a specific website from whatever marketing you've been doing, whether it's text, email or whatever, you want to make sure that you're sending them to a page or a website that you are confident that you can turn a looker into a booker that you can be proud to send them to. And, and that is why, you know, we honestly started doing what we did properly for doing websites back in 2018, 2019, because we saw that a lot of people weren't proud of where we're sending them to.

So, yeah, I see a lot of questions now, especially a lot with statefi. So happy to go through those.

Yeah, Arthur, we'll turn it back over to you.

Yeah, yeah. So can you explain? I'll read the question, then I'll answer it. Can you explain how to keep the homepage persistent, not just on the first login, force guests to go to the homepage every time they use the Internet? Fortunately, right now we don't have that ability. So that's why I'd recommend especially the texting tool. You can do it in email and text, but I think the text is the best one because text messages are very easily accessible on the phone. It's also like a very valuable thing to send the guest. Right. So within the text marketing tool, within Stay Fi, we have a text message called the welcome text, which is when they log into the WI Fi, it sends a text and then in there there's a bunch of merge fields you can insert, but you can insert the URL to the homepage. So it could say, hey, welcome to Property name. Here's a link to, you know, everything you know about the home and amenities and then it will insert that link there. So that's what I would recommend. You can also insert that link in your welcome email. If you're sending a welcome email. The question about Host Co and Mount coexisting a hundred percent. I see homepages with three with like Minoan Host and mount. Right. So people use those products for different things. A lot of people use let's say the host co for early check in. Then they might even change it to say like buy early late checkout and they might send people to just the host go page in the pre state PMS messaging. So people use those products and they obviously have different partners and different options. And Viator has different options. Right. And not every location is going to have partners from like Viator doesn't have stuff in some places but then there is stuff in the host code and vice versa. Right. So I definitely would take a look at the full range of options and see like what makes sense for your location because they all have different types of inventory in different places and then some of them might give you more of a rev share than others too. So that's like another consideration too. So there's you know, lots of things that you can look at there and then oh, Manoe was the other one which is interesting. Just if you want to sell, you know you can basically have links to sell like the goods in the property and they also can get you those goods at a discounted price. Which is interesting one to look at as well. Those stay fi email website collector. It does connect to Boostly. We have different options. Like the pop up is just like code that you paste into the header and then you can even use. I don't know if you do you guys use some of those like widgets. I forget like there's a form widgets but there's basically multiple ways to do it depending on how you want to collect.

Yeah, I think basically if you just think like Jeremy, you asked that question is just like mailchimp. You know with mailchimp they give you that little bit of code that you can put on a website and then it will send that information to wherever you want it to go. So it's like it's this, it's the same same. It's just different strokes basically.

Yeah. So within StayFi if you use us, it's a little bit buried. It's basically when you go to an audience or list within stayfi there's like this form collection form section and then you can decide like do I want it to be a pop up? It can even be like a standalone webpage that you link to or it can be like an inserted form. So you can have pop up form, separate landing page, all three options and then you can also style them to make it look more like your brand. And then there are also some like WordPress widgets that integrate with Campaign Monitor. And since Campaign Monitor is like the backend tool, anything that integrates the Campaign Monitor will integrate with statefi. But the pop up is definitely the most popular and easiest to install because it's just a code that you paste into the header and you don't have to like figure out where to stick the form in the website.

This is like, I was going to say very quickly for those who don't know what header or footer means or code. This is one of the things that we do at Boostly. You just send us, send us that. You send us those fancy things that you see in front of you and we just saw it for you. Which is again, one of the benefits. Instead of going with a, you know, free PMS site, you may not be able to put them on there.

So yeah, yeah, a lot of the pmss, you can't insert code. And then the other big drawback is Google Analytics, they don't have E commerce tracking. I think that is the biggest one as you get more sophisticated is you need Google Analytics E commerce tracking to measure like not just the traffic, but did they make a booking? And I don't think any PMS website has that built in. So super important stuff that you know, as you grow this is if you do the marketing yourself or you have a person you know, that's an area if you're not familiar with. You'll just get more comfortable over time as it's definitely, you know, you can spend an hour and like get the basics of Google Analytics down and understand like what's happening in your website. Someone asked if they're a new customer and they use Lodify and their website's being built by Boostly so you could get the information within Lodify. Are you able to get the email information from Airbnb Verbone booking? So when you, when you connect Stayfi to Lodify, we will go through all your historical reservations and any reservation with a real email will pull that in. Unfortunately for like Airbnb, there'll be no emails associated with those bookings unless if Lodify has a way to get them through some like automated messaging, which I know like ownerres does and it's pretty successful. They may not, I'm not totally sure Verbone booking, sometimes there's emails, sometimes there's not. And then of course if you have historical direct bookings, there'll be emails or if you added the emails yourself because you collected them another way. So I see big differences between PMS and I probably should at some point publish this data of some PMS just seem a lot better at getting the booker's emails and others because they have some automated request to get that information from the booker. And then obviously Stayfi is still providing a ton of information from the non booking guests which if you have large properties could be 5, 10, 15, 20 people per reservation. So if you have real emails there, we'll pull them in. Sometimes there can be a lot, sometimes there's very few. It just depends on the PMS and how many bookings you've had and what source they came from. So Stayfi someone asked about like how the Stayfi setup works in terms of WI fi. It's a great question. Today Stayfi works with one brand of WI fi equipment called Ubiquiti Unifi which we will sell to you and then you plug it into your existing router, it broadcasts a new guest network in your property and that's the guest network that will provide the splash page. And then you can actually keep your existing Internet running in the background if you want to and keep all your home devices on there. It's really up to you. Someone asked they have a very like large property with eight routers. If you say works with access points and routers throughout the home, there's a chance that you may already have ubiquiti unifi. I'd say it is the most commonly professionally installed hardware in homes and small multifamily buildings like motels. If you have ubiquiti unifi already, it will integrate with Stayfi and we can integrate with your third party hardware. If not, unfortunately you'll have to either supplement or replace those and purchase a similar amount of devices to cover that property. So it just depends on the current hardware you have. If you want to use Stayfi we can then help you get the right amount of equipment for that very large property. If you don't have compatible hardware, someone asks, they say they can get they use ownerres. And so like I mentioned before, owner res seems very good at getting emails from bookers. Is having statefi wi fi still beneficial? It depends. So if you rent small condos with have two guests on average and you're getting all the bookers emails cause you use on a res and they have that ability to get that maybe the wi fi isn't that important and you can just use let's say our email marketing tool. Right? That's totally fine. Say the wi fi is beneficial is if you have a lot of adult guests in your property that you also want to collect data from. Also, if you have issues with wifi in terms of outages or concerns about occupancy alerts, there's this other WI fi monitoring benefits. You know, we have customers that the main reason they got Stay Fi is the data collection is cool, whatever. But they actually wanted a, a cloud based WI fi management system so they can monitor the Internet across a ton of properties. So this depends on what your priorities are and also how much incremental data is there to collect outside of the booker and is that valuable to you? Right. So that's how I would assess that for yourself. Do you get any pushback from returning guests who do not need to login wifi and stayfi? So like I mentioned, the authorization is 30 days. So if someone come back a year later, I don't think they're going to be that upset that they have to enter in their information again. And it's nice because we don't have it right now. But in the future we're going to be offering more analytics around return guests. So we definitely want to know when people return because we want to actually give you that analytics and data to show you, hey, you know, these are all the return guests you had this year. This is when they stayed last, when we collect their data. So more of that internal analytics are coming within state five. So that data can be really valuable and useful, especially if they come back like with a new iPhone. Right. We can't just use the ID of the device to determine who they are. So yes, but I would say I haven't heard any pushback and then you can always customize the opt in opt out buttons on the splash page. I typically recommend people pre check the marketing opt in with guests having the ability to uncheck it so that typically, you know, if guests don't want to be marketed to, they have the ability to opt out. Right. So we typically very rarely hear about guests complaining about having to go through the splash page process to get online because it's something that they've encountered in most other hospitality environments they've been to before. Is the Boostly CRM in competition with Statefi Marketing? I would say probably they are. No, I don't know. I don't know that much about Boostly CRM. So you tell me, Mark, are we competing with each other or not?

Nah, I mean you can use it coincided easy. I mean, basically what we're doing behind the scenes, we've got an email schedule tool, we've got a social media schedule Tool, but it is very much in its, in its infancy. Again, you can use both when you join Boostly. It literally comes as part of the package. Whether you use it or not is up to you. One of the things that we, we really want to get across here is that everybody that we bring into here, there is no competition. It's all a collab. We should have called it the STR collab because it literally we, everybody that we bring in here, we, we, we're not like we don't see anybody as competition. We want to collaborate because at the end of the day we want to make sure that you, Jeremy and Katrina and Blake and Steve and Colin and everybody else in the room have got options available on, on how to build out your tech stack in 2024 for your business to make sure that you, you succeed. So whether you want to throw all the emails in through campaign monitor, which is obviously what stay using if you want to use the one that we're doing, we're basically white, white labeling. Go high level over here. I mean it's totally up to you. We've got the templates, we've got all of that cool stuff going on and we've got the AI tool in the background that helps you put it all together. Whether you use it or not, it's totally up to you.

Yeah, like for, for my standpoint is there's not as you guys talk about, there's not one right tech stack for everybody. It depends on the complexity of the tools you want to use. How sophisticated of a CRM do you really need, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So there's no one right configuration. So you know, just like upsell tools or email tools. We're really the only WI fi tools. So sorry, there's not that many others to look at at least that specialize in this industry. Although there are tools that are great for cafes. You know, there's tons of companies that do WI fi marketing and cafes, stadiums, hotels, restaurants and people have tried to adopt those to short term rentals as well. Right. So definitely do your research and due diligence and just figure out, you know, not only does this tool have the features I want, but do I have the internal expertise within my team to use it. And so obviously as tools increase in complexity, it might take more time to master. Right. So those are all things to balance of, like what is your internal bandwidth? Do this and what complexity or features does this have that will make this easier, harder for me to use? Sadly right now, Katrina, we don't have WhatsApp, it's just SMS. Although we can SMS any phone number no matter which country it is. It's based on a credit system so you only buy credits for what you want to send. For US and Canadian phone numbers, it's just one credit is one send. Then there's a group of countries including the UK where it's two credits to send and then like basically any other country is 3 credits to send to one of those phone numbers as you can send it. I think in the future we'll have other options like WhatsApp, but right now it's just text. Is there a VA to customize all the pages? Text, emails, sending safi? No, right now it's all self service. So there's, you know, anyone can Sign up for StayFi and go through the process. There is a whole onboarding flow that makes it very simple. It may seem complicated like oh my God, I have to do 10 splash pages and 10 homepages. If we integrate with your PMS, we actually pull in all the images like pre fill all the names. So and it's all built on like one template. So you have like one homepage template, one splash page template. And then we have this very easy to use like spreadsheet where you've, you can either like import the image from the PMS or upload it yourself. So the process to actually set up, even if you have to set up a hundred splash pages and homepages is very simple because you kind of like decide on what it's going to look like for all of them and then you have this very easy way to customize it for each specific home. And we'll pull in as much information as we can from your PMS to do that all for you. Next one is about other hardware providers. Yes, we are working on Ruckus. We have a customer that really wants Ruckus, so that will be the next one. And then yes, we do have other broader, other hardware providers will add as well. Most of those are going to be really, we're not going to sell them and they're probably not going to be appropriate for single family homes. That's really why we went with Ubiquiti. They're going to be more for people that already have professionally installed access points in let's say a motel or a multi family building where they want to integrate their existing equipment because those products are even less designed for like a single family home environment. High level roadmap items for 2024. Yeah, we're working on a few New cool things, although we're not really ready to announce them yet. But basically I say the biggest one is like a next version of email. So right now, like you saw, you know, you really have the ability to drive whatever emails you want to send through Stay fi and we have a bunch of guides about how to set up automations, et cetera. The next version is going to look a little bit more like Klaviyo, if you've ever used that, which is like an email tool built for Shopify stores. So basically we're going to predefine a bunch of emails you should be sending and have a wizard to help you build them and get all the relevant information, even from your pms. So we're going to make the email creation and sending process so simple that email, you just plug in, kind of like fill in certain fields and we'll basically create everything for you. That's the biggest barrier we see when we talk to customers or send out a survey of users is, you know, okay, I want to do email, I just like don't know what to do. And even with all the guides we have, people still have to do it themselves. So we want to build these wizards to basically build everything for you and you just answer a few simple questions and of course you'll still have the ability to customize everything if you want to be more sophisticated. But we want to make that super easy for everybody to do, no matter their level of comfort. When it comes to email, no plans.

For any AI robots to take over the back end of stayfire.

There is already like an AI email builder because Campaign Monitor has one. So there's like an already a thing that you can put in like hey, I want my email to say this and it will just write it for you. And then you can like say, I want it shorter, longer, more informal, formal. Right. So they have like a ChatGPT widget, but I'd say like what our users need that's a little different is more like I need to send an email. Like an example would be like, I want to send an email that features all of my properties that have open availability next weekend and then it will just build that for you. Right. So that's kind of the more direction we're heading. So it's very relevant to our industry. I have three properties. Can you explain how CRM works for collecting emails from StateFi booking, blah, blah, blah, blah. So within our email tool, right, it's pretty, pretty simple. We don't, it's, I wouldn't call it a CRM. A CRM would be more like you're capturing their historical preferences, why they booked with you. I'd say that's probably something more like Mark's tool could accomplish where ours is more of a simple email tool. I didn't mention it within StateFi, but we also connect with a bunch of third party tools including Go High Level, which there's a few people that have stuff like that. So you can send all the emails you collect within StayFi to go high level as well as tools like ActiveCampaign, HubSupport, HubSpot, Salesforce, et cetera. So if you already use a third party tool that you know how to use, you can also use StayFi and send all the data there automatically. But I'd say if you have three properties, you probably don't need to think in terms of a CRM unless they're very high end. Just because do the basics first, like start sending an email and set up an automation and then as I get more sophisticated, that's the other barrier I see to people starting is they want to, you know, they put the perfect ahead of just getting anything done and they think too complex in terms of like what's achievable in the short term. So I think, you know, if you can set up a monthly newsletter in automation, that's where I would start. And then think about how you want to layer in more complexity, targeting segmentation as you go along. But don't, you know, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. Right. Do you recommend waiting on Boostly to finish your website or could this be started with an owner res website? Of course, yeah. So because we're marketing to return guests for the most part within StayFi there's a higher level of trust between the guest and you. So if you start with the owner, owner rest websites, which are fine and they work right, they have a decent booking engine that's good enough and you can still get bookings through that. Obviously the boostly will help improve that and also help your credibility with non repeat guests. But because we're doing mostly repeat travel, the website is relatively less important than if you were advertising to totally new people that have never heard of you, where you need to establish a much higher level of trust. But obviously a more professional website will just improve your results overall. I would also just say another good place to start is actually offline bookings in a way. So sending plain text emails explaining who you are from a first person standpoint, especially if you're on the smaller Side just be like, hey, this is Richard. I manage the, you know, Turtle Inn, whatever it's called, you know, just so you know, like we have our own website or you can just email me like the dates you want to come back and you can actually save money versus Airbnb or whatever. That type of approach works really small, really well on a small scale because it has the feeling as if you just like wrote that email to them on Gmail and has very high deliverability and open rates. That's just one other way. If you're not comfortable with like pushing the website first, you can just push yourself first and have them communicate with you, then send the link to the website to book. And then of course, when you have a boostly website and you're more confident in your brand presence, then you can start sending people there en masse and you'll get, you know, a higher degree of conversion rate when you do that. Absolutely.

I think we, we made it through all the questions, if I'm correct.

Yeah, a lot of questions. That's like a marathon there.

Thank you everyone for joining. I know that went a little longer than I had promised, but I think it was well worth it because we got some amazing questions out there and answered. So I put this up here on the screen in case you missed it in the beginning, but this is where our community is going to live, where we will put this recording and the one Mark and I did last month and then all the future recordings. So you can take a look, you can ask each other questions. We'll keep posting updates about this community as it grows. If you want to see anything else from us, put it in the Facebook group as well. And we just want to continue to see this grow. So thank you for taking an hour out of your day to come and meet with us. Hopefully it was valuable and hope to see you next time. Mark, Arthur, anything else you guys want to say?

Yeah, if you just want to learn more about Stayfi, you can just go to stayfi.com and if you want to book a demo, you can go to the demo page and book a demo with one of our reps. Or if you feel adventurous, you can just sign up for stay. Fine, get started. Because there's no contracts, commitments, minimums. You can. Anyone can just go there and create an account and look around before they even pay anything at all. Lovely.

Yeah. And like, this is very much going to be community driven. So if you. There's a specific person that you want us to bring into the next round, then please do let us know, we, we, you know, this is not going to be the, the last one where it's going to be very much. You tell us who you'd like and then we will go out and, and find it and you know, obviously on the next one we'll hopefully all come back. Alpha would love to have you back as well. And we, we want to start of bring in like a couple of aspects like talk about what we're noticing over the past month in the industry and so I started to share those views and really just keep coming back and, and who knows where, where this sort of evolves to like Maddie was saying could potentially have some, organize some in person meetups and, and really make this a thing. So please do tell everybody about it if the next time that we announce that we're doing something, please do share the link. Appreciate everybody taking time out of their day. I've even seen Jody Sterling who I know is in Australia so it must be very early over for her in the morning. So really do appreciate you all. So yeah, thanks for being part of it again and thanks for Maddie for coming up with the idea.

Absolutely. And Jeremy, I got you the link in the Q and A. So if you guys can't scan the QR code right now, the link to the Facebook group is in there as well. Awesome. Thanks everyone.

Thank you. See you guys. See ya.