The best email triggers to send

Foreign. Welcome back to the Boostly Academy and today I'm going to talk to you all about email triggers. Now, what is an email trigger? You may be thinking? Well, it is an email that automatically gets sent out to the guest throughout the booking process. Now if you were to go into the vault and if you were to look at the email templates, you will see that I've created a six step guide to this. But there are some booking engines that don't have this automated. There are some booking engines that work a little differently. Your business may work a little differently, but what I want to do in this video is just give you some of the key things to look out for and how you can take advantage of it. We're going to particularly talk about upselling, we're going to talk about preventing cancellations and the benefit of doing this. So an email trigger, the most simplistic one is the first one that gets sent to your guest after a booking is made. Doesn't matter who you have as your channel manager or your property management system, they all send a confirmation email. Now this is the best time, once they've made a booking, once they've got the card out, once they've committed to stay with you, to be telling about some of the other features and services that you offer, this is one of the best chances of doing an upsell. Now why do you think this is? Well, the best time to put a upsell in front of a customer is once they've just purchased and given you the money because the adrenaline is there. They already know like and trust, so you've already crossed that barrier. But now if you were to put a secondary offer in front of them, an upsell offer for not too much of a monitorial value, then they've got more chance of taking action. The best example I can give you, and this is a guest house example, and I'll give a rental example as well. But the guest house example say that you have got a early check in or late checkout package. So say for example, your check in is normally 2 o', clock, but you know you can get rooms cleaned and change in and out by 12. So you offer an early check in of say 1pm and a later checkout of 11am Normally say that you charge this service or maybe you don't even charge this, maybe you just offer it to people just because you're nice. But this is a great chance of earning an upsell, getting more money. So what you could do is have in the booking confirmation. Hi Mr. Smith, would you like to upsell or upgrade your, your package to an early check in, late checkout for just an additional. And you work out the numbers. You could just do for the price of 50% of the price of one night or you know, 20, 30 pounds, something that's not going to go when they see it, but not something where it's too cheap where if they just go. Yep. And it's not even worth your time. Okay, so think about what that may be. I gave the example of the room but if you're licensed you could do an alcohol benefit, you know, a real nice gift set on arrival to be waiting for them if it's a special occasion and again put the monitorial value to that. But this is a great time. Now my advice here is to not do what all the big hotels and casinos do in Las Vegas. Because what they do when you press the booking confirmation is they bombard you with upsells. Every type of things that are going. So keep it clear, keep it concise, keep it to the point and put it in front of your guest booker. Now this is really simply done and it can just go at the bottom of an email, it can go in the middle of an email. You know, there's obviously the tactic that I've shared with you of converting a OTA booking into a direct booking where you use this step here of putting in the benefits of booking direct and why someone should have booked direct with you. Again, if you want to go watch that video, it is in the vault, but you can easily put this alongside there. Now another example could be for the rental. So again you could have the early check in, later checkout policy or again you could be thinking along the lines of something else where it could be maybe a restaurant, vouchers for a local place to eat. You know, maybe you've got a deal going with somebody. But again you can follow those sort of lines. And if you're with a PMS that has automated email triggers. So for example on the day of the day of arrival or before arrival or post stay, then this is where this next steps really going to come in. So try and have it. So where it's 24 to 40 hours before arrival, an automated email trigger, trigger goes out. And again this is a great final chance to have that upsell offer in there. Now you can have it at the bottom of the email, you can have it right at the top, but it's right before the guest arrives. Now when they make a booking a lot of the time it could be two, three, four, five, Months in advance. So they'll make the booking, they'll see the upsell offer and they'll go, I'll come back to that when it's closer to this day, honestly, a lot of people will forget because real world, jobs, work, family, you name it. So if you have it where it's so close coming up, so maybe 72 hours, 48 hours, 24 hours before arrival and you say, hey Mr. Smith, just to remind you, if you've not yet booked in our upgrade offer, then this is the perfect time to do so and have it as one or two ways, number one, where it goes straight to say a PayPal link. So if you've never created a PayPal link, let me know and I'll show you the video on how to do it. Email market.co.uk or you could send them to, maybe you've got a online checkout on your website. WooCommerce is a plugin that I use. So you could send them to there or they could just quite simply put in a number to give you a call. To be honest, the most simplest thing is the PayPal link. It's free to do. They just take a commission from the actual payment that comes in, but it's money straight in the bank account and you get a little notification on your phone. When they do do that also as well, I would be putting in here the Google Map directions to your property because people are going to be thinking about how they're going to navigate to you. Majority of them are going to be arriving by car. So at this stage put, put in the link to the Google Map and if you want to know how to create that custom Google Map, the video is in the vault. Just go into the vault and look for it under Google and you'll be able to find that and put that into practice. But that is a great way again of welcoming the guest in setting the stay expectations, putting it kicking it off on a real nice level. So when a guest gets that Google Map, they know about the upgrade offer, they know about the check in time and checkout time and they know about local places to go and to visit. Then it instantly puts you on course to get that good review and have that great guest experience. Now I would also be sending out on the day of arrival an email as well. Now the reason why you would do this is imagine that the again try and take your, your hat off as a business owner and try and put it in the guests. So on the day of arrival again they're going to be driving Email comes in, they may want last minute directions, they may need to know a code, they may need to know X, Y or Z. But by having the trigger to go out on the day of arrival again, it just gives them that little bit of extra ease. They don't have to go searching for it. It's a nice little feature. I would have this be sent out in the morning of the date of arrival. And then finally I would be looking to have an email go out on the day of arrival again, but this time in the PM, sort of between 8 to 10pm now in that trigger I will be just putting in there. Again, this is not in the templates, but it's sort of along the lines of something you could do. I hope that you managed to check in. Okay. Please let me know if we need anything. I'm looking forward to giving you a five star guest experience and instantly what you're doing. Then a good friend of mine, Danny from Optimize your Airbnb, we've done a video together on the Boostly Academy. In an interview he spoke about this. Psychologically you put in that 5 star review or about 10 out of 10 rating review into the guest head already. Now the other email trigger that you're going to send is the one where it's post day. Now my advice here is to send it between 24 and 72 hours after checkout and you can set it where if the guest doesn't open the first email, then you can send it 72, you know, to maybe five days later on. The reason being is in the post day email you're going to ask them about the review, you're going to ask them about the feedback. Try and ask for your own rating out of 10. Ask what you could be doing better. You know, at the end of the day, if you can get good quality feedback at this stage, it is only going to benefit you in the long run. Now you want to be here sending people to the place that you want to be getting more reviews. My recommendation right now is Google Business Listing. Try and get as many reviews into there. So go to your Google Business Listing account, you'll be able to find the share link, put that and just say please go and leave a review here if you wanted to, just to be safe. Because I know a lot of people have a bit of trouble leaving reviews on Google at present. But you could just send them to your Facebook page as a last resort send them to TripAdvisor. Focus on those three. But it's a great way of getting more and more people to leave reviews. You're asking for the review and when, when you ask, people are more likely to do it than when they get the automatic generated one from say booking.com or TripAdvisor, you know, whoever they've eventually booked through. So I would recommend doing that. Put it into your own levels and again just sort of saying I hope that you've had a that five star guest experience. So implanting that review into it. So all in all, even if you don't use the templates, you should be looking at having at least four email triggers to go out. The most important thing to do in here is to not bombard them and not to overwhelm them. Keep the information to bullet point, keep it really precise and always, always of it. Have a stage where if they get stuck, they can give you a call or send you a WhatsApp message, etc. Those that do this well are the ones that will make these email triggers work best. Your upsell could go up, your direct bookings will go up, cancellation rates will drop. Now the reason why so many cancellations happen is because when a guest books, we don't communicate with them at all. And for those that do take their time out to communicate, then what they're doing is the big word in that is time. I know people that are still handcrafting out letters, typing out so much different confirmation things when they don't have to. It's all there, it all can be automatized so you can get more time back in the day. Real super quick video for me. I hope this has helped and benefited somebody watching. If you've got any other questions, please let me know markly.co.uk or come and comment and post up in the Boostly Academy group. Have a great day everybody. Sam.