The future of direct booking marketing is

Okay, welcome everybody to a very special recording of the Boostly podcast. Boostly teamed up with StayFi recently to do a direct booking webinar. And what I wanted to do is I want to talk about the future of direct bookings and the technology, the hardware and the software that has become available to all short term rental hosts, Airbnb hosts, hospitality hosts, whatever you want to define yourself as that is available for people with one properties or over a hundred. Um, the technology that we're talking about used to be reserved for hotels, casinos, the big chains, but now, thanks to Stay Fi and other amazing suppliers and peers in the industry, it's been available to you. What I want to do in this very cool webinar that we put together, it is a recorded one, it's not live, but in this recorded webinar we wanted to just go through what the trends are, what the things that we're noticing and specifically pay attention to text message marketing. I'm joined by Arthur Kolka, who is the founder CEO of Stay Fi, somebody that I've got to know very well over the course of the, of the past year and very excited to sort of showcase StayFi to the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is obviously founded in usa. It's grown massive popularity over. It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This is why the time was right now to make sure that you in the uk, Europe and wherever you are in the world can learn about this. Stay Fire is all about direct bookings and as you know with Boostly, we're all about direct bookings. So it's a perfect little marriage and something that we can put together, put out and put to you, the Boostly peoples. So what I would love for you to do, number one, as you're watching this, do join in, there's questions that I ask which were for the zoom call, we did a very special zoom call for the Boostly community. But please do join in on the comments. If you're a Stay Fi customer client member, please make yourself be known in the comments, say hi, but most importantly, I'd love to know your feedback and your thoughts. Specifically when we come to talk about text message marketing. The cool thing, what we're going to show you a lot of the tactics in here is a set and forget. Set it up once and then you can implement it. And for those of you that are part of team Boostly, that have got access to our checklists, our templates for expert copywriters in this industry have created for you, then you've Got a leg up on everybody else. If you're not part of the Boostly community, if you want to join the Boostly community, please do send me a message. Markuser.co.uk and I'll make sure you've got all the links on how to join. But in the meantime, without more being said, let's go straight over. Gonna flip my screen. You're gonna hear from myself and then Arthur from Stay Fi and we've got a 30, 45 minute presentation, webinar, Zoom call, whatever you wanna call it, to talk all about the future of direct bookings. We're gonna go through some really cool tactics, talk about diet bookings, why, and obviously we'll go for a few things. But to get started with, before Arthur introduces himself, if you just take a second, just to give Arthur a little bit of context of who you are in the chat. So use the zoom chat. We can all see it, I believe we can all see it. Let us know where you are in the world, your business, you know, how, you know, what's your ratio of direct bookings to OTA bookings and your biggest pain points when it comes to sort of getting more direct bookings. That would be an awesome place to start. So, Arthur, do you want to just. The floor is yours, buddy. I'll let you introduce yourself and then we'll go from there.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Yeah. So my name is Arthur Kolker. I'm the founder of StayFi. My background is in digital marketing and branding and actually got into the short term rental industry by doing marketing consulting for short term rental companies. And that's really how StayFi was born. So I was developing the brand and digital marketing strategy for a company called Heirloom out of Boston and we found their, you know, one of their biggest challenges for generating more direct bookings was they had very little guest data, obviously because the OTAs don't share a lot of guest information with you guys. And whether it's the booker or the other travelers staying in these properties, you know, they didn't have a lot of guest data to market to. So we want to develop a solution that seamlessly collected information from all the guests, no matter what OTA they booked on and helped them remarket to it to those guests. And that's how Statefi was born. Yeah. And then so a little more about StateFi, founded in 2018, really with the mission of helping short term rental operators become less dependent on OTAs, just like Mark spoke about. And the way we do that is we use captive wi FI splash pages to help you collect data. So it's just like the same experience of logging into the Internet at a hotel, a coffee shop, an airport. We provide that same type of service to short term rental companies all over the world and that helps them collect and get their brand in front of 80 plus percent of all guests staying in the properties. And then because we're a wi fi tool, there's all other sorts of great wi fi related benefits around connectivity, occupancy alerting, outage alerting that reduce customer service calls when it comes to WI fi related issues. Although in this presentation we're really going to be focusing on different marketing strategies on how to take guest data and drive more brand awareness bookings and also other kind of ancillary revenue during and after the stay. And then Mark, you can talk a little bit more about Boostly's history.

Yeah, 100%. So I think a lot of people in the room live with us know about Boostly, but for those who don't and those watching on the replay who don't. So Boostly was founded in 2016 with a mission to help 1 million hosts and property management companies cut down on their overreliance on the OTAs. I like to say my sort of elevator pitch, if you call it that is we give the tools, the tactics and the confidence to increase your direct bookings. And as of yesterday or as of today, sorry 4 May, our website so boosted websites is a big part of our brand and what we're doing here. So our WordPress websites as we call them, they have generated over £500,000 in new direct bookings for our clients in 2020 alone, which is amazing. I'm on a goal to get to 1 million this year and we're already ahead of that target, which is awesome. A little bit about me, if you could talk. Mind moving to the next slide, Arthur? So yeah, best selling author Amazon offer this year with the book Direct Playbook which is epic, as you can see it there hosted the award winning Boostly podcast nominated for a Shorty's award, which is epic, which is happening in London in a few weeks and in Nashville. So in June I'm going to be in Nashville speaking at SDR Wealth Summit event which I'm really looking forward to because the 4th of June will mark 20 years to the day that I first touched down in America when I was in a previous life as a soccer coach. So it's really exciting to going back to Nashville, going back to Tennessee where it all began. Many, many, many Many years ago. And it's so cool to see so many people in the chat here saying hi, people saying welcome. And also as well in the chat sort of sharing their stories. So if you're coming into this late, if you're coming into this webinar late, please do jump in the chat and give a little background about yourself so we know more about you. And the cool thing for me, and which is why I really want to do this with our friends, specifically StayFi, is that I was messing around with a technology like this back in 2012. Our family business, it didn't and it wasn't ready for the short term rental industry then. And this is why it's so cool to me to see something like StayFi now available, not just for tea rooms or for restaurants or for hotels. This is available to everybody in our industry. And it's so awesome to see the results that everybody can get by watching this webinar and putting into practice what we're going to talk to you about. So if you go to the next slide, please, Arthur, we've got some cool little trends if you want to just touch upon what we're looking at here, please.

Yeah, so I think despite the efforts we're making, the reality is industry wide direct bookings is an increasingly small share of overall bookings and Airbnb continues to grow their market share and become more dominant in the space. I know this is just the US and I know we have a lot of UK folks on this particular webinar. So, you know, obviously could be different in different markets, but this is definitely general overall trend. And one of the main reasons why this is happening is during COVID and after Covid, there have been a lot of new individuals renting short term rentals for the first time. And obviously since Airbnb has kind of the brand dominance is like the Kleenex of the space, let's say, where people are going directly to their website. It's attracting a lot of new individuals to rent for the first time, which is fantastic. But because of that, everyone else's share is shrinking. And so one of the key things just to kind of remember is OTAs are always great, especially for first time guest acquisition. But the key thing is you really never want to have those guests book you again through an ota. And that's one of the things we're going to talk about, how to make sure we turn bookers or people that come to your property for the first time, make sure that they're coming back to you again directly in the future.

Lovely. So what we're going to do over the course of the rest of this presentation, my sort of angle is why direct bookings. My sort of angle will be the power of a website and obviously getting people to that website and then Alpha's going to jump in and sort of show the next part. So what we want to do, want to give you kind of a roadmap on what you can be doing to not only generate that direct booking or generate a booking or what you can do afterwards to make sure that if that guest was ever to come back or referral basis, et cetera, they'll be able to attract direct bookings at any stage of the process, which is, which is really cool. So the power of a proper direct booking website, that's what we've got here. So why do you need, first and foremost a proper direct booking website? And what do I mean when I say a proper direct booking website? Now, what I would love, we've got so many people in the chat, so from everybody that's in here right now, just give me a simple yes or no. Do you have live right now a direct booking website? I asked this question a lot and it is amazing to me still to this day how many people could turn around and say, and say no. Which is why it just gives me more power to sort of, of keep doing webinars like this where we can encourage more and more people to get one. Nathan's put no, but we've got one on the way, so that's a good one for Nathan. So what I mean by a proper direct booking website, now, if anybody has read the book, my book, the book, Direct Playbook, you'll know what I talk about when I say a proper one. Because there's so many solutions that are out there at the moment. If you've got a property management software, they give you a free one. Uh, for example, there's, there's solutions like wix and, and, and Squarespace and Weebly on and all the other ones are out there. But if you want a proper direct booking website, if you want one that's really going to make a dent, make an impact, you need to have a WordPress website. I think Damian will be able to give me a more accurate stat, but it's somewhere between 60 and sort of 70% of all the websites in the world are built on a, on a WordPress CMS. So if you're going to have a, if you're going to go for the effort of getting yourself a website, if you want to have a direct booking, one that's going to build the trust and the brand out there, it needs to be a WordPress one. If you want to go look at some examples, I just very quickly put together four examples of a proper WordPress website in action. Vectorstays.com, junglehouse.org, stay bright.com and livelyproperties.com you can go and check them out if you want to see an example of a WordPress website in action. Now, if you want to go back to that lovely slide, next please, Arthur. That'd be lovely. The one, if you build it, they will come or he will come. So here's a little question and I'm going to see who is the movie buffs that we have amongst us in the, in the Zoom room right now? Can you tell me, the question is, can you tell me what movie is this quote from? Let's see if we've got Nathan straight away. Field of Dreams. Amazing. Now, if you build it, he or they will come is something that so many business owners fall for the trap of. And, you know, I'm definitely one for this. And I can definitely say that I felt this when I first created Boostly. I was like, right, I'm gonna create a business, I'm gonna do this and people are gonna come flocking and it's gonna be amazing. And it's the same with hospitality. You, you go out, you go and get your property, you spend all of your money, you spend all of your budget getting the property ready, getting all of the things in place and doing all of the jazz. And when you put the post up online to say, hey, we're open. And then you just go, right, let the bookings fall in. And unfortunately, that's not always the case. This is where the likes of Airbnb and booking.com and VRBO and more importantly, like Arthur said, Airbnb really sort of stand out because they've built a whole business model and a market message of, listen, in a couple of minutes you can put your property on our site and it's live and it's bookable. And because we're in an industry of hospitality, which is so in demand, even right now, with all the things that are going on in the world, it's still a very in demand industry. You can simply put your business one or two pictures on Airbnb and at the right time of the year, you can pretty much guarantee to get revenue coming in. Now, it's a blessing and a curse that. Because it's a blessing because there's no other industry that I know like when I first created Boostly, there's no website that I could go to list my services that would be pretty much guaranteed to bring in revenue. So it's good in that respect, but it's a curse in the other example is because when something is so easy, and I'm sure so many hosts in here who were so reliant on Airbnb or booking.com it is so easy to get revenue. You just become over reliant and complacent because he goes, you know, it's all right, I'll just leave it on there and I'll get bookings. With the pandemic and with so many people now coming into this industry, not so much the guests, but like property people, it's so easy now to get started in this industry because of, of what has happened. It's not like what it was 2019, 2018. It is so easy to get started. So many people are coming to, into it and so many people are now flooding the market. And so the reason why we're doing this today and the reason why it's a really important message to spread to everybody and for you to take home and to sort of spread it around as well, is that the businesses that really pay attention to their marketing, to building their brand, building their trust, having a direct booking website, having the tools that we're going to talk about today in place, and to start putting these practices on a daily or weekly basis, you are the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive on the other end. So when I say here, if you build it, they will come, that's, that's not the case. What you need to be doing is you need to be making sure that you're putting these tactics, these principles and these, these core beliefs in process so you can build a direct bookings business. And Arthur's got some slides coming up now which will really help you get these core principles in place.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean those are all great points about building a sustainable, resilient business especially that can survive downturns. And I think it's easy when demand is through the roof and everybody's getting bookings to become complacent. And it's really about how do you set up the systems today so that you have a sustainable long term business that can survive a downturn or a decrease in demand or a flood in supply or anything that the market has coming to throw at us. And so now we're going to talk about some specific tactics that you can employ today that are relatively straightforward and easy to do. They're going to help build that direct booking engine and you can think of it like an engine so over time, as you kind of add more fuel to it, it will just start producing more and more ROI as you get more and more guests into kind of your contact database. And kind of central piece of that is going to be email marketing, which is what I'm going to talk about first, since it's kind of the gold standard of how to reach out to both prospective first time bookers as well as repeat or past guests that you've had stay with you. And it's consistently rated by marketers as their highest ROI channel. So just kind of jumping into all sorts of email marketing tools out there. And at StayFi we don't have a favorite one and in fact we integrate with all the kind of major ones that you're probably familiar with. Most popular one in this industry is definitely mailchimp and they have great tools to both set up email automations. What I'm going to talk about, as well as kind of one time newsletters. And the great thing about StayFi, because we are doing WI fi collection of emails, we're collecting emails during the stay. So that means guests are in the property at the point of collection, which means you can automate communication to them that's both relevant to the stay. So if you do sell other things to guests or have upsells, it's a great opportunity to automate marketing to those guests, to feature those upsells or extending the stay or other ways to reach you during the course of their stay, to buy things as well as follow up with them after on how to rebook the property. And so I'm going to talk a lot about automation in this presentation since that's kind of the first step in setting up emails in our opinion, is to set up automated series. And what that means in practice is you can ensure all guests get a series of branded email communications from you, but it's something you only need to set up one time and it will automatically just get sent to all guests. And that way if you don't have, let's say the expertise or knowledge or background or bandwidth, which is a big issue in this industry, to be sending weekly or monthly newsletters, you can set up something one time that's being sent to everybody who stays with you or interacts with you on your website.

I just want to quickly jump in and just say that one key word that you said was automation because we're all busy hospitality owners. We've got so many things going on and there's not many things that you can do in this business that you can pretty much set and forget. When you really do crack email and automation, it really is a game changer. And I think the best sort of example to give you is if you've ever been and stayed at a big hotel chain like a Marriott or a Hilton, or if you've ever been to Las Vegas and you stayed at one of their casinos, they are so on the ball with this. And in the past you would always think, well, I could never replicate that for my short term rental business or for my small business. But now we have the tools and we have the things in place and we've got the software and the hardware, which means we can, we can finally do this. And it's not something that you're going to go, I've got to hire a member of staff to do this or it's going to take me forever to do this. The cool thing about what we'll show you is it can be really a set and forget.

Yeah. And obviously before that, the number one first step is to obviously collect guest information. And there's a few places to do that. Number one is on your website and I know Mark and maybe talk about this and all of those tools I have have different widgets and ability to kind of place collection points on your website. Do like a give get. Because if you are driving traffic to your site, whether it's through backlinks, marketing that you're doing other places, every time you pay or invest in getting somebody or prospective booker to your website, it kind of increases the value of doing that when you also collect their email because even if they don't book in that moment, if you can collect their email while they're on your site, that gives that kind of transaction some value back for your business. Then I'll talk about stay fi current guests. And then obviously there are some other places like Facebook or your PMS where you can also find valuable guest information when you collect data. When we talk about automation, it's kind of like you need to have a relevant message. And so whether they're from your website or they're currently staying with you, you want to cater to that message, to the stage the guest is in during their journey with you. As you can imagine, depending on the point of collection, different messages are going to be relevant. And that's something that you want to keep in mind because that's how you're going to get the highest open rate and click through rate with your marketing is it has to be relevant to where that guest is during the journey. Whether it's pre stay during stay, post stay or they're just prospective guests looking to book collecting emails on your direct booking site. I would say you know the most best way to do this is through some type of give get with pop ups and website forms. So this is a great example we have from one of our customers where on their direct booking website where they're investing in sending traffic to they have this pop up where you'll get a guidebook as well as $100 off your next day when you enter this email. And and mailchimp provides all the tools you need to set this up. So they have a pop up builder where you can build this. Then they give you this piece of code that you insert on your website which I'm sure Mark could help with. You just insert it to the header and then this will automatically just pop up on your website. And then it make they make it really easy to say like create a follow up email where then once somebody does submit their email here it automatically will send this email to them with the information you want to provide. So that's a great kind of encapsulation of how you can create an email capture and response through mailchimp which will facilitate sending this information to the prospective guest on your website. And something again you only have to set up once and then it's automatically being sent until you want to change whatever the promotion is or if you do want to send additional information to the guest you can even set up multiple emails to be sent into that series. So I don't Mark, if you've seen like any particularly successful ways of capturing information on your websites.

I was, I was going to say I can see Kathy saying oh I hate pop ups. And it's the cool thing is you don't have to have this as a pop up as such a part of boostly websites. What we do on standard for all of our new templates is that we have a really nice, really elegant looking super simple form that is built into the homepage of the website. So it's not a pop up, it's not flying at you, it's not flashing or anything like that. But the main thing is is that you've got to give like the give get you got to like the juice is worth the squeeze. And some really good examples that I have seen is something which is saying would you like our top five Hidden favorite places to go and check out in your town or location. Because if somebody is visiting your website, if somebody's on your homepage, they are obviously interested in coming to stay in your area in your location. So if you can offer, you know, the top five secret places or the top five recommended places that our guests like to go visit in your town or city, that's the give get and all I have to do, they have to give up the email to get this. And for people that are thinking well that's all well and good but you're talking about the email automation. I don't know what to create. Well, those of you that are part of Team Boostly, you've got literally in the vault, you've got it all copy ready to go. You just have to copy paste personalize into your mailchimp account. So it's all there, ready to do. It's just connecting the dots. And this is a really cool way of having that give, get having that form on your website that doesn't have to be a flashy pop up. Now flashy pop ups and all those things, they may annoy you but they work, they work massively. Otherwise these big marketing companies wouldn't use them. But the cool thing is is that you get, you get a couple of options. So if you want to go see some in action, if you want to go see some in real world examples, go look at the Boostly portfolio, Boostly website portfolio and you can go on there and see them. But it's so easy to be done and like I say it's a set and forget.

Yeah. So obviously website key to capture any information there because if you're paying or you're investing in sending people to your website, you definitely want to help monetize that traffic and cash in your email is going to do that. Then of course stay fi which is the in home experience. So this is an example of what a captive portal looks like. It's very similar if you've ever been to a Starbucks or a lot of main brand hotels or an airport where you connect to the WI fi and then this will load automatically on your device and then you enter your name and email here and we validate all emails with a tool called Zero Bounce so guests can't enter in fake emails. So we make sure every email we collect is valid and won't bounce when you do email them through a tool like mailchimp. And what's great about this is we'll capture emails from everybody during this day pretty much who connects to the WI fi and then we have a bunch of ways to kind of reach out to them after the fact. So I'll talk about, I talked about validation. So it's not just email. So we'll talk about email automation, like how to then set up a series to contact people who are currently staying with you. Then I'll talk to you about two other channels which are definitely worth looking into. One is SMS marketing, which people have different thoughts on. But we do have an SMS marketing tool within StayFi and I'll show how that works. And then social media marketing, which is a super interesting one. And I think a lot of people get intimidated by this one because it's definitely a little more of a hill to climb to first set up verse, SMS and email. But anybody can set up Facebook ads, which covers Facebook and Instagram and they even do advertising on other websites as well. And you can set up very highly targeted campaigns that are relatively inexpensive to run. So one example would be, is you can for instance set up relatively easily within Facebook an Instagram ad that's shown to everybody who's currently staying in your properties or recently stayed with them through StayFi. And that's a way, if you are investing in social media to instead of advertising to, let's say a random demographic based audience to advertise to a very specific audience of people who have stayed or are aware of your brand. And that can get a lot of helpful engagement during the stay, where people start tagging you and their posts and become aware of your social media presence during the stay if they do love your property. Now this is an example of an email automation from mailchimp. So within mailchimp they have a tool called automation. In other email marketing tools, it's sometimes called a drip campaign. So there's different names, but they're all functionally the same thing. And where you're sending a series of emails to a specific audience. So in this case, this is an audience of people that have logged in through statefi. So we know that they're in the property and this particular customer is in Fernie, British Columbia, which is a ski destination in Canada. In this case, when the guest logs in, they will get an email immediately from Fernie, which is basically a welcome message that says, hey, you may have booked us through an ota, but you know, we're the brand that actually managed your experience and is why you really love and enjoy your stay. Which is a really key message because people say they booked an Airbnb, but we know that Airbnb has nothing really to do with the stay other than getting you the booking. So you kind of want to keep reinforcing that message over and over again because guests don't intuitively maybe understand who actually runs this rental and why their experience is really from the brand and not from Airbnb. And then in this case they actually send a really quick follow up with a bunch of upsell options like how to extend the stay. I know they have partnerships with some like ski rental shops and like grocery delivery in this town. So they kind of feature all their local partners which is an awesome way to kind of both add value to the guest day as well as generate some additional revenue. Then after about seven days they send an email that asks them to review the listing on Google. So Google, Facebook are kind of the two places where you can ask anybody to review. So obviously OTA reviews are really important, but only the booker can review you on the ota. But the other six people that stayed in the rental that had a great experience, you can get a valuable review from them too. Google's a great one because it actually really helps you in your search marketing results if your business page has a lot of five star reviews and that will appear there when people are searching for your rental business or a rental company in the area that you operate in. Sorry, I think I skipped a page here. Yep. And then after 30 days they actually send another email about rebooking Fernie and different year round activities or reasons why to stay there. And and they feature some events that Fernie has developed to really bolster tourism outside of the peak ski season because that's where really where they need to get more bookings is in what they call it their shoulder season there because obviously a ski destination is super seasonal. So they really push messaging around how to why you should come revisit during the non ski season. Then in a few months later they actually send a text only email. And you may be wondering why would I want to send an email that's only text? Kind of the one of the key things since most of the people I say 50 or 60% of people who submit their email will use Gmail. And in Gmail you typically have a promotions, a social and a main folder. Most the way the promotions email folder works is when Gmail sees an email with a lot of photos, they think it's from an E Commerce or another kind of like direct consumer brand. They automatically kind of put that in the promotions folder and and things in the promotions folder have a typically have a lower open rate than things in the main folder. So when you have a text only email that you send out, it's much more likely to be sent in the main folder and as a result have a much higher open rate. So in this example, I think there these emails with images typically have like a 15 to 20% open rate, while this text only email is like in a 30, 35% range. So I wouldn't necessarily say send only emails that are only text and only emails are only image. They really work well together when you kind of integrate them into one flow. So in this case, Ryland is sending an email in the series, he's the owner of this company, where it appears as if Ryland has written this directly to the previous guest. So it seems like Rylan just typed this out in his own Gmail account and shot it off to you as the guest and that's going to really have a higher open rate and engagement rate. And I know from this email that people reply directly to it and say like, oh, hey, I do want to come back and ski next February, like, what do you have available? And then one of his sales kind of associates takes the conversation from there. So I definitely recommend integrating a text only email into a series like this. And then I know they actually sent up some additional emails within the series. I think they sent like a one like, oh, it's been nine months since you stayed. Do you want to book again, like an anniversary trip? And you can imagine you can set up 5, 6, 10 emails in a series like this. So that kind of set it and forget it like Mark talked about. So you can invest one time in creating a great series and then, you know, every single guest that stayed with you will get that content over time.

Now what I just want to quickly jump in and this is the one thing that I really love about this technology and with stay 5 have created and are doing is because this email right here, normally if you were just going to use your PMS and the automated emails that are part of that, that will just go to the person who has made the booking, that just goes to one person. But as we all know that those of you that have got maybe a larger rental unit which sleeps 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or even 4, 5 or 6, however many, there's going to be more people in that party that could be a potential future booking for you. And the power of this and the power of StayFi is that this will not just go out to the booker, this can go out to everybody in that party because let's say Two or three friends of friend groups have come together. Right. The booker may never come back or never need to come back to the area, but two of the other two parties, the other two friend groups may want to come back or may know somebody want to come back. So this is the power of it. This is not just going out to one person, this is going out to several people. And again, email automations, you know my personal preference, I love a text based only email because it looks like you're personally handwriting it to somebody. But like what Ivan says, if you can mix it up with a picture text only, it never hurts. Okay. So bear that in mind when you're looking at this and when you're looking at StayFi and you're looking at this technology that we're talking about, especially with what we're going to move on to next. It's not just sending to one person, it's sending to the whole party. And the way that they do that is because the give and get, you're giving up your wifi, giving up the WI fi, they're giving up their email. So it's awesome.

Yeah, I say like when we've done kind of studies with customers over who's rebooking, more than half of the bookings come from the initially non primary guests. So we know, we see, you know, more than half of the bookings are coming from the non initial booker because often the decision maker and the booker are different people or they're unrelated. You know, you host 10 friends in a rental, you know, you know the other nine people might want to come back to your destination. So that's again a really key point I think a lot of times because the PMSS are so booker centric, like all the communication in a PMS and all the automations they set up, which are fantastic, are all oriented around the booker. And then sometimes we just kind of, the other nine people just kind of get lost or we don't think about them as much. So just important to kind of bring them back into the fold and make sure that they have a chance to interact with your brand too because otherwise any messages you're sending are just getting sent to one person. And if you do have upsells or have opportunities to extend the stay, those are things you want to get in front of the non primary guests during the course of the stay. Now I'm going to run to text marketing and we actually launched this last month within StayFi so it's still a relatively new tool for us. And the reason we did it as well, all of our customers have or have for the most part, an email tool like mailchimp that works great. Very few had a text marketing tool, so we actually built one within StayFi. And the reason why is text marketing. You know, I'd say it's kind of the inverse of email. So email, you're going to get really high opt in rates, but then a relatively low open rates, like 15 or 20% would be a good average. With text marketing you're going to get lower opt in rates because it's a little more invasive and less people may be willing to receive these. But for those who do opt in, you're going to get like a 98 +% open read and engage rate and click through rate because just about every SMS you sent will get read. So within our kind of text marketing tool, there are different campaigns you can send. So we have three that we launched with one's called a welcome campaign, one's called just like a bulk marketing message, and one's called a review campaign to kind of go over the difference. The welcome campaign is automatically sent to the guest after they opt in and log in through the splash page. And in this campaign you can see here in this example we have these kind of weird, if you look where these percentage signs are, these are merge fields. And what that basically means it will insert dynamic relevant content in the message to this guest. So in this case it will insert their first name, the property name that they're in, which we're grabbing from StayFi. As well as this customer has a guidebook, that digital guidebook for each property through a company like touchday or Hostfully. There are several out there and you actually can have a guidebook URL for each property property within StayFi. And then you're sending to the guest the link to the guidebook and you can also send the link to your website or a link to the listing of the property on the website. So lots of different options to kind of personalize this text message that's being sent to every guest upon login. Then of course we have a tool where you can send out a message to all your guests that have ever opted into sms. So a few hundred or a thousand over the course of time and you can send anything you want to them, including the links again to the property that they stayed in in the past. So if you are running any promotions or have announcements like I always love, like, oh, we launched a new property that's like a really good announcement to send to guests or if you're Running a seasonal promotion because of, you know, it's your slower season and you want to drive more demand during that particular time of year. You know, you can make sure you can mirror anything that you send an email, you can also send in text to everybody who's ever opted in. And then finally we have this really cool review campaign widget which you could automatically send after X number of days someone stayed with you. And in there we kind of pre screen the guest review where they rate you one to five stars. And then if they do rate you five stars or above, you can then send them to Facebook or Google or to your own website to leave a review. And if they rate you less than five stars, you can solicit feedback from them of course, and see that feedback within StayFi. And that way you're sending more five star reviews or collecting five star reviews from the non booking guests who did stay with you and logged into StayFi. Here's an example of what that looks like within StayFi. So you can see here, these are everybody that left for any director review recently. They have mostly five stars, a four star and they have one star in the one star. You can see the property they're in and the relevant comment and date and who the guest was. And this is again a great way to kind of like deflect people leaving you negative reviews from a public facing forum because you're giving them an opportunity to leave you a negative review and provide that feedback and hopefully you can respond to it and get back to them before they go somewhere publicly to leave you a negative review. Right. So you kind of want to get ahead of that so they have a place to kind of give you their thoughts, but they're not necessarily doing it in a public forum first. And then of course for 5 star reviews you can see who here clicked on Facebook to leave a review there. And then the last one here is Facebook Instagram retargeting. This is kind of what it could look like in practice. So in we have a whole blog post about how to set this up. It's too much to go through in this presentation here, but it leads you step by step to how to set up a Facebook and Instagram campaign through the Facebook Ads tool. And the key thing here I'll just talk about how this works in practice and I'm sure you've all experienced where you go on a website and then you start seeing ads for that particular product in your social media feeds. And the way they do that is something called a Facebook Pixel, which can be placed on your own website or in your StayFi splash page. And basically Facebook says, hey, anybody who's loaded this pixel on their browser, so anybody who's visited your website, we can put them in an audience and target them with ads. And you can pick how many days you want them to live in that audience, whether it's 30, 90, 180, I think the max, maybe around a year. So that way you can dynamically retarget everybody who visits your website with an ad. And Facebook advertising is super cheap. Like maybe, you know, $10 for like 1,000 impressions could be five to $10, maybe a little more, depending on who your audience is. So for a few dollars a month, you can essentially get your brand in front of all your guests or everybody who's visited your website on let's say Instagram and Facebook. Pixels are how you build those audiences. And then there are some tools where you can also upload a list of emails from, let's say everybody who you've collected data from in the past and create an audience based on that data as well. And then within Facebook they've made the tool like it's all self service and they've made it easier and easier to use. So you know, we obviously walk you through how to do that. But if you do want to start building your social media presence or increase your Instagram followers, targeting people that are already aware of your brand or have stayed with you is kind of the lowest hanging fruit audience that you can go after with social media ads. Mark, do you have any thoughts on this particular subject?

I was going to say if anybody's thinking, well that sounds cool. How do I set it up? There's a blog post obviously on Stayfi, but team Boostly members, we've got some specific videos in the vault of the Boostly academy vault that you can go to that shows you a step by step on how to set that up. It's so powerful. It is still a very, very, very good tactic. Even though Facebook goes crazy and Instagram is crazy at times, this is still a really good tactic because at the end of the day you're uploading an audience to Facebook but already know like love and trust you and what Facebook will do because it knows everything about everybody, because we tell it everything about us, they will go and match it to the data that you're giving to the types of people that you want to attract, like your ideal customer avatar. Those of you who have read the book, you'll know what that all about. So it just makes it a lot Easier to put your information, your brand, your business, your property properties in front of people that already know like and love and trust you. And it's people that look exactly like that on Facebook. So it is, it's, it's a such a powerful tool.

Yeah, I definitely recommend, you know, the people that have already stayed with you are lowest hanging fruit and you get the highest engaging rate. Once you start venturing outside of that with a look like audience or other types of audiences, it gets harder. So you know, if you want to tiptoe into there, it's kind of like if you think about your audiences as like kind of like concentric circles. Right. The littlest one are people that already know your brand. Like that's where you want to start with and then you can build out from there once you start seeing success. And the Pixel 2 it does help report on like how successful your ads are. So once you, let's say if you place a pixel on your boosted website you can see data on like what then that person did on your website. Right. So that way you'll know if they actually like did certain behaviors or added something to a cart or all of that's definitely possible. So you can measure ROI success or in Google Analytics you can see like everybody who clicked on the Facebook ad, like what happened after the fact or how long they were on your website for. For our stay fi, you know we always like to do an offer for people that sign up for our webinar and I'll talk a little briefly. How are we doing on time? Okay, it's 5:45 so we have a few more minutes here for questions. I'll talk about briefly how statefi works outside of setting it up in the United States because we do work everywhere but the process is a little different in the UK or another country. But first of all you can use this code boostly to sign up on our website for a discount and you know we're a self service tool as I like to say and there aren't so many of these in the short term rental industry. So some of these people are like don't realize that it's this easy. So you can just go to our website and make an account and there's no cost to making an account. So anybody can sign in and get a safi and poke around the portal and make a splash page. To set up Stayfi, you do need to buy a device called an access point that plugs into your router and we use ubiquiti unifi access points which is kind of like the leading provider for enterprise mesh hardware all around the world. And so we can walk anyone through how to get this equipment. In the US we sell it and ship it, but outside of the us, you can buy it directly from Ubiquiti, the manufacturer, and then we go on a zoom with you to set it up with you wherever you're located. And Ubiquiti has a UK and EU store. So if you want to get Ubiquiti equipment, we can recommend which specific devices are a good fit for your properties. And so the way you do that is you make an account and then you would email supportstayfi.com and we would get in touch with you, discuss what your properties are and recommend the specific devices for those homes. A lot of people already have Ubiquiti equipment, so I'd say 90% of people who have professionally installed WI fi in small hotels, cottages, or in large vacation rental villas, the installers install the equipment because it's the most commonly used. And then we can also use equipment that you already have. So if anyone's interested, they can shoot me an email and I'm happy to walk them through how that process works outside of the us.

Nice. Could you just spell the name of Ubiquity because people missed that.

Yes. I will put a link to the UK store so you can see all the devices in the chat.

Amazing. So I just want to say, while Arthur's getting that, getting that link, Tracy will get that for you. This webinar, what we wanted to do today was to just showcase some of the tools that are out there and also as well, sort of just highlight the fact why it is important now for me, seeing stayfi go from email to added in text messaging is really exciting for me because I know the power of text. Um, I know how powerful it is. And like you said, the open rate is 98%. Why? To get rid of an email, you can just leave it in your. You can leave it in your inbox, it'll just go. But if you're like me and you've got OCD and I can't, I can't stand to see something unread in my text messages, to get rid of it, you've got to read it. That's why the rates are so high. And when you open it, you go, oh, okay, let me check this out, like I'm literally doing right now. And so this is the power of it. And by investing your time into setting up text messaging marketing, you are going to be ahead of 95% of the industry, because this is one that so many people, if you sleep on it, then you just get left behind. And this is why it's so powerful. And again, we talked about it halfway through the webinar today is that this is not just going to the booker, this is going to the whole party. So if you can just invest a little bit of time, reach out to Arthur, you know, the email is right there, go to stayfi.com, go and sign up, have a little play, have a little dabble around and then we basically. Then you go from there, set it up. And if you do it right and you know you've got the support from Stay Fire and obviously for those of you are part of Team Boostly, there's all the training and the copy has already been created for you. We've hired copywriters to write email test templates literally for you to go in and put it all into practice. It's a perfect little marriage up. So, yeah, that's what I just want to end on by saying thank you so much for tuning in. Do we have that link, Arthur?

Yeah, I put the link here. These are what the devices look like. These are all kind of the latest Wi Fi 6, which is, I don't know, you know, more of a technical thing, but basically just like 4G, 5G for phones. There's a new Wi Fi standard called Wi Fi 6 that came out last year. So the other added benefit of using Stay Fly is Obviously with new Wi Fi 6 gear, you're just gonna get a faster, better connection for all guests that are staying in the property. I know somebody asked, you know, we can do some questions now. I know somebody already asked about. And you can just put the, you don't have to use the questions tab in zoom. You can just put questions in the chat because I know we have that pretty active there. I know somebody already asked about like a motel and so I say Stay Fi. You know, we definitely specialize in short term rentals, but we have branched out and done like small motel hotel installations too. And that's one where it really just depends how the WI FI set up today. There's a lot of different ways people set up Internet, whether it's hardwiring access points or setting up wireless mesh devices. And so, you know, basically if you tell us how the Internet's set up today in an email, we can tell you, you know, what the best pathway to set up Stay. If I would be in that building or multifamily property, just depending on you know, and then we also recommend, hey, that set up this way. But if you want it to be better, you can also hire someone to like wire some access points in the building. And we'll also improve the Internet so we can kind of let you know what all the options are and what the benefits and costs of those would be.

One final question that's come in, and this is a good one. So Gillian's got four properties. She's put, I've got four properties. I assume we need four hardware devices. How does it work with Stay Fi when it goes to pairing up with four hardware devices?

Yeah, so you get one device per property and the way the setup works is you cook this device, called an access point, into the home's existing WI FI router. Most people, because they manage on behalf of homeowners, they actually leave the home's existing WI FI running. So like any of the devices that are already online there, whether it's a door lock or a thermostat, you can leave on the home's existing WI Fi, the Stay Fi device will broadcast a new guest network. That guest network will have the same name in every property. And so like brand guest network. So you can imagine you'll actually have one set of WI FI instructions for all homes. You can imagine you have 10 properties. Instead of giving 10 different sets of instructions. Now you know you have one set of instructions to give to all guests and when they join that network, that's when they'll get the splash page. And then you can leave the existing password protected network the homeowner set up also running. So that doesn't go away. So that's the way most people would set it up in multiple properties.

Amazing. Yes. Eliza has put. Can I get a replay of this? I am listening while driving. So yeah, absolutely. We will make sure that a replay goes out. And Arthur's very kindly said he's going to send me the raw recording. I'll get it all boosted up and we'll get it chopped up and sent out and turned into a podcast as well. So just make sure that as many people as possible can discover this. And this is something that I'm really excited, excited for, especially people who are based in the UK and Europe who, who have never used a fire or heard of Safi. I've heard of it. I've never really dabbled more into it. This is what I really want to start getting more and more people onto because I know the power of this technology and text messaging and email and listening to the plans that Alpha has next coming up is very exciting for me. So if you're part of Stayfi, you're in the UK and Europe. Like I say, you're going to be ahead of the majority of the market here. And it's a great way of not only collecting data, but what to do with it, increasing direct bookings, which is what we're all about. So thank you very much for tuning in. Arthur, thank you so much for getting up early over there in California and doing this for us. Is there any final thing you'd like to say before we sign off?

No, it's been fantastic and thanks, Mark, you're amazing as usual.

So my absolute pleasure. And Rasha, thank you so much for tuning in in Australia, which is awesome. I can only imagine what time it is over there. But have a great day. Thank you so much for checking out today's podcast episode. Now, before you head and go anywhere else, before you click to the next episode, before you do that, do me one big favor and go check out boostly.co.uk trust IPRAC are the sponsors of all of the Boostly content and the reason why I work with them and the reason why we spread the message of IPRAC is that when a host or a company is looking to get more into diary bookings, the main question they have is around trust. As in will a guest trust that I am a true and real business? Will IPRAC take care of all of that? And they've got a special offer that is only available to Boostly people. But to do that you need to go to Boostly which is B O o s t l y.co.uk trust you can find out all the information there. You can book in a demo, book in a call and then you will get your super special offer that is only available to Boostly peoples. Thank you again for tuning in. Do go check out Iprac. We'll be back again very shortly with another podcast episode, but until then we'll see you all very soon. Take care.