Why Emailing Your Guests is So Important S1E4

Hello and welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast, the only podcast out there that will give you easy, actionable tips on how to boost your direct bookings and get more heads and beds for your hotel, guest house or holiday cottage. Today we are going to be talking about email marketing and how it is the most important marketing technique out there for getting more direct bookings so you don't have to pay the commission to booking.com, expedia and the other online travel agents. So you've done the hard work, you've got the guests through the door now, yes, they may have come through from an online travel agent, a lot of them do. They may be returning guests, they may be first timers, they may have just walked in from the street. The first things that you do with your guest could be the most important things from getting them to come back and booking directly with you. So what I'm going to do over this podcast is give you easy tips on what you can do right now to improve your direct bookings. If at any point you want to stop this podcast, come back to it. Rewind, fast forward. That's absolutely fine. You can keep all the show notes on the website www.boostly.co.uk that is B O O S T L Y or simply email markoostly.co.uk and I'm more than happy to answer any questions. So let's begin. When your guest first walks through the door and comes and checks in and signs in at reception or with yourself, the first thing that you should do is be giving them a guest registration form. This guest registration form is an essential part of your marketing process. If you don't have a guest registration form, stop this podcast right now. Send an email to markusley.co.uk and I will send you a template that you can use absolutely free on a guest registration form. The most important information should be the guest name, the guest address, the guest email address and how they found you. These bits of information are key for the following reasons. Name obviously address essential and we'll come on to that later on. Email address for obviously email marketing and how they found you. Now, it's really important to know where guests are coming from, so you can in the future collect that information and find out which websites are working, which ones aren't. So if you're spending money listing your information on websites and listing sites, you can spend 100, 200 pounds quite easily with. We need to know if that money is being put to good use or if it needs to be knocked on the head. So let's go on to address now. Why do you need their mailing address? Firstly, this podcast has been recorded on December 2016, we at the property, one of my clients, we have just done a very big offline mail in Christmas card campaign. So we created these Christmas cards, we got them printed at a local printer and we collected 2,000 guests addresses. And we've been very busy handwriting envelopes out over the course of November to send out at the start of December. Now, what are we putting on these cards? Firstly, Merry Christmas. We're thanking our guests who stayed with us for their support of a local business this year. And on the back we're giving them a reward. And the reward is if they come and stay at this property in 2017 and stay for more than three nights, then they will get 20% off their total booking, which is great because the guest, first of all opens up an envelope because not many people nowadays will send Christmas cards. So it's really nice to get a Christmas card in the post, especially at the start of December. If you leave it for the mid to the end, when loads of people have been potentially receiving Christmas cards or Christmas promotions in the post, it does become a bit of a meh. But if you do it at the start, it's fresh, it's exciting. Everybody's well into Christmas by the start of Christmas, that point, so you do that. Secondly, on the back, it's got a nice little reward. And if they were thinking about coming to stay with us, if they're 60% sure they're going to come and stay at that property in 2017, this just adds on that extra 40% and just guarantees the booking. And as well, you're getting three nights out of them or more. The property in question probably spent about £200 on postage, printing envelopes, etc. But already the return of investment has been tenfold through bookings that have come in from this voucher. And it's easy to track. So we got all of this by just getting the guests addresses. That's one thing that you can do. Secondly, you collect all the information. So all these 2000 pieces of guest addresses that we found, what we did is we filtered them into cities and towns and postcodes. So what we did is we worked out that out of 2000 that we, the large chunk, over 60% of our guests come from the local county. So people are driving 1 hours, 2 hours, 3 hours to come and stay with us so we can then focus our marketing. In 2017, in the Yorkshire area, we went even further though, and we pinpointed that 70% of those guests were coming from Leeds and around that city. So what we now do is we then use that information and we will go and work with a local newspaper in Leeds, or we will use it for Google advertising for people of Leeds, or even more important, Facebook advertising for the people of Leeds. We can put an ad pinpointed for anybody who is in Leeds to get our Facebook Facebook page and our website name and how to book with that discount for 2017. And we got all of that by just asking for a guest address at the point of booking essential. So again, you've got to start thinking long term when a guest arrives through your door. Okay, so we've got the guest registration details. You can the next bit you can either do daily, weekly, monthly, you can get a member of your staff to do it. It's totally up to you. But you need to take that information and you need to put it on an Excel file on your computer. So have an Excel file for guest details of 2016, 2017 and just add the information. The fields to put in there are exactly the fields that you put on your guest registration. So name, address, email address, how they found you. So take that information, put it on Excel and save it into Dropbox, Evernote, USB stick, however you want to save it, make sure it's safe and secure, that it cannot get deleted. Then what you're going to do is then you are going to use that information on a monthly basis to send out an email every month to the guests that stayed in your property. So one of the most popular, cheapest, easiest emailing software out there is mailchimp. We use mailchimp for all of our clients. And if you are yet to send email to guests, I recommend you get started because it's free and easy to do. So, so every month we take all of our guest information, we upload it to mailchimp, which again, is really straightforward and simple to do. And then what we do then is we send a monthly email to all of our guests just to tell them about the latest news, the latest events and any special offers. A lot of people ask me, well, what should I put in an email? To be honest, it's not massively important what you put in it. The most important thing is that you do it and you email once a month. So, for example, let's give you some details of what you could put in an email for our clients. What we do is we have it as a social aspect, like a friend emailing a friend. We Put news from the local town, from the area from the last month and we also tell people what's coming up over the next few months. For example, there's a big bike race, there's a big event, there is a music, a big music band coming to town. We tell people about that in the email. So then it would pique their interest and they're thinking, you know what, I would love to go and see that I know a place to stay. But the most important is by emailing once a month to you are keeping in your guests eyeline, in your thoughts, in their thoughts. Basically they will not forget about you. If you combine this podcast episode of email marketing with the podcast episode on social media, there's no way that your guest will forget about you. Now some people say to me, well what if they don't want to get these emails from me? Simple, they'll unsubscribe. There's an easy button and it's easy to unsubscribe from emails. And if a guest really doesn't want to find out more about you or does not want to stay with you again, let alone subscribe, but you don't have to worry about them, instead of concentrating on that one, unsubscribe, concentrate on the 99 people that are subscribing to your emails and people who want to know more about you after you have sent your email. What I love most about mailchimp is that you can check the stats of who has opened them, how many times they've opened them, and if they've clicked on any links within that email. So for example, I sent an email out on the 1st of January to say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Here's a link on how you can book your 2017 right now with us. If you do it this month, you'll get 10% off just by clicking here. So I put the link really clickable, goes to our booking website where people can book their rooms and they get the discount. What I'll be able to do is check the report to see who's opened it and if they have then gone on and clicked a link, not only that, I will get a list. So out of 100 emails, I'll get a list of 10, for example, and I'll be able to have email addresses in front of me. So what I could do a week later is I could focus on that core group of 10 people. I could send them a follow up email, personalize it to them. If I want to make it really personal, I will email each of them individually. Just add a bit more of a personal feel to it. But then again I would have the link button on there, signing off the email saying we would really love to see you this year. Click on this Link, here's your 10% discount. Any questions, call me, here's my number. Now, from those 10 people that I email personally, I guarantee you will get at least one booking. Now that's one booking. If it's a two night stay, a three night stay, a four night stay. If you that could be an extra 500 to 600 pound income from a free email. So you've not spent any money doing it. It's maybe taken an hour, two hours of your time, but that is one potential booking from 100 emails. And if you do that regularly, if you do that once a month, then this is how you increase your direct bookings moving forward. So the next time you have a visitor arrive at your front door, doesn't matter whether the booking has come from your website, from a phone call or from an online travel agent. If you follow these steps, when that guest leaves and wants to come back and stay in your town again for holiday or work, it is your job to make sure that they come back and stay with you by following these tips, keeping their eyeline, keeping the guest thoughts, and they will book with you every time. This is how you increase your direct bookings. Thank you for listening. Out of, in my opinion, out of all the six episodes this is the most important. So what I would love for you to do is to rewind it to the start, listen to it again and take action. What I'm going to do is I'm going to leave you with an actionable tip that you could do right now to get direct bookings. To increase your direct bookings, I want you to go back and pick out 10 guests, 10 random guests for who have stayed with you over the last few years and send them an email individually. Send them an email, ask them what their plans are for next year and if they'd like to come and stay with you. And make it social, make it responsive, ask open ended questions but get them to respond to it. So I want you to leave that with you right there after you sent us 10 emails. Give it a week. Email me markoostely.co.uk or on Twitter it's ostleyuk and let me know how you get on and let me know out of the 10 people how many responded and if you got any bookings. As always, thanks for listening. If you could go and leave a review and a five star review on itunes. I'd be so grateful. My goal is to help increase direct bookings and getting more heads on beds for the independent hotels, guest houses and holiday cottages in the uk. With your help we can do this. Share it, tell a friend, put it on Facebook, share it on social or email somebody. It all helps.