As a vacation rental manager (VRM), you’re used to hard work. Blood, sweat and tears get results. That is absolutely the case for so many aspects of managing a vacation rental business, but it doesn’t ring true when it comes to email marketing.
That’s because technology has stepped in to save you time and increase your bookings — with a whole lot less work than you’re used to doing. That technology is called email automation.
The benefits of email automation are numerous, and we’re going to take you through five of the most important ones below. But first, what is an email automation, anyway?
What is an Email Automation?
Email automation is email marketing for your vacation rental business — done automatically. No more logging in every morning to send a thousand emails to people who subscribed to your newsletter; no more painstaking copying and pasting of email addresses and hitting the send button with sweaty fingers.
With email automation, that’s all in the past. Everything is done ahead of time. Here’s how it works at the most basic level:
- Using email automation software or an email marketing provider, you set up triggers. These are events within your digital sphere that will “trigger” an email to be sent.
- For each trigger, you pre-write an email that fits it. For example, if someone subscribed to your vacation rental website’s blog, you have a welcome email ready to go.
- You sit back and let the email marketing work take care of itself while you focus on other things.
This process may sound familiar to you. That’s because most property management software has a little bit of email automation baked in. This feature usually covers a lot of post-booking communications, such as pre-check in, checkout, reviews and booking and payment confirmations.
That’s all great. But where the marketing benefits — the ones that actually increase your bookings — come in is in the pre-booking phase. You can and should automate emails for that part of the traveler’s journey, too.
Benefits of Email Automation for Vacation Rental Marketing
Clearly, the biggest perk among the benefits of email automation is the fact that this strategy can increase bookings. But a higher occupancy rate is the result of several smaller benefits that all add their own unique value to your email marketing strategy.
Here are the five most important benefits to understand:
1. You Can Automate Your Personal Touch
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can’t personalize automated emails. With even mid-range email automation software, you absolutely can personalize your emails down to the individual recipient’s name.
And that is, without a doubt, extremely valuable. In 2019, a large survey of internet users found that 90% were receiving emails that they felt were irrelevant to them. And 44% said they would be willing to switch to a new brand if that brand did more personalization.
Instead of going through and adding a first name to the subject line of every single email you send, you can automate it. Many email automation tools will do all of that for you with utter precision and in a matter of seconds.
2. Automated Drip Campaigns Can Increase Bookings
You pretty much can’t do a drip campaign without email automation. You could do it, but it would involve a very strict calendar and a lot of time wasted sending emails at specific time intervals. That’s not scalable.
But you really can’t afford not to do email drip campaigns as a VRM. Drip campaigns are simply pre-written emails that are sent to potential customers over specific intervals of time. They’re how you nurture leads to bloom into bookings. And they were designed to be used with email automation.
Instead of trying to keep up with the drip calendar, you automate it and watch your bookings grow.
3. Schedule Emails for Peak Booking Seasons
VRMs know that they’re in a seasonal business. The particular season that is best for your short-term rental may be different from that of a vacation rental in another part of the world, but you have a peak season.
That’s when you’re busiest. So, it’s counterintuitive to try to send a bunch of marketing emails leading up to and during your peak season. Instead, you can automate all of that months ahead of time with email automation. That allows you to focus on the business at hand when you’re booked to the brim.
4. Email Automation Keeps Your Vacation Rental on Travelers’ Minds
Getting a new customer can be as much as 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. And in the vacation rental business, customer retention is all about keeping in touch with past customers through channels like email.
But who has time to send marketing emails out to every past customer a few times per year? Nobody. That’s why this is the perfect task to automate. With email automation, you can get all of your emails aimed at retention written and set them to hit past bookers’ inboxes at specific times after their stay.
5. Save Precious Time and Focus on Other Things
What is email automation, if not a way to save time? Time is inherently valuable, but when you’re as busy as most VRMs are, getting some of your time back from email marketing is like investing in stocks — it pays dividends.
That’s because you don’t just get the time back when you automate your email marketing. You get more time to focus on other marketing and business efforts that can pay off double for your bottom line.
Get the Benefits of Email Automation with Magnetic Strategy
What is email automation? It may just be the marketing strategy you’ve been missing — the one that will keep your booking calendar full and your revenue going up. Unfortunately, there are dozens of ways to do email automation wrong, and plenty of VRMs do it wrong every day.
That’s where a marketing partner like Magnetic Strategy comes in. We know email marketing for vacation rental companies inside and out, and that includes email automation. With Magnetic Strategy, you get all the benefits of email automation, as well as the benefits of SEO, website design and more, without all of the hassle.
Interested in email automation strategies for your vacation rental? We’re here to help you with that and virtually any other marketing strategy that will increase your occupancy rate. Give us a call at 623-226-8518 or contact us online to get started.
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