Top 5 Email Marketing Tips for Vacation Rental Managers

Email is a great free marketing tool that can increase your engagement with past and potential guests, enabling increased referral for your vacation rental agency. In our earlier blog post we covered the importance of email automation when managing a guest’s stay at a property, this week we will cover emailing past guests for referral marketing purposes.

We need to be careful not to overstep boundaries when reaching out to customers through e-mail. Emails are a personal-use tool, and if a guest feels your emails are irrelevant or are sent at wrong frequencies, you can be sure to expect them to unsubscribe from future emails, hindering your relationship.

To help ensure your emails do not get placed on a guest’s black-list, we have rounded up the top 5 email marketing tips to increase your success with guests:

1. Encourage Communication

Being personal with your email recipient will help you build a relationship and decrease the chances of guests seeing your communication as marketing.

Make sure the “from” part of your email has a name in it, and if you want to include your company name you can place it at the end of the name such as Francesca Nurlu (Kigo).

Always address recipients with their names in the intro of the email, try and avoid intros such as “Hi All”.

2. Avoiding the Dreaded Spam Folder

Email programs use two basic rules when it comes to placing an email in the Spam folder: High number of spammy words in your email, and credibility/familiarity of the sender. Having communicated with guests for their stay will help ensure you have credibility with the recipient.

In order to avoid placing too many spammy words in your e-mail we would suggest that you avoid Spam Trigger words such as, Risk Free, 100% Satisfied, Pre-approved etc. It is especially important to ensure that your e-mail subject line avoids these words. Here is a full list of spam trigger words.

Again, making sure the content is relevant to the recipient will ensure you avoid them clicking on the Spam button through their email program.

3. Utilize Email Management Programs.

Just like you can automate your emails between the housekeeping staff, guests and property owners with vacation rental software,  you can manage a large email list with email management programs such as MailChimp. The advantages of using these programs are that you can see what percentage of your emails were opened, whether any links inside the email were clicked, as well as who unsubscribed from your emails. Best of all, you can design your emails to look professional with pre-designed templates or easy-to-use template creators.

4. Newsletters and RSS Feeds

Finding content for email marketing campaigns can sometimes be challenging. If you have a blog, allowing guests to sign up for a newsletter will ensure you receive continuous brand recognition without having to create new content.

To ensure we are keeping in-line with tip #1, we can keep our newsletters and rss feeds personal by ensuring the content is of interest for specific guests, making sure that e-mails are addressed to the recipient by name (a great feature of email management programs) and also placing personal comments or questions at the end of your feed, such as “As always [Name], let me know if you have any questions about the saving money when travelling abroad”.

 5. Make It Sharable

If you are sharing content that the user finds relevant, chances are they will want to share it on their social networks, such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. A simple “share this” link or widget will make it easy for guests to spread your content with their friends and family. Again, relevant content that is informational and sometimes funny is very important.

Do you use email marketing to promote your vacation rental agency? Do you have any success stories or not-so-successful stories to share with us? We would love to hear from you so be sure to comment below!

Looking for a new vacation rental reservation system that allows you to automate e-mail communications with your clients?  Kigo offers fully customizable vacation rental reservation software, SEO website solutions and the best channel manager on the market. Contact one of our experts today at [email protected] or on the phone (Spain) +34 512 702 105 ‧ (France) +33 1 84 17 04 18 ‧ (USA) +1 (786) 292-0030