WHAT DO I DO IF MY BOOKINGS ARE LOW?!

There are so many changes in vacation rentals today. We all used to rely on lead requests coming in from VRBO or Homeaway, and we would do our best to convert those. We also had the flipkey leads, vacationrentals.com leads. All of a sudden, those leads are drying up and the bookings coming directly into the system are just not going to help you survive.

It is time to dig into your bag of tricks. I know many companies who live and die through newsletter marketing. There is a big different between newsletter marketing and spam. You have to be very careful. I have a lot of experience with previous companies where newsletter marketing was critical to our success. We did many studies on the effective of marketing campaigns based on how often we sent out emails. It turns out that if you email someone more than every two weeks, you begin to lose their interest. Even worse, people will start to mark you as spam. That is the worst possible thing you could have happen. As people declare you a spammer, your email delivery rates start to drop significantly. In the case of Google, it is a click away. You get marked as spam, Google starts to throttle your emails. Did you know that you can only send in a certain amount of emails into Google per a predefined amount of time? This is one of their techniques to prevent spamming. If you try to send in 1000 emails within 5 minutes, they do not allow all of the emails to go through. Isn’t that great, we don’t even know who is getting our emails any more!

In the good old days, you could send an email to anyone. Spam filters did not matter. They did not really exist. A few important tips when it comes to marketing emails is to stay away from spam triggering words. Check out the list of 100 words that trigger spam. Any use Free quote? Limited Time Offer? The best rates? Dear friend? Congratulations? Click below? Lowest price? Keep reading, it gets better ;).