Email marketing is one of the best ways to get the word out about your vacation rental business without spending a lot of money. According to the 2021 Hubspot report, for every dollar spent on email marketing, $42 is made. This is a 4,200% return on investment, making email marketing one of the most effective ways to market.
But the hardest part is always getting started. But don’t worry, we’ll take care of you! In this post, we’ll show you ten different ways to make a successful email marketing strategy for your vacation rental and get more people to book it. Let’s get to it!
1. Use a guest Wifi network to grow your database.
The first thing to do: No matter how long you’ve been in the vacation rental business or if you’re just starting, you need a big database. Keeping your guests’ emails after they book your property is the easiest way to grow your list of email contacts.
Unfortunately, they will only be able to choose that option if they book their stay directly through your website for your vacation rental. If the reservation is made through an OTA platform like Airbnb or Vrbo, you won’t be able to get their email address.
But wait, there is still hope!
You can still get their email addresses if you set up a WiFi network for guests on your property. How does it work? Well, it’s pretty easy. When your guests arrive at your property and connect to your WiFi, they will be sent to a homepage where they must enter their names and email addresses to access the Internet.
By setting up a guest WiFi network at your vacation rental, you will not only get the email of the person making the reservation but also the emails of all the other guests.
2. Make sure your emails about your vacation rental have clear goals.
When you start writing your vacation rental newsletter, you should have a goal in mind. Any piece of writing that doesn’t have a clear point risks losing readers. So, you should ask yourself why you are sending emails.
Set some short-term and long-term goals and use them to guide your content creation. Do you want your guests to know more about the area before they get there? Do you want to build trust or maybe tell people about a deal at your rental? The better you know what you want to achieve, the better your newsletter will be at reaching that goal.
3. Make your emails about content, not just announcements
It’s easy to write a newsletter, but it can be hard to write a newsletter that your potential guests will enjoy reading. Your emails about vacation rentals should be about more than just news and sales.
Focus on making content that is interesting and useful. Give the people who signed up for your emails a good reason to open them when they arrive in their inbox. Include information that will help your guests and potential guests in your vacation rental emails to keep them interesting and useful.
4. Inspire your potential guests to travel
There are a lot of places to stay all over the world, from mountain lodges to fancy resort hotels. With so many choices, it can be hard for people to decide what to do.
You can help potential guests decide by using amazing vacation rental email marketing campaigns to show them why your property is the best choice for their vacation.
Don’t be afraid to use beautiful pictures of your property and the things it has to offer. If your property is near a beach, mountain, or hillside, feel free to share pictures of the scenery. If there are activities that guests can do, include pictures of other guests doing these things.
By showing people these pictures and telling them about these things, you can quickly get their attention. It will be easier for potential guests to picture themselves having fun and relaxing at your place.
5. Figure out how often
Choose how often you want to send emails, and then work on being consistent. Will you send your newsletter about vacation rentals once a month, three times a year, or once a year? The right answer is what helps you reach your goals and what you’re willing to do well.
Putting together a newsletter can take some time, so don’t get ahead of yourself. Think of a realistic way to send your newsletter and set a reminder so that you can always find time in your busy schedule as a vacation rental owner to write your newsletter.
6. Come up with some catchy subject lines
One of the hardest things for anyone who writes a newsletter is just getting people to open the email in the first place. Travelers looking for a place to stay get a lot of messages every day. If your email’s subject line is boring, many people won’t bother to open it, and you might lose the chance to turn them into guests.
Remember these four “U” words when writing your subject line: unique, urgent, very specific, and useful. Make your audience think they’ll miss out on something really special if they don’t open your email, and make sure your subject lines stand out from all the others!
7. Create visual emails
In the travel and hospitality industries, it’s best to use as little text as possible when designing emails. As important as words are, they don’t always do a good job of showing potential guests what they can expect when they stay at your place.
This is why you should instead put your attention on pictures.
Use good photos in your emails, but stay away from stock images. It’s a lot better to show real pictures of your vacation rental.
When potential guests open your emails and see these pictures, it will be much easier for them to imagine what it will be like. This will make it more likely that they will book with you.
Finding a template that looks good will also help you be consistent. If you’re not good at graphic design, don’t worry: free email sites like Mailchimp can help you with this.
Here are some more tips to help you make a newsletter that is beautiful and interesting:
- Put your logo at the top to help people connect your rental with the quality of the newsletter.
- Use headings to break up the text, just like you would if you were writing an article for your vacation rental blog.
- Find some good pictures that go with what you’re talking about.
- For a more professional look, make sure that things like font style and size are the same in each issue of your newsletter.
- Include a “Call to Action” with a link to your website, where potential guests can book your property.
8. Send a welcome email to everyone who has just signed up.
It’s a good idea to send welcome emails. Welcome emails bring in 320% more money per email than other types of emails, and they can also increase the number of people who open your emails by 86%.
So, put out the red carpet for your new subscribers and treat them like they’re already special guests. Send them a welcome email with a greeting and a personalized subject line.
Include high-quality pictures of your vacation rental and a short list of things they can do while they’re there to get them interested in booking it.
9. During the off-season, offer deals that only last a short time.
Seasonality is a fact of life in the vacation rental business, whether you own a house on the beach or a ski lodge. There are busy times, but there are also times when not many people stay at your property.
You shouldn’t be put off by how few people showed up. The off-season is a great time to come up with new ways to market your business through email. Off-season marketing helps you build momentum for your next busy season by reminding your subscribers about your business.
Offer a limited-time discount to people who want to stay at your vacation rental during the next busy season. This will get people excited. For example, you can give potential guests a big 40% discount on the total cost of their stay if they book in the next 48 hours.
Setting such a short deadline plays on people’s fear of missing out (or FOMO). People who want to stay will be afraid to miss out on such a great deal that they will probably book within the 48-hour window.
You can even add a countdown to your email, like in the example above, to make it clear that time is running out. This will make would-be guests even more likely to act quickly.
10. Adopt a “mobile-first” email design strategy
About half of all emails are opened on a mobile device, so your potential guests are likely opening your emails on their phones. A detailed Mailchimp report also says that putting out an email design that works well on mobile devices can increase unique mobile clicks by 15%.
This is why you should make sure your emails look great on mobile devices.
Don’t worry, though, because it’s not as hard as it looks.
You don’t have to know a lot about email development to make emails that work well on mobile devices. All you need are mobile-responsive email templates. Mailchimp and other free email marketing tools have templates that work well on a variety of devices. This means you can make beautiful emails that work well on mobile devices with just a few clicks.
To sum up
So, there you have it: ten ways to use email marketing to get the most out of your vacation rental property. There are a lot of people in the vacation rental business, so you’ll always have a lot of competition. If you use these tips to make your email marketing plan work, you’ll not only stand out from the crowd, but you’ll also get more people to stay at your vacation rental.
