That’s a good thing, right?

The problem is that people tend to only research their vacations a few times a year. They may only be interested in our site in January when preparing for a summer trip. This is bad news for return visitors through the year.

So what should I do about this? More importantly, what can you do?

I could remind customers about our place at the same time of year as our last contact – maybe with a message from our autoresponder. If they contacted us last February and stayed at our place in the summer, we might want to remind them about it again this February.

Can we afford to leave it for a whole year though? What if they did their research already in January? If we miss them by a week, we’ve lost a potential booking.

What we really want is to keep customers coming back to our site throughout the year. This will keep us and our place in their minds and maximize the chance that they will think of us again when they are planning their next vacation stay.

So over to you. What can you offer your visitors to keep them coming back through the year? If your site is just a few photos of your property and some description, I’ll guarantee its not going to be too compelling for them to come back to!

OK – here are some things you can try:

1. Write a blog about the holiday location. Heather Bayer does this really well at the cottageblogger.com Write about events, new offers, places to visit or updates and improvements to your place. Keep it fresh, open it up for comments and get involved in some discussion!

2. Build a discussion forum around your place. Give customers the chance to talk about their experiences, share vacation tips and tell stories. This is a great way to build interest, and it also shows that it’s not just you who thinks your place is great.

3. Use an autoresponder to send out regular messages to existing customers. Keep customers updated with availability offers and new information about your property

4. Try and catch them on Twitter or Facebook

5. If none of these work, use a calendar and pick up the phone!!

When you get customers back to your site, you can welcome them back with a personalized welcome message or some special info that only customers can see – maybe some special offers or some photos or a private discussion forum.

Of course all of this assumes you’re providing a great place to stay and that your customers want to book with you again…

• Your car dealer says she will call you back at the weekend. She doesn’t.
• You promise to get back to a prospect on Tuesday. You leave it til Thursday
• The spam email promises a discount on your favorite drugs but when you open it it’s just garbage
• Your latest blog comment promises useful feedback but it turns out to be just a bunch of link spam

Are you getting wound up? It’s probably because this seems very familiar. Promises get broken every day.

It’s the promises that people keep that you remember. If you break your promises people will forget you. Very quickly. Don’t forget that a promise could be a number of things:

• A Google AdWords Ad for your website
• A Google hit returned for a keyword from one of your pages
• Your book cover
• Your URL
• Your autoresponder delivery schedule

These all promise something to the visitors who clicks on your ad, or opens your book, or types in your URL, etc.

The words in an AdWords ad promise to show something relevant when your visitors arrive at your site. Your URL (include any file/pathnames here) promises some content related to the words that it includes.

If you promise to do something via any of these paths and then don’t do it, you will disappoint your customers and they may not come back.

No one likes a broken promise.

The term is used a lot for systems that automate email marketing. It implies a system that just, well, responds to customer inquiries. This has its uses, of course. If a visitor to your site fills out a support request then it’s helpful to send a quick automatic reply saying “we will reply to your request soon”. However if you base your entire email marketing campaign around such a one-way interaction then you are ignoring valuable conversations that you can have with your customers.

Many autoresponders will take your signed up customer and schedule a set of emails to be delivered to them. You can choose when these emails are sent – let’s say once a week for a whole year. The problem here is that you’re sending every customer down the same path through the same set of emails. We all know that every customer is different. What works for Joe might not work for Jim. Also does the system allow you to get feedback from your customers and adjust the scheduled messages?

It’s time to stop thinking about autoresponders and start looking at email systems that allow you to tailor your conversations to the individuals that you have on your contact list.