Welcome Back to My Vacation Rental Website
I’ve been thinking about ways to keep my customers returning to my vacation rental websites. I’m 99% sure you’d agree this is a good thing to do. If people are returning to my site this means our place is staying fresh in their minds and we’ll increase the chances of them asking to stay with us again.
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…
You can share a copy of this post on your own website provided you include a link back to the original. Happy reading!
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February 20th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
We email all previous guests about 3 times a years, but only when we have real news about changes we have made at the properties or interesting new things in the area. Guests who book to come back to us get a 10% discount on the rental price. When they arrive, there is a bottle of wine for them in their apartment with a ‘Welcome back’ card. We know our newsletters are successful because we almost never get a request to remove anyone from the list – in fact, people write to us when they change their email address so that they can be sure of continuing to get the newsletters.
January 25th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Thank you for sharing this! Safe dive!
June 1st, 2010 at 7:16 pm
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I considered I would leave my very first comment. Nice website. I’ll keep visiting this website very often.
June 2nd, 2010 at 4:08 am
Haven’t tried anything like that yet, but i might suggest for everyone to have little faith