Vacation Rental Marketing: Importance of Email Automation

The global nature of the vacation rental industry means that agencies and owners are receiving booking requests around the clock. Most of the time requests that come in after work hours won’t be replied to until the next day, which can lead to lost bookings if a competitor has already responded to the potential client before you or your agency was able to. An easy-to-implement and effective solution to this predicament is to automate your responses with potential clients.

Email automation can save you and your vacation rental agency significant time and allow you to focus on marketing activities to increase bookings. Email automation can take different forms depending on your marketing needs:

Booking request email automation:

When a guest visits your website or portal page to request a booking of one of your properties, if your property is not able to be automatically booked, there will be a lag between the time of request and the time of confirmation. This dangerous time-lag can be eliminated through email automation that is “trigger-specific”.

Once a guest requests a booking (the trigger) you can automate an email response to the potential guest that includes confirmation of reservation request, information on the property requested, if the property is booked it can tell the guest to look at other similar properties and also allows you to tell the potential guest when you will be able to confirm the booking.

Cleaning service email automation:

Managing property staff, such as cleaners, can also take up significant time without email automation. Just like a booking request, you can arrange for the property staff to receive automated “trigger-specific” emails. Once a property booking has been confirmed, you can automate emails to cleaning staff that outlines the dates and times they will need to clean a specific property. You can also automate email reminders a day (or two) before the property needs to be cleaned.

Pre-arrival email automation:

Improve customer service by automating greeting and pre-arrival checklist emails. You can arrange for your emails to be sent at a specific date before their arrival so that you don’t have to create individual emails and instead focus on marketing activities. Automatically send guests emails that outline security information, directions to the property, important contact information as well as local activity lists.

Post-stay email automation:

Referrals are key to future increasing bookings, and in order to improve referral success, you need to maintain post-stay contact with guests. An effective way of maintaining contact with a guest post-stay is automated emails. Your email automation system can trigger an email to be sent X days after their stay. This email can include thank you notes, feedback requests, as well as other necessary marketing messages.

Email Automation Software:

There are numerous software programs that allow you to automate your emails. We suggest focusing on service providers who specialize in vacation rental software, as they can provide you with built-in guest email automation. Kigo’s reservation system allows you to automate both “trigger-specific” emails as well as “reminder” emails, which is the perfect solution for both vacation rental agencies and property owners.

Do you use email automation for your vacation rental properties? If so, what creative ways do you use email automation for? We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences: join the conversation and simply comment below.

If you are in the market for vacation rental management software complete with e-mail automation, to manage your inquiries, bookings and marketing, consider using Kigo. You can reach us at [email protected] or on the phone (Spain) +34 512 702 105 ‧ (France) +33 1 84 17 04 18 ‧ (USA) +1 (786) 292-0030