Top Tip: Anticipating Enquiries Pays

We noticed that one of the influential factors in converting an enquiry to a booking is a timely response. We’ve also seen a distinct correlation between the weather and the number of enquiries received. These things are worth noticing as they help ensure that you can be standing by, ready to receive and respond to enquiries when they arrive. You may well have discovered your own patterns – and feel free to share your thoughts on this, but speaking personally, I love and hate (the latter, just a teeny bit) a sunny Sunday. That’s because people tend to drift outdoors, enjoying the fine weather with a BBQ or day trip into the countryside and loving it. 

This prompts people to think about their as yet unbooked holiday, resulting in an hour or two surfing the internet after tea, looking for likely places to stay. By about 9 pm, they are ready to contact their shortlist of possible cottages and send e-mails winging their way to the potential suspects. That’s the bit I love. I hate that these always start arriving around 9.30 pm and continue until around midnight. 

Being committed to exemplary customer service (or a sucker for punishment, as my wife occasionally mutters), I feel honour bound to respond straight away with a decent, well-crafted response. It may be beyond the call of duty, but it does work, and Sunday nights or Monday mornings can be very profitable indeed. As always, the easiest enquiries to convert to bookings come from a property’s website. I spoke to a few guests who had been one of the Sunday enquiry gang and booked the following day and asked why they had chosen us. The common factor in their response was that they were impressed with the ease with which My Favourites allowed them to go straight to an owner's website, which offered more information than an advert. Still, when they then received a swift response to their enquiry, it helped to back up their initial gut feeling that this was indeed the cottage meant for them. 

All this means is that you need to be aware of the times when enquiries are most likely to arrive and be in a position to respond to them straight away. Like the effort put into mowing a lawn, the result is very, and in this case financially, rewarding. So, bring on the Sunny Sundays and be prepared to work late! We will continue to help you by channelling prospective bookers to your website as quickly as possible, whether it is a sunny Sunday or not.

 

The next 'Must Have' for your cottage?

It wasn't long ago that things like dishwashers, digital TVs, Wi-fi and an iPod docking station were only found in luxury cottages. Not any more! We've been wondering what the next 'Must Have' gadget is and have got to thinking about the level of technology that guests arrive with and the needs all these gadgets bring. The last time my family went away, I worked out that we had two laptops, two digital cameras, four mobile phones, 2 Kindles and a video-camera recorder. Each evening, that meant searching for 11 plug sockets to charge them. That's an awful lot of plug sockets and gadgets scattered about the house. It will not be long before a phone or another gadget becomes the most common piece of property left behind when guests leave, which will become a pain when returning them by post. 

So, a really good 'Must Have' (early 2014) is a multiple docking station, a gadget that allows multiple devices to be charged all at once and in the same place. They don't cost a fortune, and your guests will love them. As a parent, it also means I know my kids will be asleep upstairs rather than online, as I can see all their gadgets in one place at night. 

As an owner, it'll reduce the number of times you'll have to deal with a gadget that gets left behind because it was being recharged in an out-of-the-way corner of the cottage and forgotten in the final flurry of departure. 

As a potential booker, it also sends a strong signal that the owners of this cottage genuinely care about their guests' well-being, which could even help attract more bookings. It's just a thought, but I bet it is one that a lot of people will have as the use of handheld technology grows.

 

Cottage Marketing: A Fundraising Parallel

Have you ever tried to raise funds for a good cause? The absolute golden rule of fundraising is this: No one will give you a penny simply because you need the money – no matter how good your cause. The reason people give is because of the benefit to them. It might be the knowledge that in giving, they will save the life of a child or a precious painting for the nation, but it is the justification for giving. It’s that old ‘WIIFM’ (What’s In It For Me) factor. It is essential that you have just 5 seconds to give a potential donor a ‘light-bulb moment’ as they make up their minds about whether to give. It’s called creating an emotional response. Get the emotional response right, and people will then look at the small print to find a reason to justify their emotional decision. This also works for marketing holiday cottages and persuading people to book yours. 

So, when you advertise your holiday property, please do two things. Allow a potential booker to believe within 5 seconds of landing on your site why a holiday in your country cottage or seaside apartment will benefit them. Then, follow this up with the information they seek to back up their initial reaction, such as prices, availability, list of facilities, etc. We’ve purposely designed the format for presenting a cottage on My Favourite Holiday Cottages to facilitate this response – how you draft the content and select images is up to you. Just keep this golden rule in mind when writing. It would be best if you did the same with your website. What is the ‘wow’ moment created on your home page or advert when someone uploads it? Generally, it is a decent-sized beautiful photo that makes the exterior or interior look utterly desirable in a way that the booker imagines themselves and their family in the image. A good, catchy title can work, too – but they can be subjective. 

The camera cannot lie! Remember – no one will book your holiday cottage simply because you need them to! When describing your property and its features, focus on the benefits. Explain why its location or facilities will help to make a holiday more relaxing or enjoyable. For example: “Bunk beds: Children love our bunk beds, which means you won’t have trouble getting them to bed earlier than usual – giving the grown-ups more time to themselves in the evenings. And, of course, your children will be less tired and irritable the following day.” 

If you are redesigning your website or just refreshing your listing on My Favourites, think about how you can use the photos and content to create an instant, positive emotional response to each page. Get this right, and you’ll find converting enquiries from the visitors we drive to your site much easier into bookings. There’s an excellent article on this theme published by our friends at Kissmetrics worth reading called (and don’t be put off by the title) Using Neuroscience to Design a Better Blog. As the admen (and women) say – “Sell the sizzle – not the sausage.”

 

Reviews and Testimonials

You can tell people how great your self-catering accommodation is, but in addition to photos, the other great persuader is a good testimonial or review. Don’t forget that you can display both on your listing free of charge. Our analytics show that those of you who are posting reviews are enjoying additional traffic as search engines like what they call ‘user-generated content’ – which probably means more enquiries for your website late in the evening after a sunny Sunday. Sorry about that. By the way, you can upload a copy of a testimonial left in your visitors’ book AND invite guests to post their own reviews by sending them the web link to your listing page on My Favourite Holiday Cottages. We moderate all reviews from guests. If any are openly critical, we will run them by you first and let you tell us whether you want them published or not. If you’re reading this after your Easter guests have departed – collect their feedback and upload the juicy reviews today! If you cannot remember your user name (generally your property’s e-mail address) – e-mail us, and we’ll tell you. There’s nothing like a glowing, up-to-date comment from a guest to sway a potential booker’s opinion.

 

Cut VAT on Visitor Accommodation

If you haven’t heard about it, a very persuasive campaign is being fought to persuade the government to reduce VAT on visitor accommodation. The UK is only one of 4 European Union countries to charge maximum VAT levels to self-catering accommodation, hotels and attractions. In countries where the rate has been cut, the subsequent boom in tourism merely restores the level of tax collected by the Exchequer, so everybody benefits. If you want to learn more about this campaign and lend it your support, you can follow it on @CutTourismVAT or find it on www.cuttourismvat.co.uk. You’ve got nothing to lose!

Thanks!

I hope you’ve found this Newsletter beneficial to your plans to get more bookings for your holiday cottage. Do let us know if there are any areas of advice, from how to use your listing to other holiday property-marketing topics, and I’ll cover them in future issues. And don’t forget, any suggestions and ideas we can use will be rewarded with a Featured Favourites listing. Send them to Rick.

Don’t Be An April Fool

We’re starting this month’s My Favourite Holiday Cottages Newsletter with a cautionary tale. If I asked you whether you have ever posted an image on your website without having obtained and paid for permission to use it, the correct answer would be something along the lines of “Never in a million years!.” And that’s how it should be. 

The trouble is that it’s so easy to post something on your site in all innocence without thinking that it will get you into trouble (perhaps in a blog or on your property’s Facebook page of an image sent to you by a friend). This is because Getty Images owns the rights to squillions of photographic pictures and buys more every day, which could come knocking at your door. They continually search websites for illegal use of the images for which they own the licencing rights. Should they find one on your site, they’ll send you a strongly worded legal letter, and an invoice which works out to around £400 per image displayed. Ouch! We’ve received two, even though we had permission to use the image from the photographer. However, when the photos were licensed to Getty long after we’d used them, the photographers concerned naturally couldn’t be expected to remember to tell Getty Images every person they’d permitted to use their image as Getty wasn’t told, hence the invoice. You cannot blame either party. However, you may have to pay up unless you have written proof that you had permission at the time. 

For some mad but inspired reason, I saved all my e-mails in a large file dating back to two thousand and diddlysquat, so I could produce the evidence that got us off the hook. Even so, we’ve been through our site looking at all the images we have posted to check that we indeed own the rights to all the images we feature. And we think we do. I say ‘think’ advisedly because you and other subscribers list most images on the site. These feature your cottage and other photos from the area around it. 

Here’s the crucial bit: Please ensure that you either own or have permission to use each photo you upload. This is set out in our terms and conditions to subscribers, which state that you are liable for every image you’ve uploaded, and have the right to allow us to display the image on your listing. So, for example, if you’ve found and used a beautiful image of a local beach from the Internet and posted it on your listing (or any other listing for that matter), then you are risking a fine if it is licensed to Getty or someone else. 

Of course, they’ll write to us as they will to the owners of all other sites on which you’ve posted the image. And while we would love to be in the position to pay your fine because we value your custom, that just isn’t possible, so we’ll be forced to pass details to Getty, who will come and chase you for their money. To avoid this happening, please check all the images you have used on your listing to ensure that you either own or have permission to use them – and remove or replace any that you don’t. 

I hope writing will persuade everyone to take appropriate action and avoid a heart-stopping fine. Please, therefore, think of us as the ‘Good Guys’. Please don’t blame the photographers; they have to make a living. As for Getty, well, they are just doing their job, and their charitable foundation, which receives a share of the profits, invests millions in good causes across the globe. For those who cannot remember how to log in to your listing, the following article will tell you exactly how to do that.

 

How To Log In

You probably know that you can log in to amend your listing on MFHC at any time of the day or night. You can update images, tweak text, add a booking to your calendar or post a recently received glowing testimonial to attract more attention to your listing. It’s a fair bet that many people don’t refresh their listings because they cannot remember how to log in. If you’re one of these, and especially if you’re desperate to make changes to your listing after reading the previous article, here’s how. To log in, go to the My Favourite Holiday Cottages Home page and click on the login button in the top right-hand corner. This will open the Log in page. Add the address used when you registered (this is your username) in the box titled’ E-mail address’. 

For most subscribers, this is your main e-mail address for enquiries. Then add your password. If you can’t remember it, contact us, or if you haven’t time for a chat, click on the ‘Forgotten Your Password’ reminder. If you’re stuck, call me, and I’ll look it up for you – although there is a ‘Password Reminder’ tab on the site (we just like a good excuse to chat with subscribers!) Once you are logged in, the column on the left contains all the different menu options. Select the one that describes what you want to do, and away you go. If you wish to update your property information, click on the menu button that says ‘Manage your cottages. And select the appropriate link from the list that appears.

 

Marketing Tip: Meta title Writing

If you want to improve your website’s rankings on Google, it is essential to ensure that you are using meta titles wisely. They’ll influence the number of appropriate visitors to your website. Forgive me for teaching some of you to suck eggs and using jargon, but meta titles are very important to search engines. This makes them very important to you. For the uninitiated, a meta title is the phrase that sits right at the very top of your web browser box. It describes what your page – or site, if it is the home page - is about. Look at the image above, and you’ll see the meta title is ‘Late Availability Cottages | Discounted Late Bookings’. NB: your subscription includes the unrestricted use of this facility! This is one of the phrases search engines will use in ranking your site. It’s not the only one, but it is pretty darned important. It would be best if you had a different meta title that succinctly describes the purpose of each page. 

They are tricky to write as you’re confined to using no more than about 55 characters. This isn’t a hard and fast rule as Google measures the length of a Meta title by character width, so if your title uses the letter ‘w’ a lot, it’ll use more width than a cottage with narrower letters like ‘l’ and ‘i’. Moreover, each page on your site should have its own title – not the same one running throughout the site. Try to make it read as naturally as possible. Don’t just stuff it with keywords, e.g. avoid mentioning words like holiday and cottage 2-3 times, but do use natural phrases that you think may be used by people searching on the Internet for the information on that page. 

We are in the process of updating pretty much every meta title for every cottage on My Favourites. If you haven’t done so, take a little time to craft suitable meta titles for your site and forward them to your web designer to upload. It won’t take them very long to do if they’ve correctly proofed the raw material. This won’t see your site rocketing to the top of page one overnight (if only…). Still, if you’ve chosen your words wisely, over time, you will see an increase in the amount of site traffic you get from relevant visitors, i.e. those looking to book a holiday cottage. It’s a long, laborious process, but we hope you’ll soon be enjoying the extra benefit of more click-throughs to your website in due course.

 

Bring on the Spring!

Well, that is it for this lengthy Newsletter. Congratulations if you made it this far! We are always open to suggestions for making the content of our monthly Newsletters even more relevant. Do let us know if there’s anything we should be covering more frequently, like how to get the best use from parts of the My Favourites site or more marketing tips. We love to listen!