February 2013 Newsletter
The site for ‘Savvy Owners’ – an enlightening tale
In a recent conversation with an owner phoning to renew his subscription last week, he described My Favourite Holiday Cottages as ‘The site for savvy owners’.
Naturally, we invited him to explain his reasoning. He thinks we are one of the few sites in town that prioritizes click-throughs or referrals to his website over enquiries, saving him time and money. His view is that the more people that visit his site, the more genuine/high-quality enquiries he is likely to get (far more than coming from an advert).
Then (he said), enquiries from his site convert to bookings more often than those from an advert. Aside from the fact that a website offers a more trustworthy source with more information, he feels it is also because enquiries from an advert are from people sending out the same message to lots of properties at the same time. He’s fed up with spending hours replying to duplicated enquiries, only for 95% of them to come to nothing. Meanwhile, his ratio for converting an enquiry from his own site is at an all-time high, thanks to the quality of traffic from My Favourites.
Finally, the other advantage of click-throughs means that, because his site allows online bookings, more and more people were booking his cottage online (cutting out the laborious enquiry response processes), so much so that he was able to take a week’s holiday in January and still take more bookings than he had during January 2012.
He felt that many still think that the merit of a successful site can only be measured in terms of enquiries. As such, many directory sites are geared towards encouraging bookers to send out multiple messages to lots of owners to make them feel the sites are doing a good job. Savvy owners, such as himself, reckon it’s all about choosing sites that will deliver quality traffic to their own site to be converted to bookings as quickly and in as little time as possible.
Your Members Area Made Easy
We are making it easier for you to upload or amend a property and renew it. We’ve also made improvements to the renewals section to make that process easier, too. We hope that we have made the process much simpler to manage, but do log in and e-mail your feedback. Remember, valuable suggestions we implement get rewarded with a free month’s listing on our Featured or County Favourites pages.
We are also looking at other improvements to the appearance and functions within the members’ area. If you have any suggestions as to what we should add, remove, or make easier to understand, please share them with us.
Fancy a VAT Rate Cut?
Are you fed up with the cost of VAT? For most owners with turnovers that fall below the VAT threshold, adding an unrecoverable 20% VAT to expenditure on your property significantly impacts its profitability and rental prices. Yet while we pay such high rates, other EU countries charge much less, Germany and France for example pay only 7% Tourism VAT while Italy come closest at just 9%. This puts a serious brake on the drive to attract more EU visitors to the UK and allows UK cottages to be completed with the allure of overseas villas.
Support the campaign to persuade the government to cut VAT on tourism. According to independent research, cutting VAT on tourism to 5% will create up to 80,000 jobs and deliver an additional £2.6 billion to the Treasury over the next 10 years. A handy website full of information that allows you to declare your support for a 15% cut in VAT for tourism businesses . Visit Cut Tourism VAT and do your bit to persuade the Treasury to do their bit for tourism and the economy.
Using Stats For Better Results
We publish two key stats sets to show you how well your listing performs. The first tells you how often a potential booker has viewed your main page. The second tells you how many times someone has clicked through to your own website. The ratio between the two figures will tell you something about the effectiveness of the content of your listing. If more than 35% of those who viewed your page hit one of your website’s buttons, that’s about average. Beyond 55%, you can be sure you’ve got a very good informative page.
There’s nothing worse than seeing lots of page views and few click-throughs. We can help! If you think your stats put you in the below-average category, then why not give us a call at 01598 710631? We’ll hapilly provide you with a free verbal assessment of your listing and suggest options for enhancing its appeal to bookers. We can’t promise overnight transformation in your stats, but we have noticed that there are certain things that, if done well, do deliver results.
Faster Download Speeds
One of the ways search engines rank a site is by the time it takes to open a page. With sites like ours carrying many megabyte-hungry images, this always represents a challenge. It’s why directories try to restrict the number of images they allow you to upload. We say images rule! The more, the better! So, all through the dark days of January, we were rebuilding bits of the site to ensure pages now open so much faster than before. We look forward to these changes being appreciated by search engines and reflected in the form of higher rankings in due course.
TTFN
TTFN?!!! (Showing our age a bit here). Next month, the primroses will be out in the hedgerows, and we’ll be bringing more news of more site improvements and marketing tips.
Book Well!
Rick Bond