Mar 24 2010
Bed and Breakfast Marketing – Guest Retention = More Profit!
Any bed and breakfast marketing should have two targets – 1. finding new guests and 2. getting previous guests to rebook.
It sounds kind of obvious but it’s clearly a lot more profitable to service an existing, satisfied client than it is to attract new ones.
So apart from making sure everything about their stay is as close to perfect as it can be, what else can you do?
You will, of course, gather details from your guests. Name and address, telephone number and now, where possible, email. You have to be careful here – people are very protective of their email address so you can’t make it something that is “required” but rather something that is voluntary. Along the lines of “please let us have your email address if you would like us to inform you of special money-saving offers”.
A lot of people might just be “passing trade” and you will never see them again – but many are potential re-bookings and if you don’t ask, you won’t get!
You must make sure you only ever email them with quality offers. Don’t send out any old junk just for the purposes of keeping in touch. If you know birthdays or anniversaries then send them an e-card maybe – but don’t use their email for idle gossip. Don’t add them to “friends” on social websites.
Treat that email address with the respect it deserves. They were kind enough to give you the opportunity to contact them at a later date – effectively they have given you the chance to sell to them in future. You can lose that right in an instant, or you can turn them into a very profitable long-term guest.
Your blog or website gives you an even greater bed and breakfast marketing opportunity – the chance to make offers to people who have never been to stay with you.
A well run blog or website will attract people from all over. It is a B & B promotions tool which is becoming increasingly important. You can use it to make offers directly to people who visit your site but it can go further than that.
How? By trying to gather their email addresses as well.
You can do it by asking people to send you their email address but people are less and less likely to do this. It also isn’t very efficient from a management point of view.
Far more efficient is to use a mailing list management company.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to cost you an arm and a leg. Even if you have more than 1,000 potential customers it will cost you less than $10 a month.
But let’s give you some detail of how this works.
You sign up with a mailing list management company. The people I use are called Your Mailing List Provider. Sign up is free. There are paid-for accounts but you won’t need one of those yet.
The mailing list company will give you some code to put on your blog or website that will allow you to collect people’s name and email addresses. It’s a small form, just like that one on the top right of this page where it says “Bed and Breakfast Marketing News”.
The management company handle pretty much everything for you. When you have an offer to send out you just log into your account, compose one email, then the software will send that email, personalized, to each person on your list!
With the company I use you can send up to 1,000 messages a month before you have to pay. If you have 500 people on your list you could send them each two emails a month – and still do it for nothing – now that’s efficient.
I probably wouldn’t recommend contacting people twice in a month – unless you have something really special going on – but you can see the advantages I’m sure. Instead of having to manage all this yourself you leave it to someone else. You can even add those emails you get from your guest.
There are plenty of options available at Your Mailing List Provider and although it’s not complicated I would recommend you have a good read through and send a few test emails before you set it all up. It will work equally well on a traditional bed and breakfast website as on a blog.
To add extra punch and encourage sign-ups to your bed and breakfast mailing list you might want to offer a small gift. It should be perceived as something of value. I offer an ebook because that’s appropriate to my business. You might want to offer a discount for first visit, or cheaper rate for children. It’s true you might make a little less profit but it’s still more money than if they didn’t come at all!
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