How To Set Up Your Website/Blog: Lesson: EMail Lists

This lesson is part of the series of posts on how vacation rentals owners can set up and use a website to promote their holiday rental.

Most aspects of creating a website or blog from scratch, with every detail of the technical setup, content creation, SEO, link building, and social media channels are covered!

Lesson # – Building an Email List
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Why are websites a good medium for shwoing your property? Because it’s a place you want to give enquirers much more information, a place where
they learn to like you, trust you, and find out you’re a real person, a place where you can engage them emotionally with words and pictures, and somehwere you can provide a call to ation.

However you only get to establish that kind of relationship over time. That’s why RSS readers are important, but few visitors will subscribe to it. Many of them will arrive at
your site via a rental listing site link, search engines or other websites and for these visitors you have not yet had the opportunity to establish that relationship.

There are two ways to do that – encourage them to subscribe to your RSS feed – and encourage them to join an email list.

What is an Email List?
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Basically it is just another publishing medium but there are some important differences. RSS is a live publishing medium, ideal if you have a blog (or blog as a part of your website). You publish
your post and it gets published immediately. Any reader who subscribes get a limited selection of your older material (perhaps the last 10 items in the feed). Email lists can be setup to deliver a preset
sequence of emails to any new subscriber.

Email lists are delivered via email (obviously) and, in itself, this has implications. Email has always been seen as a more personal form of communication than RSS.
Email lists have the ability to have an auto-responder attached to them which automatically sends out pre-written information on a schedule.

Why Use an Email List?
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This is a confusing question for many rental owners who blog. Surely we should be getting people to subscribe to our RSS feed and not to an email list, they ask? Well not quite. Firstly, vastly more people understand
email than understand RSS. Many of your readers may not really understand RSS.

Email provides a second way to establish a relationship with your reader and the more options the better.
Again, you’ll have some overlap – some people will subscribe to both which means that you have to pay attention to your email content and I’ll cover that in a moment.

The main reason to use an email list is that statistically, more people will sign up to an email list than to an RSS feed.

How to Setup an Email List
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You should consider using a proper email list system. You can just collect addresses yourself but caution is needed – there are laws around spam and if you keep emailing poeple without their permission you will get into trouble.
There are both free email list providers and paid email list providers, and the biggest difference between them is not so much the features as the deliverability. It depends on how big a list you have or intend to have. Because of the spam problems of today, if you use an inferior list provider you might find that a large propartion of your email never even gets seen because it ends up straight in your recipients’ spam-box. It can be disaster because if your email address gets labelled as a spammer you’ll be shut down at your ISP but perhaps also your payment processor, such as PayPal.

The best free mail manager is WPRespponder. I use it for a list that total over a thousand names and addresses. I did use Aweber, which costs $19.95 a month for their startup service, but you’ll find that although Aweber have an excellent number of tools you can use to simply create great looking emails or newsletters, if you have a big list, they can get expensive (as monthly costs are charged according to your list size). They’re probably ideal for a website regulalry selling a product or service to a large audience, but less so for vacation home owner’s lists.

If you want to be able to use Aweber (who are definately the best paid email list provider) to produce exceptional looking emails that can include video and graphics by all means do so.

Here is my affiliate link for Aweber

If you don’t want to pay for a paid list and want to experiment, then try WPResponder (if you are running a WordPress blog) or phplist, which is open source software:

http://www.phplist.com/

Check with your webhost – many of them support phplist which means that you don’t even need to install it yourself.

Whatever list provider you use, the setup will be similar. You’ll need to create a list, name it, provide your physical address – this is a requirement for anti-spam laws – and then you can create an
auto-responder sequence or send broadcast messages.

There’s an important caveat: If you switch your existing list from a free to a paid provider, that provider will (typically) insist they email your list with a new opt-in request. They will tell you it can be completed easily with few existing subscribers being lost, but it’s not true. You will lose a high percentage of your list in the switch. So decide now which course to take and stick to it.

The Content Of Your Email List
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The ideal situation is to provide enough good content, on an on-going basis, that keeps your subscribers engaged and involved with you, so you are ‘front of mind’ when they make a decision to book a vacation rental. That means sending them interesting information and, ocassionally, offers.

How To Create Your List
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You add an opt-in form to your website or blog. It’s simple to do, an whatever provider you use, they will have tools that generate the HTML code automaticaly for you.
You want to encourage a visitor to sign up by offering them something. That can be the opportunity to be the first to receive special offers. Or, updates about what’s going on in your local area. An electronic brochure. or combinations of these and more.
You’ll also be collecting emails from enquiries from the listing sites you’re using. You can email them with the opt-in form on the email, to legitimatley add them to your list, too (but you shouldn’t just add them without permission).

What To Write About?
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The hardest thing is keeping people on the list – and this is crucial. You can use any blog content to feed your list and have the list act as a blog digest. In that case you might publish content once a week or once a month with a summary of the latest posts, for example, if you blog that regularly.

You can certainly email them last minute deals for late cancellations or empty weeks, and you can also keep them informed (and engaged) in the area around you by writing about local events – wine season, wine tasting, festivals, Easter, Xmas, skiing season, and so on.

Try NOT to be too time-sensitive (whilst excepting offers will always be just that) as it puts unneccesary pressure on you to action things: Being timeless is a much better approach so that you can over
time build up a collection of content that can keep your readers subscribed for a long time.

Autoresponder v Broadcast
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A broadcast is an email sent to your list at a specific time and date – only those people subscribed to your list at that precise time will get the email. Those that subscribe a day later will never see it. It is a one-time only affair.
Broadcast emails are a great way of promoting something time sensitive to your list. Last minute offer, for example, or any discount or
special offer only to your list. Those people who join afterwards don’t see this particular promotion.

An autoresponder is different because you setup the sequence in advance. It’s a communication tool drip-feeding information in sequence.

The Ideal Mix
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I would recommend keeping the structure loose so that you can continue to add to it over time. Certainly offer exclusive special deals to your list. Definately keep subscribers engaged with good content about your property and the locality. Keep the content relevant and make sure that every email provides genuine value to the readers.

How Often To Send Email
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If you bombard your readers with too much email they will unsubscribe, however useful you think it may be. They just don’t have time to read much email from you.

There is no ideal, as it dpeends on what you can, and how often you can, write about. I do any special offers as often as I need to, and on top of that, information every 4 – 5 times yearly. I’ve found that keeps my list healthy (ie: the unsubscribe rate is barely measureable).

One final point: ALWAYS give your list an unsubscribe option. It’s the law in many countries.