Responds time after an quotation

How to communicate with your potential renters - how to turn site visitors into enquiries, and enquiries into bookings.
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Cas & Irene
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Post by Cas & Irene »

Sorry Nemo, I forgot to mention: I had an quick look into PIMS, but this is a ¨similar¨ program as FreeToBook (which we are using), handling and organize the bookings.
I mean something for handling and organize the enquiries.

But thanks for the tip!
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Nemo
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Post by Nemo »

Not sure what the difference is? PIMS does an enquiry analysis as to where each enquiry comes from (assuming you record this information), what proportion go on to book etc.

If the data is not available within the standard PIMS offerings, then you simply export everything out of PIMS to an excel spreadsheet. So I can for example see the guest names, address, whether a repeat guest, date of booking, number of nights, how many people and all costs involved.

You could then personalise and add colours etc to the excel spreadsheet as you do already, but probably much of the work has already been done!

However I suspect that you have personalised yours so much that you have no need for PIMS, but I didn't want others to think that it can't do all that most of us need and more.
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Mouse
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Post by Mouse »

This thread is very timely for me as I am getting frustrated by people not replying to my email...I know, I know. But it means I don't know if it has been received and I have lost a few over time to the junk box.
I do make replies personable....in nearly all cases I even ask an open ended question, so prompting them to engage. So I agree with Roxy; manners seems to be something that are disappearing.

If it is a hotmail account I always text, via skype, if I have a mobile number. But I am seriously thinking of added a p.s. at the bottom of every reply to ask them to please confirm they have received my reply due to emails sometimes being treated as spam. Is that acceptable?

I do follow up on the more interested ones or if it is for a hard to sell week. I ask them to confirm receipt and say that if I don't receive a reply in the next day or two I will text them. That usually helps.

I follow up after about 4 days, I agree with Nemo that sometimes discussions with friends and family take time, so anything less than that would seem pushy.

An acquaintance of mine has a real hard sell. He replies in full and then says something like; 'Right, let's get you booked in then, unless I can help with any additional information etc etc.
It's a call to action.

Mouse
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Marks
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Post by Marks »

I use Outlook and had a 30 day trial using www.zendio.com which tracks when emails are opened. It does not ask for a read receipt.

I used this for all emails sent, not just replies to enquiries so every email that I sent for business and personal use. 98% of 530 emails were opened and 73% within 3 hours of sending. Because of that I decided to not take out the monthly subscription, a 2% failure rate did not warrant it.
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Joanna
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Post by Joanna »

Thanks for that info Marks - I was wondering about some sort of email tracking.

If it's a hotmail or aol address or something I'm not familiar with and an enquiry I want (not for too many people, dogs, etc.) then I send a second plain text email a day later just asking them to let me know if my first email arrived.

I mention that we've had enquirers miss out on dates that they wanted because our reply was stuck in their spam filter so hopefully it sounds like we're being helpful rather than pushy.
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Robin S
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Post by Robin S »

Morning all. Another neat email tool you might want to consider to check email open rates is Yesware (http://www.yesware.com/). Free to use if you send less than 100 emails a month.

It's only compatible with Gmail. It works in a similar way to the other tool mentioned a few posts back. In addition it add the ability to create templates for responses.

One bit of advice when tracking email opens. Some email programs like Exchange and some email clients on mobile phones will trigger the "open" metric even when a receiver skims a mail and doesn't engage / open fully. So another thing Yesware does is allow you to track openings of attachments. So you could add a quote as an attachment (pdf?) and see when a receiver opened the quote which is a better sign of how engaged they are...
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Cas & Irene
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Post by Cas & Irene »

Essar wrote:
I will always send an sms text message confirming that I have responded in an email
Thanks, a very good tip!
Only sometimes not so easy to see if the provided number is a land line or a mobile.

Any idea what happends if you send a text message to a land line?
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Post by Joanna »

I think it depends on who the land line provider is. I've done it by mistake a couple of times and the text has been read out by an automated voice (causes some odd effects with some text abbreviations!).

I seem to remember a friend saying that they got an automated message to call and hear the text, which they didn't because it sounded like a scam (unless of course that was a scam).

I think there are web sites where you can look up numbers and identify if they're landline area codes or mobiles. Not sure if this works across all countries though.

IIRC UK mobile numbers are all consistent now and all start with 07.
Jo

Joint owner of Baker's Cottage in Chester & Chandler's Cottage in Sidmouth
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