How To Know If Your Prospect Opened Your Email?
A pretty obvious yet very important question I hear all the time is: “How Do I Know If My Email Reached My Prospect?”
This is a big issue for all of us, property owners and managers who often wonder whether our reply to an enquiry ever made it through the spam filters and into our prospect’s inbox.
I heard more or less the same question at the last HomeAway UK Owner Summit in London and none of the staff on stage seemed to be giving a satisfactory answer. Because there is none…or better, experts and non experts don’t really know how to bypass this problem.
We developed a pretty simple, yet really powerful workaround, which enabled us to check what happens to our emails 98% of the times and therefore allows all our next moves, which are the core of our winning formula for getting an enquiry to conversion rate of 60-70% when the industry average is roughly 10-15%!
Want to know what we do?
Option 1 – Adopt Our System
If you attended the last Owner Summit, heard us speaking about the importance of reviews and downloaded our presentation (you can download your free copy + audio recording here), you may remember how we use email communication in a simple, yet tricky way. No rocket science, just pure common sense and attention to every opportunity we have to spot our prospect’s action in order to play the next move in our killer conversion sequence.
There is a specific technique we use, which makes part of our “Fully Booked Formula” online video tutorials, where we go in depth and explain step by step what you can do with your own email account, and it works with virtually ANY email account! Simply, the folks at major companies such as the industry leaders we all know either have never thought about such simple workaround or think it isn’t worth mentioning for it would make many of the efforts they do to make you use their own internal communication platforms look foolish.
The so called ‘mediated’ communication system they rolled out – which is absolutely fine, no question about it – shows a few limitations while correctly claiming to be extremely safe with regards to the owner’s identity and personal details protection. You can do only as much as they allow you to do with your email messages and you have low control over what you can insert in your emails that can significantly increase your chances to convert an enquiry into a solid booking, while truly make you stand out from the rest of the crowd and create a staggering first impression. Besides, many property owners criticized how such system breaks in their own privacy and most owners are not that eager to let ‘big fishes’ know what they are doing, what they’re writing and which tricks they use to win sales…
We agree with such criticism, in fact we don’t use their system in favor of our own, home based, 100% privacy protected solution, which keeps us in total control of all our know-how and best kept secrets!
Option 2 – Start With Signals
If you are using Chrome to browse the internet (something we highly recommend), there is a free piece of super simple software called “Signals“, recently released by Hubspot, which may be just right for your initial endeavors. It’s essentially a plugin that integrates with your Chrome browser and tells you when your recipient opened up your email! This can be pretty useful:
A) Because it answers with reasonable reliability whether your mail ended up in your recipient’s spam folder or was not read for whatever reason (maybe your prospect simply deleted it right away).
B) Because you can trigger your next move, based on the marketing strategy or the communication technique you adopt with your prospective guests (e.g.: sending out an immediate follow up message to grab their attention while they are still ‘warm leads’ or send out what we call “anti-spam follow up message” to make sure your first email went through – and pretty often this simple trick recovers all the messages actually ended in the spam folder and gets our prospects attention, that is increases our chances we get our prospect back and win the sale)
Recap
If you ever wondered why you don’t get a reply after you sent out your offer, now you have a simple tool that can give you a first answer, although not 100% reliable and limited to just Chrome and ‘almost’ all email accounts (it doesn’t work on Mail for Mac or Outlook for Mac).
If you want to take your communication strategy to the next level and make sure you exploit every chance you have to turn your enquiries into solid bookings, you may want to join our “Fully booked Formula” video tutorials and discover a much better “secret strategy” at your fingertips which can give you a lot more details on what truly happened to your response once you sent it out, while protecting your freedom, your privacy and your control over all your best know-how.
Not only we all need to know if our prospects opened up our email; we also need to know what to do next to make sure we turn them into paying customers while they are still warm leads…and that’s the core of Module 1 of the “Fully Booked Formula”.
Which road would you take next? Let us know below.
