How to connect Stayfi and Mailchimp to increase Direct Bookings

Welcome to Boostly Podcast Episode 343. This is a recap of my Facebook live where I talked about how to connect Stayfi and Mailchimp to increase Direct Bookings.

Here's the audio for this episode:

Here's the video for this episode:

Timestamp

00:00 Start
01:40 Stay-fi Results
04:00 Marketing Consent

Whilst you’re here

Follow Boostly on the following channels to get more tips, tactics and knowledge on how you can increase your direct bookings

Visual – YouTube 

Audio – Boostly Podcast

Instagram 

Facebook 

Linkedin

Transcript from the Episode

Welcome to a very special edition of the Boostly podcast and this is a little tuneup series. As you will have seen if you watched a previous episode, I am helping Pad suites, which is also known as Mr. Shawn rock eg from Airbnb automated, we've got the amazing Hayley and Kristin helping her get more direct bookings. And we had a coaching call, we went for a few things and full context, they are 95% reliant on Airbnb bookings a little bit of VRBO, a little bit of direct, but we haven't got the systems and the structures set up in place. And this is what they want to do more they want to get more direct bookings, there's no website as of yet. Sync B&B as their PMS. And we looked at a few things. And I said, Listen, the main thing, what we need to start doing is we need to start building your database, you've got no way of building a list. And so I put him in touch with the amazing offer at stay fi. And what they've done, they've got over 100 properties. And what they're doing is they're trying to stay fi with 14 of their units in Dallas. So they're spread around the state. So we're in three different states, over 100 properties and growing. And so we're going to test out stay fi with 14 of those properties. And we've just been able to get back access to the dashboard. And I wanted to walk you through to show you how to properly set up your stay fi account on how you can grow your email list.

Stay-fi Results

Stay fi is basically when you go into Starbucks, and you want to use their Wi Fi, a splash page comes up. And you have to give them your email address to use the Wi Fi just like when you go into Marriott or any of those big chains. And this technology isn't new. It's been around for a long time now. But it's never been very good. I used to mess around ever since 2012. The technology wasn't there and has definitely been nothing geared up for the hospitality industry. And Arthur and his team at stay fi have come in it's a fantastic product it works. Then primarily based out of America and Canada.

So this is your stay fi dashboard. Okay, this is what we're currently in right now. As you can see the Getting Started is here we're going to ignore all of that I'm going to let Kristen and her amazing team crack on with that what we're going to focus on is the splash page. Now this will be what your guest sees. So when they walk into the property and they want to connect to the Wi Fi like everybody does. This is the message that they will see Welcome to pod suites in Dallas. Please enter your name and email below to enjoy complimentary Wi Fi. Okay, really super simple. You can choose the image you can choose the logo, etc.

Marketing Consent

Now this is the most important bit, you come down to where it says marketing consent checkbox, or what you need to do when you want to have that require marketing consent to connect to Wi Fi and pre check. You can mess around with that text if you want but it's totally up to you. So it looks like that it's pretext and they have a ticket to basically have marketing content, which is fine, which is what we'll link up to MailChimp which will be the old how to get around all of the GDPR and this and all that lovely stuff gets thrown at us.

Okay, so this is what it looks like. This is what it will look like for the guests when they arrive not just for the lead booker but everybody in their party. Now, the redirect URL now at the moment they had it go into their Facebook page, but as you can see from the Facebook page, it is bad. It's one of the things that we're going to help them with but in the interim, I saw that they had a really cool video on their Facebook page. So what I want to do is I want to link it to their

Now I've messaged the team and I said that instead of this, what I would love to see is a link to a YouTube video of Haley, Kristin, Shawn and a team just all introducing themselves having a go really well really nicely. And again, I encourage you to do that as well. But this is what we've got. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna update that that's saved. And the cool thing is, is you can, you can add many different types of splash pages, you can test you can, you can change, it is totally up to you. So, however you want to do it really cool.

Now, the main thing, what you got to do now is you got to integrate it with your email marketing provider of choice. So you've got Active Campaign, I personally use in Boostly, you've got MailChimp that I also use and I have, I've got videos and showing everybody how to use MailChimp properly, but you've got everything doesn't matter who you may be. Oh, it's lovely. It's all there. Alright, so let's connect it to MailChimp.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on that, and we're going to connect it up. Okay, so as you can see, we have connected it up, all we needed to do was to get an API key that you can obviously get from your MailChimp and you just have to do a little bit more of connection. Simple enough, took about two-three minutes to do and to understand, but it's the same for whatever you would use. So now what we have is we have connected up our MailChimp to our stay fi, what we've now done is we've created our splash page.

And what's next is going to happen is stay fi is going to activate the hopes that are each of the properties of 14 in total. And once that's happening, we will check back at the moment, there's only one person subscribed to the email list. And that's me. And then when we check back on this, we will have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people connected up to Stay fi.

So stay fi is a fantastic way of generating emails, I'm hopefully going to have an interview with the founder of stay fi over the course of the coming weeks or months to explain more about this. But if you want the easiest, quickest, fastest way to not only get the emails from your Booker, but the emails from all of the guests in your property stay fi is a fantastic tool. It's very cost effective. Very, very, very cheap for what you're getting. And as you will know by now with me email is one of the best return of investments you can do when it comes to marketing and I'm excited to show you the results of what we get with pad suites stay fi, MailChimp.

Our Podcast Sponsors

Blog - Hostfully

Before you leave

Please go and rate, review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify Google Play or Anchor or visit Boostly Hospitality Podcast for the full list of episodes!

If you have enjoyed this post and want to feed my caffeine addiction you can “Buy me a coffee” ☕️ 

 

Share this post