Make It Easy On Yourself – Create Email Templates
Sending emails to guests can be a time-consuming task… especially if it’s not done correctly.
And the more properties you have, the bigger the problem gets.
It’s a waste of your energy trying to come up with the right wording for a message every single time.
And chances are you’ll realize later that you forgot to include something in the message or later figure out a better way of saying something.
Instead, lighten the burden on yourself and start using email templates.
Using email templates makes it A LOT easier to respond to guests.
There’s no worse feeling than standing in the middle of a supermarket while grocery shopping, trying to compose a thank you message for a booking, and for the life of you – you can’t remember what your last thank you message said (ask us how we know that lol)
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. If you decide to purchase any of these products, we earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. We recommend these products only because we have experience with them and use them for our own business. As Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases.
What’s The Point Of Templates
When we’ve mentioned to other VR owners that we use email templates, we’ve had mixed reactions.
We were surprised to hear that some owners weren’t very keen on the idea of templates.
Some of the surprising comments to us were, “I like composing the messages myself”, “it’s easy for me to write up the message”, and “I want to make sure I add that personal touch”.
We like using message templates because:
- It’s Fast
- It’s Easy
- It’s Consistent
- Your Best Message Wording Is Always Used
It’s Faster
That speed has a double benefit.
First, it takes up less of your time. A message is sent out in a few seconds compared to at best at least a few minutes.
Second, responding quickly to inquiries boosts your performance on the OTAs and helps you get the booking.
They’re Easier
Composing a message from scratch can be difficult, especially if your on your phone and in the middle of something.
With a template, you select the template, customize it a little if needed and shoot it off. You don’t have to put much thought into it.
It typically takes less than a minute to respond to most messages using a template.
Email Templates Are Consistent
Once you do this for a bit it’s good to know the patterns. With Templates, along with a good email sequence, you’ll know what information was sent when.
Otherwise, you’ll always be looking at your previous correspondences to see if you remembered in the past to send them their house guide, or the house address, or whatever bit of information you were supposed to have sent them.
The Best Version Of Your Message Is Always Used
Not sure if this happens to you, but with us, we’re not always very eloquent. We have our moments of wordsmith genius… and other times not so much.
Prior to using templates, our messages were hit and miss.
We would kind of sort of remember a past guest that we responded to with a good response and start searching for that person in our messages and hopefully we’d find it then copy the text from there.
If we didn’t find the old message, we’d have to start creating a new message from scratch.
With templates whenever we are in wordsmith genius mode and something good comes out of us, we update the template.
And from that point forward, the best version we came up with to say something is always being used.
Remember – Templates Don’t Have To Be Impersonal
In fact they shouldn’t be.
Using a template doesn’t mean you have to send an informal, robotic message to every person that books… the template is just a starting point or baseline.
What we do, is put the best version of the message with everything we want to communicate in the message template… that way we don’t forget anything.
If the guest asks a question, no problem!
We start with the template and customize the response to include the answer to their question and add a little personal touch.
Email templates are fast and easy. 🙂
Where To Create Email Templates
Currently, the two biggest OTAs, HomeAway/VRBO and Airbnb both give you the ability to use email templates.
We personally prefer HomeAway’s interface for the templates but they both do the job well.
It’s probably also a good idea to keep your templates outside of an OTA, even if it’s just a document or email in your drafts folder.
That way you don’t have to start from zero when the unexpected happens.
Thanks For Reading
Well, there you have it.
If you’d like to starting setting up your templates, check out the next posts on how to create your Airbnb email templates and how to create VRBO email templates.
Did this article convince you that email templates are the way to go?
Why not give it a try?
Let me know in the comments!
Enjoy this post? Pin it for later!
