The question about the “right amount of questions” to ask of potential guests for your vacation home rental signing up to your opt-in form is a tough one to answer.  The answer: “it depends.”  It depends on what you really need for your business. Here are a couple of guidelines: QuantityIf your business relies on sheer quantity and “just ok” quality of email addresses then you might only ask for email address and maybe first name if you want to ever personalize your email marketing campaigns. QualityIf you need your email addresses to be quality and be “real” verified email address, than a double opt-in verification or a CAPTCHA can be used.  Postal Address - Some businesses need a full address because they’ll be sending postal mail to them. If you do need this make sure to make it required so your visitor can’t leave the form without filling it out. What’s also great about getting a postal address is if your recipients email bounces you can send them a direct mail piece asking them to call you and update it.If you’re not going to be sending your recipients anything by mail but want to know their location, you might want to just ask for postal code. Phone Number – Phone numbers can be especially important if you need to call your customers at any given point to confirm something. And just like gathering postal information, you can call them if their email bounces to get an update. Expect to get a percentage of people giving bogus information as well, but many won’t especially if you give them the reason why you’re asking for it. Vacation Interest – Property managers who want to market to their recipients by seasons or services they have an interest in.  If you do this, tell visitors why certain fields are required and ask what  they’d like to receive information about. Age – Asking for age is a bit tricky. One way around this is by having a birthday club where you give something to your registrant as a gift. It can be in the form of a discount or something free.  Danger Zone Data – Credit Card information, household income & gender can all be a bit personal and turn off your registrant especially if they’re required. Expect a lot of bogus information here if you’re asking for it, there are just too many scams going on online and people are generally afraid. 

The better your information, the better you can market your vacation home rentals.  Be careful to balance the desire for detail with the potential abandonment rate of asking for too much.

Lets us know what has worked and what has not worked for you?  Do you have any online Jedi mind tricks the rest of us could use?

Ralf

LiveRez

Tags: online vacation booking, vacation home rental, vacation property management, vacation rental, vacation rental software

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Industry Trends, Online Marketing, Vacation Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.