International Vacation Home Ownership Company Adds $3 Million In Sales

In the international vacation home ownership industry, prospective clients must pass through several steps before transitioning to becoming a vacation homeowner. And each step presents a potential time for the prospective owner to slip through the cracks.

The process required from initial contact to sale requires both multiple contacts interspersed by long waiting times. First, the prospective customer must visit the vacation home ownership site online and book a stay. Typically, these stays come at discounted promotional rates to entice prospective owners to visit properties. The potential customers must then attend the tour and finalize the sale to become vacation homeowners. Several obstacles can prevent this process from completing. Prospective owners may cancel promotional bookings, fail to sign up for a tour, forget to attend their tour, or choose to not make a purchase. All of these small and easy to forget details can jeopardize the final sale.

Despite the difficulties presented by this extended sales funnel, the international vacation home industry represents a growing sector, with more than $7.9 billion in sales in the United States during 2014. Even with the risks created from the loss that occurs when prospective owners fail to schedule or attend tours, sellers can still thrive in this sector. To remain competitive in this industry, vacation home sellers must find ways to stay connected better with prospective owners to ensure they pass through the entire process.

When this international vacation home ownership company began to integrate automated remarketing techniques into their sales process the results spoke for themselves.  These sellers can gain an edge in keeping connected to potential vacation home buyers. Improved connections with prospective owners increase the chances that they will convert into becoming buyers. Take a look and see how automated remarketing can have real impacts on profits for sellers in the international vacation home ownership industry.

Case Study of SMS Remarketing For Vacation Home Ownership Company

Vacation Home Ownership Problem:

A major international vacation ownership company faced a problem with losing track of potential owners. The business specialized in selling partial ownership of vacation homes to clients. However, the company needed to connect with those who scheduled discounted stays at the property but had not yet booked tours.

The business’s model focused on spending a significant proportion of its budget on providing promotional rates to prospective visitors to the site. Unless the company could recover these costs through the conversion of prospective owners to sales, they would lose profitability. The biggest concern for the company was not being able to recover the money they invested in discounted promotional rates. The business needed a way to ensure that visitors to the four Hawaii sites would schedule and attend tours after signing up for promotional visits.

The Proposed Solution: 

Capture®, powered by MOVology LLC, uses a patented automated remarketing technology that gathers information from abandoned. This information allows companies to connect with those prospective clients to convert them into sales. Taking this one step further this technology coupled with SMS the vacation home ownership company can reconnect with potential customers to remind them of tours.

 The Capture® technology automatically will capture the potential owner’s information and send an SMS reminder if they abandoned a tour signup form. Additionally, by generating contacts from forms, this system allows businesses to contact non-owners once they arrive at the property. The reminder could request that they sign up for a tour. Later messages focus on ensuring the potential owners attend the tours they scheduled.

For applications such as reaching out to potential owners on a vacation property site, using SMS offered a better means of contact than email because many people would not read emails as frequently while on vacation. The open rate for SMS is 98%, even for those staying at a vacation property.

Two-Step Solution from Capture® for Automated Remarketing 

• First, the non-owners who booked stays at the property received an email reminder to book a tour before they arrived on site. This reminder message went out to 11,372 potential buyers. In the email, recipients could choose to sign up for a tour through the email. Alternatively, they could submit a phone number to receive SMS reminders to sign up when they arrived at the vacation property.
• Not everyone signed up for a tour through email. Capture® technology gathered the phone numbers of those who did not complete tour forms. These phone numbers the company used to send reminder SMS messages. By using the information recovered from abandoned forms, the company could reach out to potential buyers that it would have otherwise lost contact with.

The company used a tracking system that integrated these new contact numbers into it. Whenever anyone did not attend a scheduled tour or abandoned a tour in the middle of it, the system could send a reminder SMS to them, giving the potential buyer a second chance. 

Trial Results: 

Among those whom the company contacted at its four Hawaiian properties – 11,372 non-owners – to remind them to sign up for a tour or request SMS messages, 57.26% opted for the latter. The follow-up SMS reminders prompted 794 to sign up for and attend tours. Of those 794 potential buyers, 765 converted to becoming fractional owners in the property. By reaching out to these other clients, the company gained an additional $3,000,000 in sales.

The patented technology from Capture® to gather information from abandoned forms offers an invaluable tool for businesses looking to gain an edge. In sectors that rely on continued communication with potential customers, by using automated remarketing techniques, businesses can convert potential clients into buyers.

Automated remarketing facilitates connecting with customers with a variety of messages, on various platforms and consistently to drive business and communication. The added outreach makes any marketing efforts more effective without extra work. As the international vacation ownership company learned, sales and profits can dramatically increase with the addition of one more device in the marketing tool chest.

For more information on Capture® or its automated remarketing methods, call (613) 654-9966.