No Kidnapping Please!
You know what it’s like, don’t you? You’re almost full, nearly every bed taken, if you could just let that last vacant room, you’d be in Easy Street. Well….perhaps not quite but when you do let your last room on the door assuming you have passing traffic, you get a sense of achievement and it does make a significant improvement to the ‘bottom line’ as nearly all your overheads will have been met from the letting of the other rooms.
But how do you entice in that last room? They (the customer) stands outside dithering, procrastinating and debating and you know if you go out to them they will either walk away or offer some feeble excuse as to why they no longer wish to stay. So how do you lure them in?
We publish all our relevant tariffs outside our front door and list all our accreditations as well of course but sometimes people who you know would benefit from your service refuse to take the plunge and open the door or ring the bell. So accepting that passing clients want something more to get them to buy our service we set about finding out what it was and how we could provide it.
So what is it that the ‘undecided’ need to make them cross the threshold? Well we asked and we probed, gently of course, and finally came to the conclusion that they needed was ‘assurance’.
Assurance that the rooms we at least habitable, assurance that the breakfast was edible, assurance that we were not kidnappers seeking to hold them for a ransom (!), assurance that they would be safe and assurance that they would receive value for money. So no problem there then!
Setting out to provide it we sought to find something that we were already doing that we could adapt to get these ‘hesitants’ across our threshold.
We have already mentioned that we offer customer comment cards for clients to fill in when they leave. We use these cards to feed back to the client via our database and mail outs their original comments. So if they enthused about the breakfast for example and left a comment like “ the breakfast was superb, NO watery bacon and the sausages were scrumptious” (actual comment) we would put that into a database field and feed (excuse the pun) back to that client in a letter. Something like:
We know you enjoyed last stay with us because you mentioned “the breakfast was superb, NO watery bacon and the sausages were scrumptious” and we though we ought to tell you that things continue to get better on that front!
A technique like this can be a very powerful marketing tool. Why? Because it reminds the client of their original comment, which in turn triggers good memories of their experiences when they stayed with you.
But I digress, how could we put the clients comments to use in bringing in that last room? Simply by posting them up on the front door, that’s how!
So now we produce, see the picture, a customised comment card and after entering the comment on to the database we pin up some, tastefully of course, on to a cork board on the front door.
Now when passing clients dither on the doorstep they get chance to read how much at least 16 other guests enjoyed their stay with us and feel a lot more comfortable ringing the bell.
Why no try it? Total expenditure for the project £2.59 (£1.99 for the cork board, 20p or a cup hook to hang it on, 25p for some map pins to pin up the cards, and 15p for the printing and paper). If you find a more cost effective way of filling the last room, other than kidnapping, please let me know!
Chris Parkin