Friday, July 13, 2012

Turning Vacation Rental Photos Into Banners


VacationRentals.com

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What if you could add a "call to action" to the photos of your vacation rental in your online listings?

One of my subscriber s (Matt) recently sent me a link to a really interesting experiment he did to test if adding a phone number to the photos of his vacation rental property increased the response rates that he received.

In summary, he found that there was a 300% improvement in his vacation rental bookings!

You can see how this makes sense: if you give a prospective renter such a "call to action", they are more likely to call you (rather than send a dozen emails to a dozen different vacation rental properties) and, once you get them on the phone, you have a MUCH better chance to converting their enquiry into a booking for your vacation rental property.

I suspect this works best in the US (or possibly the UK), where the renter and owner both are English speakers. (It may also work as well for French to French or German to German etc). In some cases, non-English speakers prefer email so they have the time to understand the communication. (Although I have noticed I get lot more calls from Italians than any other nationality, for some reason!).

Also, it is unlikely that the big Vacation Rentals sites, such as Homeaway or VRBO are likely to alllow owners to include text on their photos.

However, if you have a personal web site, then I think it is well worth considering Matt's advice to add a "call to action" to your vacation rental photos.

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