Your best customers are already in a list. Send them something.
Outreach → Segments filters your customer base by lifetime value, booking count, last booking date or membership. Outreach → Campaigns sends that group an email. Two screens, and your repeat business stops depending on memory.
This week: Outreach.
Where to find it
On the left-hand side, open Outreach. Two things live under it: Segments and Campaigns. You build the audience in the first one and email it from the second.
Build a segment
A segment is a saved filter over your customer base. Five templates sit at the top of the form to get you started: VIP customers, Win-back (lapsed), Recent customers, Repeat customers and Email subscribers. Or build your own. The obvious first one is a high value segment where lifetime value is greater than or equal to some number. Pick a figure that means something for your fleet. For a kayak outfit that might be $500. For a boat charter it might be $5,000.
The other filters are where it gets useful:
- Number of bookings: your regulars, or your one-and-done guests
- Last booking date: everyone who hasn't been back since last season
- Membership: members, non-members, or a specific plan
- Status: active, lapsed, and so on
The contact count in the top right updates as you add rules, so you can see how many people a filter catches before you save it. Segments are live. As guests book and cross a threshold, they join. You don't maintain the list, the data does.
Send a campaign
Under Campaigns, create a new one and pick the segment you just built. Give it a name, write a subject line, and write the message. The body is HTML, so it can carry your logo, a photo of the water, and a button to your booking page, not just plain text.
That's the whole loop. Segment picks who. Campaign says what.
Three campaigns worth sending this fall
- High value, thank you: a short note and an early look at next season's dates. No discount needed. These people already like you.
- Last booking over a year ago: "We've missed you", with one clear reason to come back. A new boat, a new route, a new time slot.
- Two or more bookings, not a member: the ones most likely to say yes to a membership. Tell them what it would have saved them.
One thing to know
A campaign goes to everyone in the segment at that moment. Open the segment first and look at the count and the names before you send. A filter that reads right can still match more people than you meant.
Repeat business isn't luck. It's a list and a reason to write.
See you next week.
Transcript
Good afternoon. This week I want to highlight Outreach.
Under Outreach and then Segments, what you can do is build, for example, a high value segment. You can pick lifetime value is equal to or greater than, I don't know, let's say five thousand dollars. I don't believe this will put anyone in the segment for me, because this is a test account, but on your account this would create a high value group.
Then you can go and actually do some campaigns. In Campaigns, pick new campaign, and you can now pick that high value segment. From here you can name it, you can have subject lines, and then you can have a message, which is HTML. So this is a great way to target people who you may want to return.
Some of the other things you can filter on as well: number of bookings, last booking date, whether they have memberships, statuses, all that fun stuff.
This will let you start to build out some outreach directly inside RentalTide, which should hopefully encourage people to come back to your location.