Archives : 2010 : February

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February 19th, 2010

Twitter.com/NavisNow

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Email Response Study

February 10th, 2010

NAVIS recently held our bi-annual Leaders Conference in Orlando where we discussed the technologies and Best Practices that our vacation rental and resort clients can use to drive new revenue. Prior to the Conference, I conducted an interesting “secret shopper” study to see who of our attendees would respond to my email asking for more information about an upcoming vacation.

Drew, our network wizard at NAVIS, setup a covert email account for me so that the recipients wouldn’t know I was from NAVIS. My email simply inquired about dates and asked about pricing options. I recorded the exact time the emails went out and the time that responses were received. 34 companies, some of the biggest vacation rental and resorts in the country, were on our list.

This graph shows the time it took for the responses to come in. Amazingly, the first response came 18 minutes after sending.

NAVIS Email Response Graph

As you can see from the graph, nearly 40% of the recipients didn’t respond at all. And if you didn’t notice, this adds up to just 28 companies. The other 6 either didn’t provide an email option on their website, or they required more information on their contact form than I was willing to provide.

The bottom line is that responding to emails in a timely manner can affect your bottom line. And if you don’t respond at all…well, you’re just leaving money on the table.

NAVIS Releases Major Narrowcast Enhancements

February 8th, 2010

Attention NAVIS vacation rental management and resort hotel clients…

Numerous new features and enhancements have been added to our flagship product NAVIS Narrowcast, effective at 8:30AM Pacific time today. From a totally redesigned and more intuitive navigation menu, to automatic template-based emails, this newest releaseĀ brings online more new features than we have released for quite some time.

You can now assign specific agents to follow up on leads – directly within the ELM lead screen. You can even select the time and date to remind the assigned agent.

Several new reports have also been added including the Scoreboard Report, which provides conversion metrics, lead revenue, and compliance information about your reservation agents. Posting this information on a daily basis will help to drive new revenue.

An email was sent to all NAVIS clients detailing the many new features. If you didn’t receive it, you can find the document HERE. Of course, your NAVIS Client Advocate is always available for questions.

Happy Bookings!