Customer Education: How Lodgify Educates its Customers Using LearnWorlds

According to J.C. Penney:

Learn how vacation rental software company Lodgify empowered its customers and generated twice as many quality leads per month in less than 6 months by using LearnWorlds to implement its customer education program.

Company Profile

Headquartered in the sunny city of Barcelona, Lodgify is an innovative all-in-one vacation rental software that simplifies vacation rental marketing.

With Lodgify’s software, rental owners and managers can create mobile-friendly websites, easily manage their reservations from one place, and synchronize property listings with their booking channels.

In September 2021, the Lodgify team resolved to harness the power of customer education with the dual aim of providing additional value to its customers and generating more leads.

In this pursuit, the company created the Lodgify Academy, a series of interactive courses aimed at helping anyone interested in the vacation rental business, as well as short-term rental owners and property managers, learn how to start, run, market and scale their businesses.

Image: Lodgify Academy home page. White labeling and customization options mean the Academy can seamlessly integrate with the rest of Lodgify’s website and ensure a unified branding experience.

The Challenge

“One of our core values here at Lodgify is to empower our customers,” says Alvar De la Viuda, Lodgify’s Instructional Designer and Academy creator.

“So the primary reason why we decided to create the Lodgify Academy, our customer education learning platform, was to help our customers and give them valuable content.”

“Apart from this, we were also looking for a way to create more engagement on our website and generate leads for the business.”

Image: Lodgify Academy’s first course. “How to Get Started with your Vacation Rental Business” is divided into 6 chapters, composed of short video courses, downloadable material, and short quizzes to track progress.

Before creating the courses that would make up the academy, Alvar conducted research to better understand the audience the program would cater to and assessed the project’s needs in terms of the software required.

“We found that for the vast majority of our customers here at Lodgify, their rental business is not their main source of income, which means they are pressed for time,” Alvar explains.

The team also discovered that many of their customers were fairly new to the vacation rental property industry and thus had little to no prior knowledge of it. However, as Alvar pointed out, searching for quality educational resources to educate oneself on any topic is an activity that requires a considerable amount of time, something their customers did not possess.

To counteract this, the Lodgify team decided that their academy’s courses should include bite-sized video lessons of 5 to 10 minutes each.

Aside from an easy-to-use platform and the ability to easily create videos, Alvar also wanted the e-learning platform he would ultimately use to build Lodgify’s academy, to integrate with the company’s main website and CRM.

“We needed to connect our new Academy with our HubSpot accounts to synchronize multiple data points – that was a must for us.”

“We also wanted a seamless transition between our main website and our learning platform,” he says.

The Solution

“We chose LearnWorlds for two main reasons: it’s very easy to use, and it offers a HubSpot integration,” Alvar says and adds:

“It also has all the features we had in mind when planning our new learning center: from an intuitive course editor to a built-in community that would enable us to interact with our students.”

“The Single-Sign-On (SSO) was also a big differentiating factor, but ultimately it was the combination of all the elements mentioned above,” he says.

Image: Lodgify Academy includes a community section. With it Lodgify enables learners to share their thoughts and news about the short-term rental industry, interact with other users and owners, and pose questions to others or directly to the company.

“In the end, we managed to maintain the Lodgify look and feel in our Academy thanks to all the customization options available on LearnWorlds – and we’re very happy with the final result!”

The Impact

The Lodgify Academy went online with its first course in December 2021. Since then the team has launched additional courses, but even in the first 6-months of the academy’s operation the team was witnessing exciting results, including a 6% increase in monthly leads and a 3% increase in conversion rates.

“Our Academy has been quite a success getting new leads but, more importantly, in terms of conversion. In just a few months, it has become our best-performing resource – with the highest conversion rate from leads to customers!”, Alvar says happily.

“Now we are in the process of creating our next course which is all about how to use social media to effectively advertise vacation rentals as well as working on growing our Academy’s community.”

“There are also several features of the LearnWorlds platform we haven’t used yet for example, the interactive video feature, so we are excited to try those out as well.”

Image: Having successfully launched several courses since the official launch of their academy, the team at Lodgify is in the process of releasing its next course, “SEO for Vacation Rentals”

Reflecting on the overall process of creating the Lodgify academy, Alvar expresses his satisfaction with what he and his team have achieved thus far.

“At the beginning, during the course creation phase, it’s kind of like navigating through the dark, you don’t know where you’re going to end up,” he says and adds:

“The trick is to be patient. Allow yourself to try things out. It’s better to start doing things step by step rather than do nothing because you are overthinking. You can always make adjustments.”

“Also, throughout the process, it has been super cool to have a support team that is so responsive. Every time I’ve had a question relating to the functionalities of the platform, they respond within the same day.”

“Overall we are really proud of the Lodgify Academy, what we have accomplished so far and how we have combined different types of formats to create our courses, although there is still room for improvement.”

“Our main mission at Lodgify is empowering our customers, sharing resources that will help them run their vacation rental business,” Alvar reiterates.

“We figured that creating our Academy with video lessons and courses about the industry was the way to go, and LearnWorlds helped us achieve that!”

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Veronica Andrianatos

Veronica Andrianatos is a Marketing Events Specialist at LearnWorlds. With an educational background in business and marketing, she has over 10 years of experience in the education sector which center around three areas: event, content and digital marketing. She is an advocate of customer oriented and data-driven marketing; passionate about creating compelling narratives and enthusiastic about designing successful marketing initiatives that promote brands ethically and authentically.