Is The Multi-Family Industry Missing Out on Email Re-Marketing?

Stop for a moment and think about how much time, money and effort your community spends on lead generation? How much have you invested in:

• Your website?
• ILSs?
• Signage?
• Other media?

If you’re an operator of any size, those investments are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Despite all of the money spent on these efforts, how confident are you that you are maximizing the return on those investments?

This is one of the questions we embarked upon answering in our latest research project on email re-marketing. The research project, sponsored by leading leasing technology provider On-Site, sought to answer the question, “Are MFH communities missing out on the power of email re-marketing?”

While the study shows that communities are generally good at providing an initial supply ( 84% of those contacted by email sent something back),  the short answer is, “Yes, they are missing out.” Follow-up beyond the initial contact was disappointing and lacked a systematic approach, the study states.

The study also noted some clear usability problems and branding missteps at the prospecting stage:

• 10% of the sites contained difficult spam filters or required fields that were not marked “required”;
• 16% had confusing or hidden “contact us” links;
• 23% requested many extraneous pieces of information like a secondary phone number;
• 19% displayed an error message or blank page after submitting the form;
• One email was branded with the logo and color scheme of the property management software supplier instead of the community.

Effective email re-marketing, or nurturing, provides several benefits. Consider:

• Lead nurturing emails have click-through rates that are 2.5x general emails (source:  HubSpot).
• Leads who are nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities (source: DemandGen).
• Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. (source:  HubSpot)

It takes a lot of time, effort and cost to generate a lead. Conversely, other than the upfront time and cost of developing a good drip campaign, the incremental costs are insignificant.   “A cynic might say the results were very discouraging,” explains study authors Donald Davidoff and Joanne Chapman-Reps, “but we prefer to point out the tremendous opportunity that industry marketers have to leverage a relatively inexpensive marketing vehicle.”

Zeke Kirkpatrick, On-Site’s director of product management, agrees that housing providers could do more to follow up with leads, and his company’s recent advances aim to provide a helping hand.

Many housing providers rely on the initiative of their leasing agents to follow up with leads. Unfortunately, this approach leaves both the quality of the response and the timing of the reaction solely in the leasing agents’ care.

Follow-up prompts are one of the features that makes our lead management solution a secret weapon for apartment managers.  Smart software keeps them organized and focused on a creating an exceptional user experience for new prospects as well as existing residents considering renewing their lease.

You can download the entire report, Email Re-Marketing: Is Multi-Family Missing Out? here.