Introduction
LeFrak has been at the forefront of innovation in multifamily marketing. LeFrak’s internal structure seems backwards by industry standard. The company reduces costs by automating the selling process and focusing on well-thought marketing initiatives, meaning it has a large marketing team and only a few leasing agents. The company has focused on heavily investing in automation to free employees to think, not just do… and it is working. LeFrak experienced a whopping 63% open rate on their last email campaign. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Arthur Kosmider, Marketing Director at LeFrak and discuss how LeFrak revamped their email communication process.
The Challenge
LeFrak was looking for a way to automate communications with prospects, old leads and residents. Arthur states, “We were looking to create a robust system around email and using email as a channel not only to enhance our lead gen follow-up but to improve our retention efforts.” LeFrak, like most property management companies (PMC’s), was struggling to follow-up with leads more than a few days old due to the constant flow of new leads and resident turnover. Arthur says, “Prospects were falling through the cracks and once residents moved in, they sort of fell off our radar.”
LeFrak realized this change needed to come from the marketing team. So, Arthur and his team set out to find a platform that could automate a customer lifecycle email marketing campaign. This way, LeFrak could engage with leads and residents throughout their entire customer lifecycle without hiring more agents.
“What we were looking for is a system that allows us to build out all of these communication cycles and do them in a way that first of all is robust, second of all is well organized and third of all is cost effective, meaning once it is put in place, it doesn’t require any additional work from anyone.” Arthur shares.
The Solution
LeFrak eventually chose to use Hy.ly’s Autonomous Lifecycle Marketing (ALM) solution to implement its new email marketing campaign. ALM is Hy.ly’s system to automate customer lifecycle marketing for Multifamily. It combines customer lifecycle marketing efforts from employees and the digital workforce to build stronger customer relationships. Using a series of plays, ALM provides targeted content to customers based on their stage in the customer lifecycle. A play contains a mix of automated drips, triggered alerts and eBlasts. Each of the email types used in a play involves some degree of automation. All together, these emails work to move customers from one stage to the next.
Impact on Prospects
Since LeFrak began using ALM, it has reduced marketing costs, stayed top-of-mind for prospects, increased conversion rates and shortened the sales cycle. While LeFrak has managed to shorten the sales cycle, he recognizes that many prospects crave more time to make a decision. Arthur says, “The automation allows us to interact with them long after the prospects visit the leasing office.”
In addition to these improvements, LeFrak has seen improvements in unexpected areas. The ALM solution enabled LeFrak to create a more consistent look and feel across email communications, which has increased brand recall by 30%. Also, due to the autonomous nature of the solution, LeFrak employees are more productive since they are no longer responsible for manually sending follow-ups.
Impact on Old Leads
Another perk from implementing a lifecycle focused communications plan is the reactivation of old leads. Arthur shares, “We personally found that by reactivating old leads by automatically following up with them a year later has resulted in new leases.”
He furthers this point by stating, “Multifamily is sitting on a goldmine of opportunity [old leads].” However, without automation it is nearly impossible to take advantage of old leads.
Impact on Resident Retention
ALM has made a huge difference for LeFrak’s resident retention efforts as well. Arthus says, “We are creating drip campaigns to educate our residents to improve their experience and reduce the toil on our customer service lines. We found that when we email information to our residents, they actually call our customer service line significantly less.” This education effort is actually saving LeFrak time and money.
Additionally, Arthur tells us, “With the drip campaigns, we make sure every resident gets the attention they need or want.” For the LeFrak team, resident retention is a must. Arthur gives us insight into resident retention for multifamily by saying, “Our industry is wired to think about SEM spending, ILSes, and geotargeting. We are so bent on driving traffic in, getting more leads, increasing conversion rates that we forget we are in a business where it is easy to make the sale again to the same person.”
Arthur tells us that by using drip campaigns, LeFrak is able to, “Show residents we care about making them feel at home and have their best interests in mind.” It is still too soon to have collected any hard data about how the addition of ALM has affected resident retention rates, but Arthur is optimistic that having this dialog with current residents will help retention efforts.
Why Hy.ly?
When we asked Arthur about why he chose to work with Hy.ly over other automated email platforms he states, “Partnering with Hy.ly was a very easy decision.”
He backs this statement by saying, “I don’t feel like just a customer, you guys are genuinely trying to solve issues and help us solve operational inefficiencies which results in some really cool campaigns.” He also touches on the importance of working with a company within the multifamily industry. He states, “Using a platform that is integrated into our current systems saves a ton of time for us.” Hy.ly is seamlessly integrated with Yardi, Entrata and RealPage in the backend. This integration eliminates the need to manually import lists and adds email communications into the conversation logs. Arthur concludes the interview by stating, “What I enjoy about working with Hy.ly is at the end of the day, you just get it.”
