Autonomous Email Marketing for Multifamily Prospects

Nurturing prospects is one of the most important steps to convert a lead to a lease. According to Invesp, companies that use automated lead nurturing gain 50% more sales-ready leads and they spend 33% less doing it.

This is due to the fact that 47% of shoppers look at three to five unique marketing materials prior to reaching out to sales personnel. Automated lead nurturing campaigns provide more frequent and consistent touches, without agent involvement.

The Prospect Zone

We created the Prospect Zone in our Autonomous Lifecycle Marketing solution to communicate with prospects during the 4 most important prospect journeys. Consistent communications with prospects consistently during these journeys makes prospects more comfortable and excited to sign a lease!

The Prospect Zone focuses on active leads. This zone consists of three plays:

• Pre-Tour Play

• Post-Tour Play

• Closing Play

These plays move leads through the Prospect Lifecycle.

Each play is a collection of emails designed to work together to transition a customer from one stage to the next.

The Dormant Zone

The Dormant Zone is responsible for re-engaging cold leads. The goal is the same for every prospect in this zone: re-engagement.

So, it only has one play, aptly named the ‘Win-Back Play’.

Together, the Prospect and the Dormant Zones provide autonomous email marketing for warm and cold multifamily prospects!

We have made a cheat sheet that covers the main benefits for each play. Take a look!

Let’s dig deeper into what each of these plays can do.

Make Your Post-Tour Follow-up Better Now

You can take all kinds of tours. You can tour museums, cities, apartments, etc. When you are on the tour, you are getting a very real experience about a particular subject.

Let’s think about this for a minute.

Most people understand that dinosaurs were big creatures, but it’s not until you are standing next to the skeletons at the National Museum of Natural History that you fully comprehend how scared Chris Pratt’s character must have been in Jurassic World.

Yet, a few days later you revert back to your basic idea that dinosaurs were big.

A similar thing happens when a prospect tours your apartment. They can tour your property and clearly see how they would personalize each room to make it their home.

However, after a few days, the homey feeling fades back into “Yeah, that apartment was nice.” That’s why we have the Post-Tour Play. It is made to make your property seem like home again.

How Does it Work?

The Post-Tour Play consists of triggered alerts and eBlasts.

As a reminder, eBlasts are used for one-time only events like a community pool party. Triggered alerts are used to automatically send a particular email to a customer based on a specific action taken place by the customer or the property. Triggered alerts are often used to notify prospects about price and availability changes.

The goal of the Post-Tour Play is to move prospects from toured to nurtured in the customer lifecycle.

Post-Tour Play Emails

Floor Plan Availability Triggered Alerts
Show your prospects what their new home could look like by sending them your property’s move-in ready floor plans.

Community Events eBlasts
Invite your prospects to the exciting community events they would be a part of if they became residents.

Price Drop Triggered Alerts
Price is a big factor in the apartment search. If you lower the price of one of your units, be sure to let your prospects know. That could be the push they need to lease at your property.

Conclusion

Together, these three email topics remind prospects why they fell in love with your property. The Post-Tour Play eases the transition from toured to closing in the multifamily customer lifecycle.

Now that your prospects have seen your property and learned about the current availability, it’s time to close the deal. Next, we are going to explore how the Closing Play can help!

It’s Closing Time

For starters, if you sang that heading, you’re awesome. If you didn’t, you’re still cool, but you should definitely spend more time listening to 90’s music. Regardless, this play is all about getting your prospects to sign a lease!

The Closing Play encourages prospects to take the plunge and sign a lease. Using a combination of special offer emails, you can appeal to every prospect.

How Does it Work?

This email combo functions differently than the others. The emails in the Closing Play are made up of a variety of special offer emails. We recommend creating a few special offer emails and rotating them. Each offer should expire after a week. This gives the prospects enough time to take advantage of the offer, but provides a little nudge to sign sooner than later. Plus, by rotating the offers weekly, you can send prospects a new offer that may sound more appealing.

Most special offers equate to similar savings. Yet, different people are interested in different offers.

To a fitness buff, a waived amenity fee might be really exciting since could mean free gym, pool and lake access.

However, a prospect who just got hired might prefer half-off the first month’s rent. It often takes three or more weeks before a new hire gets their first paycheck. By having a prorated first month, it would take some of the stress off of the prospect.

Let’s take a peek at what some of these special offer emails look like.

Samples

Waived Amenity Fee
Waive goodbye to amenity fees to show prospects you are more interested in providing them a home than making money.

No Security Deposit
Show a vote of confidence in your prospects by waiving the security deposit!

Half-off your First Month’s Rent
Give your prospects half-off their first month’s rent to show your prospects you are willing to work with them— and their budget!

Conclusion

The Closing Play makes it easy to tell prospects about your new deals. Plus, it gives them a variety of offers that speak to each unique customer. The Closing Play accelerates the lead-to-lease cycle!

Now that you have taken care of your active leads, let’s see what ALM can do for those pesky dormant leads!

Baby, Come Back

Not every lead is going to turn into a lease, no matter how well you nurture them. Maybe they can’t afford your neighborhood or want a floor plan you don’t offer. However, things could be different in a few months. We believe that these leads are worth fighting for, so we created the Win-Back Play.

What is the Win-Back Play?

The Win-Back Play is a strategic email campaign designed to win dormant leads back by:

1. Telling them you miss them
2. Reminding them what they are missing

The best part is that you only need to create these emails once. Then, the angels can deliver your messages to all the leads that got away.

This play breathes new life into your list rentals too! Instead of spending on new list rentals, you can revitalize your old ones. You’d be surprised how many of them will be apartment shopping again!

How Does it Work?

After a lead has been inactive for 9 months (roughly when their lease is about to end), they will start getting Win-Back Play emails. The first three emails in the Win-Back Play (We Miss You, Neighborhood & Amenities, Area & Community) are part of an automated drip. These emails will be sent according to a predetermined schedule.

The fourth email (Community Events) is an eBlast sent once to announce new resident events.

The last two emails (Floor Plan Availability and Floor Plan Price Drop) are triggered alerts. The digital angels automatically send these emails after a specific action has taken place.

Let’s take a closer look!

We Miss You Email
This is your John Cusack moment, only you are swapping a boombox for a heartfelt email to let your prospects know you miss them and want them back.

Neighborhood & Amenities
This email reminds what your prospects what they’ve been missing.

Area & Community
Show off the surrounding area to remind prospects you are the whole package.

Community Events
Now that you have their attention, invite them over for an event so they can see what life at your property would be like.

Floor Plan Availability
Set up a triggered alert to send dormant leads an update when a new floor plans type becomes available. This way, they can see if you have what they need.

Floor Plan Price Drop
Using a triggered alert, you can let dormant leads know when a unit price drops. The price could be the thing that sets you apart from the competition.

Conclusion

The Win-Back Play gives you more prospects for free by reaching out to dormant leads. All you need to do is remind them why you are the property for them.

ALM for Prospects Improves ROI

These four plays reach out to prospects when they need it most. Plus, they are strategically positioned to move prospects one step closer to residency. The Prospect Zone takes the benefits of customer lifecycle marketing and makes it work for multifamily!

To top it off, managing warm and cold leads autonomously increases your return on investment (ROI) for prospect communications!

Now increasing ROI is a pretty big statement, but stick with us here. To increase your ROI, you need to do two thing: increase revenue and decrease costs.

The digital angels add consistency to the lead nurturing process, which should result in more signed leases.

By making the most of every lead, you are adding value to your lead generation investments. Plus, your agents are able to get more work done faster. Together, these reduce the amount you need to invest in lead generation and new staff.

The Autonomous Lifecycle Marketing solution increases your revenue and decreases your costs. By definition, your company will have a higher ROI!

Are you ready to start nurturing your leads autonomously?