#80 - Automated Email Follow-Up for Apartment Communities with Mike Whaling
Welcome to this week's episode of Marketing Home. Marketing. You! My name is Rebecca and I'm the Creative Director at Sprout Marketing! Today we are focusing on automated email follow-up, and we're joined by Mike Whaling, Founder and President of the digital marketing consultancy, 30 Lines.
Mike and his team are digital marketers specializing in email, SEO, SEM, and all that jazz. So if you just keep listening or read on, you can get all the amazing bits of information you need to know to bring this to life in your apartment community!
Here’s a glance at this episode…
>> [01:03] - What is a Drip Campaign and what’s involved
>> [03:55] - What content to include
>> [14:50] - Building a client list
>> [20:33] - Different types of Drip Campaigns
>> [23:39] - Outsource or do it yourself?
>> [30:50] - Tips for the next step
>> [35:05] - Learn more about 30 Lines
Mike, can you explain what a Drip Campaign is and what is involved in setting one up?
First, we have to think about follow-up in general, and what the expectations are of the customer. People expect follow-up right away, they want instant communication. People also have a lot of questions. This is a huge purchase, a huge decision, so we want to make sure that we stand out and do everything that we can to answer their questions. They're most likely looking at several properties, so Drip Campaigns, or smart email follow-ups, are a great way to stay in front of customers.
They help you continue to tell your story by showing things that maybe they didn't see on the website.
They answer all those questions that you may get multiple times.
Most importantly, they move customers toward the next step such as scheduling an in-person tour or starting an application.
Some people start looking three months or more out, and some need a place yesterday, but typically, the sweet spot is about two weeks of dripping information to them, continuing to tell your story, until they make a decision. From the time they get to the property and reach out to you, you have about two weeks to influence their decision.
To set this up you first need to look at what tools you already have available. There's a really good chance that your lead management system or your CRM, might have some drip campaign capabilities built in. Most of the major property management software systems have some kind of drip campaign capabilities.
Preferably, I would want these emails to communicate where you're at in the process because everything is happening in parallel and complementing the work that you're doing in person with the same prospect.
If that isn’t an option and you need something more industry-specific, there are many, affordable email tools out there. Constant Contact, MailChimp, or something like HubSpot, Klaviyo, or ConvertKit, to name a few. They're typically called email service providers or email marketing tools.
what content should you include in the emails?
Look at your unique selling points. What are some unique things about our property and community that help you stand out or things that you don't talk about enough on your property website? The purpose of the Drip Campaign is to drip content every couple of days to stay in front of that person. And ideally, that’s only telling one piece of the story at a time.
We also want to move that person toward the next step. Showcase your featured floor plan. Include plans that might fit what they were looking for or even something they hadn’t considered. Other content to include can be meeting the team, resident testimonials, and reviews. Show how people love your maintenance team or resident events. One of the biggest things people look for in marketing is what their life is going to be like there, and this is where Sprout really excels. Email is a great way to continue to tell the story of the lifestyle they will enjoy at your community. Include videos or photography that showcase that or anything that makes your community unique.
The typical neighborhood page on a property website is the least visited page because people have already seen the neighborhood on Google Maps, Yelp, Instagram, or wherever else. They already know the coffee shop, the best brunch spot, or where they will be hanging out for happy hour. So the email and drips play really well into this. Personalize it by highlighting your team's favorite places or the residents’ secret hotspots. Their favorite places to go after work, or hang out, or their favorite running trails. Show them why you love this neighborhood and why they’re going to love it too.
A great leasing consultant knows all of these spots, favorite places, or maybe the secret dog park that nobody else knows about. That's the perfect kind of thing to highlight. If you're a super pet-friendly community, put that in these emails and talk about that specifically because that's going to generate interest. The other great thing about these emails is they help you increase your closing ratio because you've answered their questions, told the story, and by the time that person walks in for their tour they are already pre-sold.
As far as what to put in subject lines that get people to open them, the easiest thing to do is add their first name. That can be difficult, but if you can collect their first name from something like the guest card, then you can certainly tailor your emails. Most systems will allow you to automate that through something they call a “merge tag” or something similar. Including emojis, some color, or a graphic also works really well.
If you are a new or renovated community but don't have a lot of information, what do you recommend for building a list?
You want to showcase your team hires. Make a video to meet the new manager and email the video link that you post.
Have a construction update. For example, state that hard hat tours are about to start and we wanted to make sure that you're first on the list.
Send out invites to an event. Have an offsite event to review some new construction details, and then send out a recap of what they missed out on.
We had a client hire a food truck in front of the construction site and bought lunch for everybody for four hours, and anybody who came by had to “pay” with an Instagram post. That way they tied the email into their social media efforts and got people talking about the property through their social. There are a lot of different things that you can do to continue to tell the story and build excitement.
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What if you have no vacancies, should you still do email campaigns?
If you’re a community that is completely leased up with no availability, it’s still important to do things like this, and maintain a list because we're never done leasing. These Drip Campaigns showcase all the great things about your community either during the leasing process or even after.
In the leasing process, you could send these emails:
Tailor those messages based on what you have coming available.
You can also use this to shift traffic to sister properties that are nearby and have availability.
After the leasing process, here are emails that may be great to send:
New resident, welcome drip. Six or eight emails go out as soon as the application is approved to welcome them and show them all the things they need to know.
Answer move-in FAQs about the community such as how to reserve the loading dock, where to park, what to bring on move-in day, or even a coupon for the pizzeria at the corner.
These emails set the tone for really clear, simple, easy communication and take the load off of the onsite team at the same time. Email doesn’t get a lot of love because it's boring and outdated, but it’s cost-effective and you never know what will happen with the housing market. It’s a great way to stay in front of people in an industry where follow-up is a challenge.
Which types of campaigns are essential for a property manager to set up to make their job easier?
An important one that’s an easy starting point is new prospect storytelling of why they should live here. Ideally, it’s around six or eight different messages that will go out over two weeks:
For the folks that do convert, I love new resident onboarding. Send emails that welcome them to the neighborhood and what they can expect.
For those that don't convert, in about 30 days I would email them again, trying to reel them back in. How are things going? Are you still looking for a place?
Then if you have a prospect that may have already found a place that isn’t you, send another email again in probably eight or nine months reminding them it's time to start looking again and don't forget about our apartments.
Pro Tip: Another one that is successful but more email marketing is what we call highlight emails and traffic lifters. If you have a specific floor plan that you need traffic to, or if you have a regional focus or specific properties that need some attention, send out an email that puts focused attention on those stale units or on the properties that need some love. Use these emails to steer the traffic to the places that need the help.
Do you recommend someone try to do this themselves or outsource?
I think we put way too much on our onsite teams, period. Asking them to build, manage and maintain an email campaign is a lot to ask. It doesn't have to be hard, you can definitely do it if you have the time, but you also won’t have that collective expertise of a company that’s doing this for hundreds if not thousands of properties at this point. At 30 Lines, we've learned a lot over the past decade about email marketing for other industries. We do a lot with the restaurant industry and what we learn from that we pull into the things that we do for our clients.
Look at what you are using for your lead management. Can they do automated drip emails sent out at specific intervals or based on specific customer behavior? That's what we’re really big on. We market in a way that aligns with how the customer is shopping. As that prospect moves through the process, we look for the triggers that tell us it’s a good time to send an email, and that is absolutely something you want to outsource to a group like ours at 30 Lines.
Email marketing is only effective if you have a list. There's a lot of work making sure all of your leads from every single source are getting connected to your email program. There are things that you can do to improve conversions on your website and build your list, but it's helpful to know what metrics are important, especially as technology changes. Many different things are happening with email right now based on privacy regulations and changing technology. So it's important to have that partner that can help walk you through that, make sure all of your leads are getting into this program, and help you tweak the program as you go. Your website is never done, it’s constantly evolving, constantly improving.
WHAT RESULTS CAN YOU EXPECT FROM EMAIL MARKETING?
The results? Expect to see your leasing team having an easier time closing on the traffic that they're getting. When we see that teams can improve their closing ratios, that means they don't have to go buy as much traffic. They can cancel on ILS, and reduce their Google ads. The whole leasing machine is more effective because you're doing a better job of telling your story, staying in front of prospects when your comps are not, and guiding that person to the next step that you want them to take.
A lot of the time leasing agents are trying to juggle tours, and follow-ups, and still, deal with the resident that walks in. Certain things don’t need to be done in person, and this is one of them. Leasing pros still need to manage their queue. They still need to respond to leads and answer questions. What email marketing does is give them superpowers because now they can be talking with those really hot prospects and in the background, you’re sending emails every day to everybody on your list, warming up more people, and getting that next prospect ready to go. This is a technology that works in concert with the human element and makes leasing professionals better at their job.
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what Tips would you give For someone to take the next step?
The first thing to start with is to look for any opportunities for improvement.
It’s important to understand what kind of customer experience you're delivering, so do a secret shop of your own property online. Fill out an ILS, or guest card from your website and see how fast it comes back. Do I get a response? Are we relying on the leasing team to do all of the work? Or is there anywhere we can provide a better experience? Can we over-deliver on communication when we know our competition is not?
The next thing I would look at is the story that you want to tell, and the stories your leasing agents are good at telling.
What are the questions that they find themselves answering all time? Go back to that hidden gem Dog Park or secret insights and make those your stories. These are the things that are probably not on your website or your Zillow listing.
The other thing that I would do is go through and look at what technology you have to complement this.
Can people book a tour on their own time? Do you have online applications where we can send an email to link them to show what’s available so they are ready to lease? These are things that we can use to pull into emails to help shape the story and showcase everything you have to offer.
Lastly, don't overthink all of the integrations or automation, and what works well based on where customers are at.
You don't need that to get started. If you can manually pull a list of your prospects and export it out of your software and into Constant Contact, MailChimp, HubSpot, or any of these systems, that gives you a starting point. We at 30 Lines can help you, but if have zero budget and know you need to be doing this, you can absolutely get started yourself with very minimal technical knowledge.
LEARN ABOUT OUR FRIENDS AT 30 Lines
At 30 Lines, we are a digital marketing studio. We have our agency group, which helps people with their emails, SEO, and Google ads. We do a lot of website maintenance and we build custom websites for properties and portfolios. For the last six years, we’ve been big on centralization, and I'm excited to see the rest of the industry starting to catch up.
We've also developed some of our own software, for instance, our apartment marketing platform called RentPress. There are a lot of gaps in apartment and multifamily marketing, and we are on a mission to make that a much easier process and experience. We pull a lot of inspiration from other industries like eCommerce and have turned our platform into something that we use not only for our clients but also made available for other web agencies. We have about 18 web agency partners building beautiful apartment websites today. We're driving all of the functionality on the back end to pull in pricing availability, make sure that the leads go where they're supposed to, and make sure it ties in with their email marketing campaigns and retargeting ads. It's amazing how little things like this really level up the customer experience and set you apart from your competition.
I love all the amazing work that Sprout has done for this industry. I love the perspective, and how you make things more accessible. Email is one of those things that can be scary and frightening but it doesn't have to be. And I think that fits really well with Sprout and the community you’re reaching every day.
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Thanks for joining me today as I took over this week’s episode discussing automated email follow-up with Mike from 30 Lines. Barbara will be back next week with another incredible episode so don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already! You can also go to trysproutfree.com to get some amazing resources containing follow-up along with a ton of other things for marketing, retention, and social media. You name it, it's there!
