New capabilities being delivered to JDR Consulting customers; enabling inbound marketing success
Indianapolis, IN — Today PERQ and JDR Consulting (JDR) announced the launch of their new partnership, bringing multifamily’s online standalone marketing automation platform for automating and personalizing the renter’s journey directly to JDR’s clients. The announcement follows new capabilities that expand PERQ’s platform’s capabilities across additional channels and enable multifamily marketers to scale their inbound marketing strategy.
“We’re very excited to kick off this partnership between PERQ and JDR,” said Andy Medley, CRO and co-founder of PERQ. “At PERQ, we’re committed to equipping multifamily with the tools to maximize their success through inbound marketing. By working together with JDR, we know we’ll be able to extend our reach to be part of the customized business processes that JDR delivers to their clients.”
By bringing PERQ into the JDR solution offerings, JDR is furthering their commitment to transforming organizations through technology, process and operational business solutions.
“We’re excited to be partnering with a team who is focused on infusing the latest technology into the marketing process,” said John Rivers, President of JDR Consulting. “PERQ provides best-in-class conversational AI across channels, and they uniquely help PMCs capture more qualified leads from their website and other inbound sources. Their automated and personalized nurture process allows clients to focus their efforts on what is most important, closing qualified leads.”
About PERQ
PERQ is a multifamily marketing platform that automates and personalizes the renter’s journey. Powered by artificial intelligence, PERQ combines website personalization, interactive website experiences, natural language chat in more channels, and personalized automated nurture outreach to help multifamily PMCs automate their renter’s journey and achieve higher conversions, reduce their costs per lead and lease, and save time for their overburdened onsite teams.
About JDR Consulting
JDR Consulting, LLC is a technology advisory and management consulting firm providing business process improvement, implementation, custom programming, project management and managed services to the real estate property management community. Through workflow automation, custom programming and focused end-user training, we help our clients achieve optimal performance.
For many renters, finding a new rental unit feels a bit like stepping back in time. For leasing agents, the experience isn’t much better.
Here’s what we mean: Chances are you’ve leaned on interactive automations at least a dozen times today to navigate your work routine, place an order, get personalized recommendations or forecasts — perhaps all of the above before you even had your morning coffee. As consumers, we’ve grown used to the “Amazon” experience, characterized by speed, ease and hyper-personalization, expecting those components in every digital transaction, whether that’s buying furniture, booking an appointment, or…researching rental properties.
The trouble is that multifamily has largely lagged behind other industries, making it difficult for renters to get answers without having to take extra steps like calling a leasing office during office hours, or dropping by for an on-site visit — often having to re-explain their interests, preferences or dilemmas with every interaction
That mismatch between modern consumer expectations and antiquated renter experiences is a massive opportunity for property management companies (PMCs) to stand out, outserve and outperform competitors. Mission Rock Residential, a PMC with a portfolio of 165 properties across 17 states, recognized that opportunity as they looked for ways to modernize the multifamily renter’s journey and alleviate staffing challenges.
Impact Snapshot
~60 properties
25,000+ questions answered by AI chatbot
+1,364 tours scheduled
+200,000 automated prospect interactions on behalf of leasing teams
60%-70% average conversion following lead nurture
22% automated support via SMS
Meagan Struve, marketing analyst at Mission Rock, had heard about PERQ’s track record on both counts: (1) driving lead-to-lead conversions with automated nurture, and (2) reducing the time and effort leasing agents have to pour into lead management. “PERQ’s ability to build up prospect interest without manual work alleviates that pressure for the leasing teams, and allows for more focus on authentic customer service,” she shared.
With that in mind, Mission Rock set out to test drive PERQ’s lead nurture platform with select properties in its portfolio.
Matching the Modern Multifamily Renter’s Journey
Mission Rock recognized today’s multifamily renter’s journey differs sharply from just a couple of years ago. For one, that journey is far longer: 46 days on average, with some renters taking as long as six months to choose a property.
The multifamily renter’s journey is also much more digitally-focused. Automated conveniences that were considered nice-to-have luxuries a couple of years ago are now baseline expectations for renters who’ve grown accustomed to “made-for-me” experiences, instant access and support.
Aside from the pandemic-driven push for more virtual conveniences, Meagan also points to a generational shift. “A lot of our renters are now younger, and they’re used to a more automated experience and the instant gratification that comes with that,” she explains. “They don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone, ever. They would much rather have a chatbot experience or have somebody emailing or texting.”
With PERQ’s Leasing Assistant, including a natural-language AI chatbot, prospective renters coming to Mission Rock websites can get their questions answered instantly, ’round the clock, via the property’s website, SME or email. So far, the chatbot has answered more than 25,000 questions, giving prospects instant answers regarding availability, touring options, pricing, the application process, and more.
Multifamily isn’t exactly known for customer service, but Mission Rock is changing that, said Meagan: “For us, to be able to serve up fun, engaging and educational experiences to our prospects using PERQ, it gives prospects a positive experience from their first interaction with a community, while also setting our community apart from others that don’t offer such a modern website experience.”
Building Rapport, Engagement With Automated Nurture
Among the benefits of cross-channel, personalized nurture automation, is the fact that the heavy task of nurturing leads is now off the leasing team’s plate so they can focus on higher-impact activities. “The stats about the number of hours we save are amazing…especially with our current staffing challenges,” Meagan said. “Having PERQ is a shining beacon of hope, alleviating a lot of that manual work we used to have.”
Automated nurture also helps to keep Mission Rock’s pipeline full and healthy as renters take longer to search and make decisions. Though prospects may not be ready to convert today, “that person is still important and could still end up turning into a lease,” Meagan said. Previously, the team tried to manually follow up with each lead, but the volume of leads made those efforts difficult and created a lot of “cracks” for leads to fall through. Now, PERQ takes on the nurture challenge, applies personalization, and drives lead-to-lease conversions. “Such a game changer for us, for sure,” Meagan said.
By Q3 of 2022, PERQ’s nurture generated 1,364 tours that might otherwise have been lost in the shuffle of guest cards, allowing prospects to engage via text nearly 22% of the time. PERQ’s nurture also managed over 200,000 prospect interactions on behalf of Mission Rock’s on-site teams.
PERQ has helped Mission Rock evolve our inbound marketing strategy. As a result, we get more leads and leases from our website and more automated engagement with prospects. We’ve reduce the work of our on-site team since PERQ takes on all the early nurture, and keeps our teams focused on closing leases and providing excellent customer service.
Meagan Struve
Marketing Analyst,Mission Rock Residential
Unmatched Conversions
Proof’s in the pudding, as they saying goes. “What we’ve found with PERQ is when people come in for a tour, our closing ratio is so high — 60% to 70% on average,” said Meagan. “Once we get that person in, it’s pretty much a done deal because the prospect has been able to qualify themselves based on the website experiences, AI chat, and personalized nurture from PERQ.”
Meagan also touts lead source attribution and dashboard reporting to help Mission Rock optimize its return on marketing spend. She also appreciates the intelligence that PERQ is able to pass along to the leasing team when leads are agent-ready. “It’s been seamless. There has never been an issue of missing information or any difficulties, and I really appreciate that,” she added.
Today, PERQ is used by more than 60 Mission Rock properties to enhance the multifamily renter’s journey, and the team has recommended 90 properties for the platform in the year ahead.
Platform Highlights
PERQ AI Marketing Automation for Multifamily
Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI allows visitors to have “natural” (read: non-robotic) conversations with AI chatbots on the property website, SMS, and email.
Conversational AI support for Google, enabling mobile visitors to get instant answers when visiting a community’s Google Business Profile and Google Maps.
Call-to-text technology converts inbound leasing calls to text chats, easing the workload of on-site teams and helping PMCs avoid costly call centers.
Website Conversion Maximizer tailors interactive online experiences to each visitor, capturing prospect data so it can enhance personalizations with every new interaction.
Nurture Science continues to personalize nurture communications to keep prospects engaged long after their first visit, through every stage of the multifamily renter’s journey.
One intelligent platform with centralized data means prospects are recognized across devices, creating connected and coherent experiences across channels.
Rich prospect data is automatically captured and made available in your connected CRM when the prospect is agent-ready.
Accurate lead attribution and real-time trends so you can see how each lead source is performing, hidden opportunities or tripping points.
What could PERQ do for your multifamily business? See for yourself!
With experts’ forecasts for the multifamily market outlook mixed for 2023, it’s easy to feel concerned or confused about what this year will bring. Some experts suggest that the multifamily sector will perform above average in 2023 despite the economic headwinds. Their claim is that demand is still steady and will remain that way because the costs of a mortgage are more than 50% more expensive than the average monthly apartment rent, keeping renters in the rental market.
Others are not as hopeful and suggest the growing economic uncertainty and low consumer confidence in the economy may translate into fewer households being formed and that decisions to move apartments will be muted if the consumers’ outlook on the economy remains lackluster.
Without a crystal ball to help multifamily marketers and operators to see the future, you are left with one choice in the matter: to assume the worst and work to ensure adequate leads to fuel occupancy.
At PERQ, we speak with multifamily professionals from property management companies (PMCs) across the nation. The topic of multifamily market outlook comes up regularly and we wanted to share with you what we we have learned about how your peers in the industry are thinking about this. Here are some ways that PMCs are preparing for the upcoming multifamily market — whatever it brings.
Doubling down on inbound marketing
If demand slows, there will be pressure on costs. To help optimize spend on paid leads, PMCs need to ensure they are getting the most “free” (vs. paid) leads from their community website as possible. You want to make sure you attract and engage potential renters through your property website without having to pay for a complete overhaul of your current site.
By utilizing interactive website tools and personalization, like the powerful ones PERQ offers, you get more tours from your unknown website visitors. In doing so, you reduce the need to spend more money on expensive lead sources, like an ILS. Using all the PERQ website features (like calls to actions to capture lead information, interactive webstie experiences, and more) you can maximize your lead generation on your existing website without needing to ramp up your spending.
No matter where the multifamily market outlook ends up, leaning into inbound marketing just makes good business sense. You already have community websites — why wouldn’t you want to use them to your advantage and turn them into your #1 source for leases?
Saving marketing spend by recycling leads
Recycling is always a clever idea, but with an uncertain multifamily market outlook, it is necessary to help save money. To optimize marketing spend and make sure you do not pay for the same lead more than once, consider revisiting leads from prior rent cycles to see if you can get them to reengage. You do not necessarily want to add more to your already maxed onsite teams during this time, so consider automating this process instead.
Some artificial intelligence (AI) technology solutions, like PERQ, can send an automated outbound multi-touch nurture program to leads that did not rent from you last year to resurrect them now that they may be looking again around their renewal date. Allowing you to easily stay top-of-mind for those prospective renters who may be looking for their next home. By recycling leads, you won’t be spending as many marketing dollars because this person is already known to you and in your database. An ideal strategy during these uncertain times.
Improving yield from paid leads
PMCs are working to improve the yield from paid leads by working those leads with marketing nurture approaches. Automated nurture can be applied to your Internet Listing Service (ILS) leads and nurture capabilities should work every lead to tour in perpetuity. At PERQ, we don’t “dead” or give up on any leads. Our nurture data shows us that there are significant tours scheduled after many touches, which can maximize the number of tours and leases created from your paid efforts.
Being everywhere prospects are digitally
PMCs are working diligently to be everywhere their prospects are digitally. With more prospects leveraging Google Business pages, employing conversational AI on this channel to capture their attention before they even hit your website makes a lot of sense.
In order to help communities be everywhere their prospects are, PERQ has added our NLP (Natural Language Processing) chat capabilities for Google and can answer questions on your Google Business Page 24/7. This way, people can research and schedule a tour even when your office is closed. In addition, PERQ will pull those not ready to tour into the website and offer a CTA (call to action) that helps make them a known lead, so nurture can be applied automatically.
Overall, PMCs are shifting their focus to earlier in the sales funnel. Instead of a focus on tours and leases, multifamily marketers are looking at their marketing mix, their spend, and how to optimize top of funnel lead creation. Their overall goals needs to be to get ahead of lead creation to ensure a steady flow of qualified leads for their communities no matter what the outlook is for the multifamily market.
Want help preparing for whatever the multifamily market outlook holds? Schedule time with PERQ and talk to one of our multifamily experts today!
As renter behaviors change and competition grows for their attention and wallets, PMCs are putting pressure on business expenses that roll up to their net operating income (NOI), and this affects marketers directly. Regardless of occupancy levels, multifamily marketers are being asked to reduce marketing costs in order to help profit margins and give the property manager room to be competitive on rental rates, if and when needed. But knowing what to cut and why (without crippling marketing performance) can be difficult and a source of anxiety for many teams — unless they’re equipped with the proper tools.
Nearly a century ago, famed magnate John Wanamaker is quoted as saying, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Nearly 100 years later, those words are still true for many marketers, though that’s quickly changing.
What if you could pinpoint, with certainty, which of your marketing efforts and dollars are going to waste? Or where opportunity lies to meet your revenue goals, cheaper and faster?
It turns out you can.
In a nutshell, that’s the value of a lead analysis report: a study of how each of your lead sources are performing so you can drop underperforming investments and uncover opportunities to improve conversions, often at lower cost. If you’ve been a professional marketer long, you’re likely familiar with the concept of lead source attribution to achieve that. A best practice that’s long proved successful in other industries, lead source attribution is finally catching up in the multifamily realm.
As you plan for the year ahead, your lead analysis report, complete with well-documented lead source attribution and performance metrics, is a vital tool to meet revenue goals and minimize marketing spend.
Why track lead source performance?
Traditionally, marketers seeking evidence for how their marketing channels, campaigns and lead sources were performing had to spend hours corralling incomplete data, with little payoff for their effort.
For starters, you had to chase source data on separate platforms: Google analytics, social networks, ILS, email, and other traffic sources. You’d try to compile all this disconnected data, then piece it together in a way that could be recorded in your CRM and accessed easily by your team.
During that process, catch-all attributions like labeling a variety of sources as “website” or relying on fellow agents to fill in referral sources failed to capture specific touchpoints (like a Google ad or Facebook campaign) that moved the prospect to make contact.
With so many manual steps and low visibility into true lead sources, the process was a tremendous resource suck, prone to error and rife with blind spots. And yet, it’s still how many multifamily marketers operate today.
Such methods also failed to measure traffic quality. Platforms like Google Analytics might tell you how much traffic they brought you, but not what happened to those visitors after they landed on your website. Did they become a viable lead? Book a tour? Sign a lease? As we well know, traffic quantity doesn’t necessarily equate to traffic quality.
Thankfully, there’s a better way. It’s why forward-looking marketers have sought to integrate and automate attribution insights, so their teams can always access a reliable lead analysis report without having to stress over spreadsheets.
Lead Source Attribution Benefits
Improved lead generation. Understanding what details move visitors to click, engage, or complete an action helps you set better lead generation goals and optimize campaign budgets.
Understanding renters. Knowing your prospects’ digital activity patterns help predict their preferences and behaviors to inform your strategy and campaign tactics.
Increased ROI. Track sources, engagement and conversions to more accurately calculate ROI and reduce wasteful spending.
Putting lead source attribution & integration on autopilot
You’re a marketer, not a data scientist. We’re guessing you have no desire to spend hours poring over data instead of building relationship, fine-tuning your strategy, or driving conversions. Thankfully, we’re living in the age of AI-powered marketing tools that can do the heavy lifting on repetitive tasks that often weigh and slow your team’s performance.
By pairing your team’s skills (e.g. creativity, relationship building, critical thinking) with AI-driven insights, you enable your team to perform at a higher level while countering burnout, wasted effort or spending.
Attribution insights in your lead analysis report can help your team answer questions like these:
What customer segment gives us the greatest chance to meet revenue goals?
What’s our cost-per-lead, cost-per-lease, conversion-to-tour, and conversion-to-lease by each lead source?
What’s the best combination of digital touchpoints to attract renters to our doorsteps?
Which tactics/campaigns/channels deliver best-fit, high-intent leads?
Where are we wasting dollars reaching the wrong audiences?
How can we cut costs without compromising results?
What evidence can I use to defend my proposed investments to our leaders?
It’s important to note that lead source attribution shouldn’t be limited to website traffic. Rather, your lead analysis report should be able to track attribution cross-channel, not just the first touchpoint in their renter’s journey. When you reply to a prospect, or if a prospect engages with one of your SMS nurture messages, for example, your tech stack should be able to carry their attribution source between channels. The same goes for emails. Let’s say your AI platform replies to a website visitor via a chatbot, or sends them a nurture email. Your lead nurture platform should dynamically link those to ensure attribution is passed through if the prospect switches to another communication channel (e.g., clicking on an email link to visit the website, calling or texting the number listed in the email).
Put another way, your lead nurture platform should ensure the source attribution sticks with the individual consumer, regardless of what channel they start engaging with, versus what channel they ultimately convert to a lead on.
Once you have a clear picture of how each of your lead sources is performing, deciding what lead source spending to stop, reduce or grow becomes much easier to define and defend.
The right [technology] partner must operate with a strong ‘technology wrapped in services’ approach, with the right tool to product instant results and push out recommendations, complementary analytics, and insight services to help dive deep into results for added value.
Cross-Channel Attribution is Needed to Drive Marketing Effectivness
Forrester | Google
Pairing your lead analysis insights with personalized nurture
Reasonably, your lead analysis report can’t exist in a vacuum. To be effective, it relies on (and is made more powerful by) an integrated lead capture and nurture ecosystem.
Multifamily marketers we’ve worked with report that deep visibility into lead source performance has enabled them to double conversions while reducing their cost-per-lead by as much as 80% when paired with personalized lead nurture.
Common traits of marketers reporting these results include the following:
As a starting point, they’ve installed the PERQ platform on their website and integrated it with their lead sources.
Online visitors engage with interactive website experiences such as quizzes, floor plan match, neighborhood finder, and more, exchanging personal information (e.g., contact info, move-in timeline and preferences) for information about the community and options available to them.
Those individual insights are used to personalize prospect experiences, messaging and lead nurture, “warming up” prospects without requiring agent contract.
The platform sees the origin of every lead and maintains source data while across the renter’s journey, even as the prospect switches communication channels over time.
Once a lead is agent-ready, the platform automatically passes the prospective renter card to the marketing CRM with the clean lead source information.
To summarize it further, they’ve set out to accomplish three things with the help of artificial intelligence:
Compel prospects to reveal information about themselves through interactive website experiences.
Use self-reported (first-party) insights to personalize nurture messaging and experiences at all stages of their renter’s journey.
Automatically record all lead sources, behaviors and activities, translating that data into actionable intelligence for agents.
Back to our focus on lead source attribution and performance metrics, the offshoot is that your marketing team can easily identify what’s working (or isn’t) to convert leads, so you can make smarter decisions and more profitable marketing investments. From there, Forrester researchers recommend continuous testing and experimenting with new campaigns, strategies and ideas based on attributed results.
Once marketers receive attributed results, they must identify opportunities to test in channels or tactics that are driving conversions and make changes to those that aren’t. A testing approach will help them identify winning marketing programs and develop repeatable interactions to acquire and grow profitably.
Cross-Channel Attribution is Needed to Drive Marketing Effectiveness
Forrester | Google
In closing, PMCs that have the right tools to gain richer prospect insights and measure lead source performance will win out, Forrester concludes, “increasing engagement and relevance, and improving ROI.”
Improve lead conversions and ROI
When you’ve been operating in the dark, it can be tough to discern next steps. At the same time, you shouldn’t have to become a data expert to benefit from it. We’ll help you clarify your next best move.
As the multifamily market evolves and becomes more competitive, PMCs are putting pressure on the business expenses that roll up to NOI, and this affects marketers directly. Whether occupancy is high or not for a particular community, marketers are being pressured to reduce marketing costs because it helps the profitability of the business and gives the property manager room to be competitive on rental rates if and when they need to be. But knowing what to cut and why is a challenge multifamily marketers often face — unless equipped with the proper tools.
Nearly a century ago, famed magnate John Wanamaker is quoted as saying, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Nearly 100 years later, those words are still true for many marketers.
What if you could pinpoint, with certainty, which of your marketing efforts and dollars are going to waste? Or where opportunity lies to meet your revenue goals, cheaper and faster?
It turns out you can. It’s why many of your peers have embraced lead source attribution, a practice that’s vital for multifamily marketers looking to outperform competitors and meet revenue goals in 2022 and beyond.
How conventional methods cost you more and deliver less
Traditionally, marketers seeking evidence for how their marketing channels, campaigns and lead sources were performing had to spend hours corralling incomplete data, with little payoff for their effort.
For starters, you had to chase source data on separate platforms: Google analytics, social networks, ILS, email, and other traffic sources. You’d try to compile all this disconnected data, then stitch it together in a way that could be recorded in your CRM and accessed easily by your team. During that process, catch-all attributions like labeling everything “website” or relying on fellow agents to fill in referral sources failed to capture specific touchpoints (like a Google ad or Facebook campaign) that moved the prospect to make contact.
With so many manual steps and low visibility into true lead sources, the process was a tremendous resource suck, prone to error and rife with blind spots. And yet, it’s still how many multifamily marketers operate today.
Such methods also failed to measure traffic quality, notes Curt. Platforms like Google Analytics might tell you how much traffic they brought you, but not what happened to those visitors after they landed on your website. Did they become a viable lead? Book a tour? Sign a lease? “You might be able to tell the quantity of traffic but not the quality of it,” he explains.
Thankfully, there’s a better way. It’s why forward-looking marketers have sought to integrate and automate attribution insights with PERQ.
AI-powered, integrated attribution
You’re a marketer, not a data scientist. We’re guessing you have no desire to spend hours poring over data instead of building relationships, fine-tuning your strategy, or driving conversions. By pairing your team’s skills with AI-driven insights, you enable your team to perform at a higher level while countering burnout, wasted effort or spending.
Attribution insights can help your team answer questions like these:
What customer segment gives us the greatest chance to meet revenue goals?
What’s our cost-per-lead, cost-per-lease, conversion-to-tour, and conversion-to-lease by each lead source?
What’s the best combination of digital touchpoints to attract renters to our doorsteps?
Which tactics/campaigns/channels deliver best-fit, high-intent leads?
Where are we wasting dollars reaching the wrong audiences?
How can we cut costs without compromising results?
What evidence can I use to defend my proposed strategies/investments to our senior leaders?
It’s important to note lead source attributions shouldn’t be limited to website traffic. “We’re able to track attributions cross-channel; not just the first touchpoint,” says Kara: “When we reply to a prospect, or if a prospect engages with one of our SMS nurture messages, we carry their attribution source between channels. The same goes for emails: When the AI replies or sends a nurture email, we dynamically build links and signatures to ensure attribution is passed through if the prospect switches to another communication (e.g., clicking an email link to visit the website, calling or texting the phone number in the signature field).”
Altogether, it takes website attribution, ILS leads, marketing numbers, and lead nurture working together to ensure the attribution sticks with the individual consumer, regardless of what channel they start engaging with versus what channel they ultimately become a lead on, Kara explains.
How it works
In a nutshell, multifamily marketers install PERQ on their website and integrate PERQ with their lead sources. From there, PERQ can see the origin of every conversion, regardless of its source. It maintains this data while the prospective renter goes along their journey.
But it doesn’t stop there. PERQ also engages prospects through interactive website experiences, AI chatbots, SMS, email and more, “warming up” those leads and maintaining attribution insights for every prospect.
Once a lead is agent-ready, it passes the prospective renter card to your CRM along with the clean lead source information it maintains.
In addition to helping you identify what’s working (or isn’t) to attract leads, this level of visibility also makes your lead sources perform better because we’ve used personalized intel to nurture each lead.
Improving your marketing performance, visibility and ROI
When you’ve been operating in the dark, it can be tough to discern next steps. At the same time, you shouldn’t have to become a data expert to benefit from it. We’ll help you clarify your next best move.
Drop us a note for a complimentary consulting session and we’ll be happy to share how your peers are solving challenges similar to yours.
PERQ integrates with your existing website and lead sources to engage, nurture and convert every lead, improving the multifamily leasing journey for everyone. Learn how it works or request a demo.
Do you really know your renters and what moves them to choose one property over another? In the latest installment of PERQ’s Sofa Seminar Series, we’re joined by two of your peers in exploring how multifamily data can help you turn more leads into renters and advocates.
Special guests Stephanie Rubino (Owner, Rubino Consulting) a marketing consultant who works with Boyd Wilson on their digital marketing tactics and leasing strategy and Lisa Delgado (VP of Asset Management, Boyd Wilson) share actionable tips for attracting and converting more leads into profitable, lasting relationships.
Following are some highlights of that discussion. (You’ll find the full Sofa Seminar presentation at the end of this post.)
Capturing intel on stealth shoppers
We know most renters are beginning their property search early — typically three-plus months out, and mostly online. Long before you know who they are, they’re researching, narrowing options, and making decisions about your property.
With that in mind, many multifamily marketers are putting systems in place to facilitate online journeys, and also to capture meaningful insights to maximize the chances of turning those visitors into renters. Desired floor plans, move-in timelines, budget, desired amenities and other preferences are some of the insights you can capture long before prospects are willing to speak with a leasing agent.
Competing for renters’ attention, preference, and dollars
For years, many multifamily marketers had attempted to incorporate tech-driven conveniences and automated support to prospects and residents, but were met with resistance from change-verse or budget-conscious decision makers. Once COVID came on the scene, those tech advances became a necessity — a change that’s now permanent as consumer behaviors evolved to become more and more digital-dependent.
“During COVID, our two main words were ‘fluid’ and ‘pivot.’ Nowadays, they’re ‘choice’ and ‘experience,'” says Lisa. To that end, Lisa’s team uses PERQ’s AI chatbot on their website — they call it the iCare bot — to offer choices and create a compelling experience for website visitors.
Stephanie recalls a prospective renter who came to the website with questions about pets, utilities, and the application process at 10 p.m. one night. “Ms. iCare answered all of it,” she shares, referring to the AI chatbot. The idea is to provide instant support and a warm, personable touch when renters can’t (or prefer not to) interact with a leasing agent.
Identifying hang-ups, removing friction, and anticipating needs
By having visibility into how consumers are experiencing your property online channels — what’s working or isn’t, what’s drawing them in or turning them off — property marketers can get ahead of stumbling blocks that might hinder the results they’re chasing.
An AI-powered lead management system like PERQ’s makes those hidden tripping points visible, enabling you to meet renters’ expectations and give them ’round-the-clock support, without adding to your team’s workload.
Improving follow-ups and outcomes
Believing that personal follow-up is crucial for converting leads, Lisa and Stephanie note that the iCare chatbot has helped to weed out low-potential window shoppers who do need their questions answered but aren’t likely to convert any time soon (and thus aren’t the best use of leasing agents’ time).
In the meantime, lead capture and nurture automations keep those slow-moving prospects engaged and “warmed up” until they’re ready to tour and engage with an agent one-on-one. By then, agents have visibility into what that prospect wants so they’re better equipped to have a productive (and profitable) conversation. “We do train our teams to read the prospect’s conversation with the iCare bot before responding,” Lisa adds.
That’s where the human element shines, versus weighing agents down with low-impact activities or conversations that are better managed by an AI Assistant. “Our number-one reason for adopting PERQ was to be available to renters 24/7. Unless we started three shifts of leasing teams, this is how we can make it possible,” Lisa explains. “I know with 100% certainty that any digital lead coming into Boyd Wilson is being addressed, I was never able to say that before.”
Reducing marketing costs
Lastly, Lisa reports the AI lead management automation has enabled her to stop or reduce advertising spend in other channels, without hurting results. “It gives us more money to spend on other things, for sure,” says Lisa. Instead, she redirected media dollars into the automation software.
Asked what advice she’d give to fellow multifamily property marketers, Lisa recommends looking to AI: “If you want to be impactful in your business, you have to automate. No doubt. Find the right partner for your business.”
Your turn
Wondering what might be possible for your own marketing efforts? We invite you to learn from the full discussion below and sign up for the May Sofa Seminar before you leave today. We hope to see you next time!
PERQ integrates with your existing website and lead sources to engage, nurture and convert every lead, improving the multifamily leasing journey for everyone. Learn how it works or request a demo.
“We’re very excited to kick off this partnership between PERQ and JDR,” said Andy Medley, CRO and co-founder of PERQ. “At PERQ, we’re committed to equipping multifamily with the tools to maximize their success through inbound marketing. By working together with JDR, we know we’ll be able to extend our reach to be part of the customized business processes that JDR delivers to their clients.”
Traditionally, marketers seeking evidence for how their marketing channels, campaigns and lead sources were performing had to spend hours corralling incomplete data, with little payoff for their effort.
In a nutshell, multifamily marketers install PERQ on their website and integrate PERQ with their lead sources. From there, PERQ can see the origin of every conversion, regardless of its source. It maintains this data while the prospective renter goes along their journey.
Capturing intel on stealth shoppers