Using five key tactics, apartment marketers can ensure their websites are performing at the highest level, delivering measurable results and, ultimately, more leases.
Prospective residents can now find a community or management company’s website in a variety of ways, including search engines, Internet Listing Services (ILSs), mobile phones and social media websites. While optimizing the use of these sites to drive traffic is important, it’s only half the story. Once prospects are on the website, how will they be converted into a lead and, eventually, a lease?
With five key tactics, apartment marketers can ensure their websites are performing at the highest level, delivering measurable results and, ultimately, more leases.
1. Short, Well-Lit Paths Are Better Than Long, Blind Trails.
Minimizing the number of steps a user must take to send an e-mail inquiry or make a phone call is paramount. If the goal is a little more complex, such as filling out an online application or lease, make sure users know where they are in the process and indicate that forms are easy to complete. (This will be addressed in more detail in the “Build a Killer Form” section, on page 77.)
The first step in creating a short, well-lit path is to walk in the prospects’ shoes. Which steps are they taking to find a place to live? It’s likely that the first step has already been completed by the time they reached the property website in the form of a search on Google or an ILS or finding a link through a social media website. Now that they’re here, what’s next?
Hopefully, they’ve landed on a page that is community-specific. It’s likely that the prospect already typed in specific details in their search engine query, so companies want to avoid having prospects fill out yet another search form on the company’s landing page, if possible.
If the landing page is not community-specific, however, make sure a community search form and contact information are front and center. Contact information should be displayed on every page. The next step should be a search-results page that features accurate rent ranges, unit types, specific locations, a photo and more contact information. The last step should be the property page itself, which, of course, has prominent contact information.
By creating a short and simple path, prospects will only encounter three pages before getting to any forms, such as an e-mail inquiry or online reservation. Alternative contact information should also be provided each step of the way. Of course, it is not just about the number of pages the prospect encounters, but what is on those pages, which leads us to the next tactic.
2. Be Rich in Relevant Content.
This is not to say websites need to be stripped or bare-to-the-bone. Meaningful, rich content is valuable. However, be sure to only create rich content for the information that matters most to renters.
One frequent blunder is using large, generic glamour shots that aren’t property or user-specific (picture the happy couple laying hand-in-hand in the grass). Instead, make sure the website highlights the information the user needs. Apartments.com has observed that including three types of content will improve the shopping experience.
• Showcase Photos. In a study commissioned in 2009, Apartments.com asked over 3,000 renters what was most important in their online shopping experience, and photos was the No. 1 response—the more photos the better. Make sure the photos being featured are high-quality and detailed. One of the pet peeves of renters shopping online is grainy or poor-quality photos. While quality is more important than the type of photo used, consider highlighting a photo of an apartment or a key, attractive amenity, rather than a photo of the signage.
• Feature Floorplans. After photos, floorplan images generate more views than any other media. Make sure these key pieces of content are easy to find.
• List Accurate Rent. More important than any unit amenity or community feature, and almost as important as location, is rent. Communities that do not post rents on Apartments.com generate 47 percent fewer leads than those that do. Contrary to popular belief, a “call for rents” plea actually leads to the opposite effect: The prospect calling another property that clearly and accurately posts its rents. Companies that post specific rates rather than a range will provide a better customer experience. Even communities that frequently update rents through revenue management software should be able to use a feed to update the website information.
3. Use Strong Calls-to-Action.
Now that prospects have been floored by the seamless navigation of the website and its rich and relevant content, direct them in clear, concise calls to action (CTA) on what they need to do next. Simply put, a CTA is the language on the page that helps drive the prospect to the ultimate desired action and is perhaps the most important element of any marketing initiative.
For many property websites, sending an e-mail lead, making a reservation, calling or having a live chat online are the ultimate desired actions, or maybe an online lease is the ultimate goal for some. Either way, here are a few tips for writing effective CTAs:
• Catch More Eyes with Short Text. Keep CTAs short and easily scannable. Prospects looking for a place to live want to skim the website for the apartment information they want. Longer phrases are more difficult for users to understand and act upon at a glance.
• Be Specific and Descriptive. Do not be vague. Here’s an example of a simple yet vague CTA: “E-mail the property.” OK, fine, but one has to ask, why would someone “e-mail the property”? Is there a better CTA? Basically, the most effective CTA should accurately describe the action the user will be taking. Try something like “View Availability” or “Apply for Lease,” which are clear, descriptive and short. Avoid CTAs like “Click Here” or “Learn More.”
• CTA Domination. Have a CTA on every page! This will help funnel prospects directly to the guest form or desired destination on the property website.
4. Build a Killer Form.
Here is one rule of thumb: People hate forms. They are roadblocks. The more communities can do to break down the roadblocks, or at least minimize the impact, the better. Building an intuitive, effective form is actually pretty easy by following a few simple rules:
• Put Your Form on a Diet. The notion that a prospect that is willing to fill out more fields is more qualified is a myth. Do not spook off a prospect by asking too many questions. Simply secure the minimal information necessary to successfully continue the process. Often, this means eliminating, or limiting, optional fields. If the information is really optional, then consider deleting it. You will get higher conversion in return. For example, a study of 40,000 form entries by online marketing firm Hubspot found that eliminating the phone field increased lead conversion by almost 40 percent. While phone is probably too important of a field to eliminate for the needs of an apartment lead, this fact shows how sensitive users are to form elements.
• Provide an Endpoint. Let prospects know where they are in the process of completing the form. By indicating their progress, prospects are less likely to become impatient or give up. This rule should only apply to multi-page forms like applying for an online lease.
• Don’t Discount the “Thank You” Page. Keep the story going. Do not simply say, “Thank you.” Show prospects other communities in the portfolio that meet their needs, provide additional contact information, and use this opportunity to drive home the value of the brand.
5. Leverage, Measure, Track and Optimize.
If properly utilized, website analytics can reveal a lot about where the prospect is looking online and what they want, including where traffic is coming from, what they’ve searched for, what content they’ve clicked on, and often most tellingly, where they bailed on the website. Communities need to know what they are going to track.
• Visits. Do not worry much about pageviews or “hits.” These numbers can deceive, since a high pageview or hit number can mean the path is simply too long. Unique visits (or “uniques”) can be helpful, but with shoppers returning to a website several times from multiple sources (first from an ILS, then later from Google, for instance), uniques may not tell the whole story. My favorite metric to measure is visits, because it counts the people who jump back and forth and return multiple times. It is also necessary to get to the most important metric, conversion.
• Conversion. In simplest form, this is measured by dividing the number of website visits that resulted in a guest card or a phone call by the total number of visits. To accurately measure conversion, the community must track their visits and leads. This can be measured daily, weekly or monthly, but it is best to pull data over a month to really know what is going on.
• Bounce. This metric will display how many prospects are bailing on the website. However, bounce metrics become really powerful when looking at them on a per-page basis. By doing so, marketers can garner greater insight into exactly where prospects are getting tripped up, so the community will know where to focus optimization efforts. There is no target bounce rate, per se, since it will depend largely on which page is being viewed, but Greenough says a community will know it has a problem if the bounce rate on the home page is at or above 40 percent.
Advantage to Analytics
Examining a company’s website analytics can help the company most effectively implement the five steps to creating a website that delivers results. When Princeton Properties recently redesigned its website, the company was sure to research and monitor behaviors on its existing site, Greenough says. By using tools such as Google Analytics, the company was able to measure visits, bounce rates and identify top exit pages as well as in-page analytics.
“This research revealed our roadmap for the website design,” Greenough says. “The in-page content details really showed us what the users were clicking and how frequently. With this valuable information, we were able to lay out our new website with the necessary CTA locations and redundancies to give us the best chance for conversion.”
In a year-over-year comparison of traffic to the Princeton Properties website in 2009 vs. 2010, there was an uptick of 8.23 percent in visits and a 1.88 percent reduction in bounce rates.
Greenough recommends reviewing as much information as possible, setting benchmarks for the company, and monitoring and adjusting strategies as needed. To help paint a big-picture perspective of lead-to-lease statistics at Princeton Properties, the company uses multiple tracking tools including Google Analytics, Callsource, applicant-screening reports, Craigslist posting partnership and tenant-management software, Greenough says.
When optimizing a website for conversion, do not over-think it. Common sense will get properties far, as long as they have identified their goals and are executing them by minimizing the number of steps it takes to get to the guest form, keeping the CTA simple and tracking everything. Lose the Flash intro and focus on getting the prospect to the point of sending a lead or making a reservation. Then, rely on analytics to report what is working and what is not.
The No. 1 goal of building a better website is conversion. While conveying the marketing message is important, it should not trump the easy navigation of the website.
That said, a website need not have one without the other. If a property website delivers an excellent user experience, it will also create a positive image for the brand and benefit from high conversion.
Chris Brown is Vice President of Product Management for Apartments.com