How one property manager is leveraging AI to funnel email prospect leads.
Morgan Properties is driving more signed leases by leveraging its Google My Business (GMB) listings with links to online bots that live on its websites.
The strategy represents two emerging marketing trends: Emphasizing GMB and prospering from the enhanced lead-qualifying capabilities that bots can deliver.
When prospective residents find a community on an ILS or through a GMB search result and decide they want to contact a community, they will be led to an online bot, which triggers artificial intelligence to guide the prospect through a text-based conversation process of setting an appointment and learning more about the community.
Bots Make Tracking Leads Easier
Kim Boland, Director of Digital Marketing for Morgan Properties, is using BetterBot for Leads to drive this traffic via five pilot programs she began in June.
Boland posts her bot links on Morgan Properties’ GMB pages as well as ILS sites such as Zillow, RentPath and Apartment List, and then has the bot nurture the email leads.
Boland said tracking leads from the bot listings became much easier recently after she was able to connect them to her communities’ property management software, which added them as a source.
“This is definitely generating more appointment leads for us than any other avenue,” Boland said. “The bot is high-performing and is giving us more accurate data.”
Through October, it directly led to 129 signed leases.
“We’re getting these better-qualified leads, but our leasing teams still need to close the deal,” Boland said. “But just getting our online visitors to schedule an appointment is a huge step.”
Boland said that if she can get the APIs that allow Better Bot to push appointments directly to their CRM – third party to third party – eliminating the middleman, “then that would be a huge game-changer for us.”
Leads Are Funneled as Appropriate
The advanced bot works to determine which leads are most viable for the property and then funnels those leads to the community’s CRM for further action.
Leads that are not qualified will funnel to a different channel to be handled as the leasing team sees fit. Using bots in this manner means no more sifting through leads to find out which are going to take action. It does the hard work so onsite teams can focus on converting those qualified leads, Boland said.
Working onsite has become overwhelming lately. It’s understandable that team members would rather be working to establish relationships with prospects and residents alike, not spending all their time qualifying leads.
Paul Bergeron is a freelance writer.