I learned an interesting statistic this morning, there are more than 18,000 redbox kiosks and new kiosks are currently being installed at a rate of one per hour! My first reaction was "wow, we're in the wrong business!". But, I am of the school of thought that there are lesson to learn from every business. The case study that I read, essentially concluded that no matter what product, or even service, we are offering - we need to give our customers (residents) less choices.
As product managers, we have somehow convinced ourselves that our customers both want and need more choices when it comes to our products. This thinking has allowed us to heap on more and more choices for our customers to make: colors, pricing plans, features, etc. However, it just may be the case that the one thing that our customers really don't want is to have to make more decisions in order to buy our products.
So, here's my question for you – how many choices do your prospects have in the decision making process? How many floorplans are there to chose from? How many pages on your website give choices other than lease an apartment with us?
One of our policies is that every website we build must provide access to decision making information (i.e. physical address, contact info, rental application, etc) with 3 clicks or less. From the home page of a website, a prospect should not have to click more than 3 pages "deep" to have vital information. We see far too many apartment websites that require home > floorplans > floorplan B > options > rent online. The more times someone has to click, the higher the chance they'll leave your site without making a decision.
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Elysa Rice is Ellipse Communication's Emerging Media Consultant. Ellipse is celebrating 10 years providing websites and software to the multifamily industry.