What is Lifecycle Programming?

Lifecycle Programming is a way to automate customer lifecycle marketing for Multifamily.
It combines customer lifecycle marketing efforts from employees and the digital workforce to build stronger customer relationships.

Let’s dive deeper.

 

How Does it Work?

Using a series of plays, Lifecycle Programming provides targeted content to customers. The customer’s stage in the lifecycle determines the play used.

Each play is a collection of email topics to send to customers in a particular stage of the lifecycle. A play contains a mix of automated drips, triggered alerts and eBlasts.All together, these emails work to move customers from one stage to the next. 

Plus, they are faster and easier than traditional email marketing campaigns!

Automation is the key to making Customer Lifecycle Marketing for Multifamily work. Each of the email types used in a play involves some degree of automation. Let’s learn a little more.

 

Triggered Alert

Triggered alerts have the highest level of automation. These emails rely on ambient intelligence to sense and respond to an event. Trigger events can be a result of a property’s action or prospect’s action.

Property triggers result from property management company actions. These can vary from price changes to policy changes.

Prospect triggers are a result of actions taken by the prospect. Events like submitting an application or clicking through an email are prospect triggers.

Take a look at the chart below. It makes it easy to see how little agent effort is required.

For example, a prospect may only click through emails featuring one bedroom apartments. The system uses that information to infer the prospect is looking for a one bedroom apartment. All the agent needs to do is program the system to send the response email once the prospect clicks a particular floor plan.

 

Bonus: With a digital workforce, you can use triggered alerts to answer FAQ for your agents. This gives agents more time to complete tasks that need a personal touch.Let’s take a look at an example of a prospect and a property triggered alert.

Automated Drip

An automated drip is a sequence of emails that are automatically sent in a staggered manner. Drips provide customers with relevant information without overwhelming them. All automated drip emails work together to accomplish a strategic goal using minimal agent effort.

Let’s compare how much an employee has to do for an automated drip compared to the digital workforce.

For example, a resident welcome drip makes residents feel at home by welcoming them to the community and giving them a helpful overview of the area. This is a series of five emails that should be sent to each new resident to increase resident satisfaction.By making it a drip, one person has to design the emails and program the system to send the emails to every customer in the selected lifecycle stage. Once that is set, the digital workforce does the rest.

 

With an automated drip, you know each resident is cared for without having every agent repeat the same tasks for every new resident.

 

Sidenote: A property management company would only send this drip to a new resident. It wouldn’t make sense to send this to other audiences because they are already familiar with the area or they don’t live in the area. See why it is important to segment your email list according to the lifecycle stage?

eBlast

eBlasts are emails that you send one time only to a large audience. Since each of these emails are unique, there is not a way to program the system to design them. Plus, there is no need to program a sending schedule since they are only sent once. These emails need the most employee effort.

 

As you can see in the chart, the digital workforce and the human workforce tasks are evenly distributed. The lack of repetition in creation of an eBlast makes it difficult to program.

For example, an event invite is a one-time event with a large target audience. The human workforce understand the need to invite the guests and designs an appropriate email. Once the human workforce has scheduled the email, the digital workforce sends it at the right time and tracks the analytics.

 

Did you notice? This is the only type of email type where the digital workforce doesn’t sense and respond. The digital workforce responds to a repeated event. An eBlast is not repeated so there is nothing to the system to sense. With nothing to sense, it can’t respond.

 

Most companies are still using eBlasts for all customer communications. By using digital workforce driven emails, your email campaign becomes more efficient. Plus, your human workforce has more time to spend on developing more strategies and campaigns!

Now what?

Lifecycle Programming provides a variety of automation levels. It makes it easy to keep track of a CLM campaign for Multifamily!

Now, you need to pick where to start automating your customer lifecycle marketing.

 

Tune in next Thursday! We will be discussing how Lifecycle Programming can increase resident retention while decreasing employee effort!

Want a refresher on all of the plays? Here’s the Ultimate Guide to Lifecycle Programming.

 

Your Turn. We want to know what play excites you the most and what about Lifecycle Programming scares you the most. Comment below!