Over the years, I’ve found high-performing marketers share one trait: strong relationship-building skills — both one-on-one and at scale.

Relationships are core to multifamily. Without earning trust from prospective residents, multifamily marketers can’t be successful — and these days, that trust needs to happen quickly, and digitally. 

For today’s consumers, that requires instant gratification and personalization: lickety-split, smooth-as-butter, made-for-me experiences.

Researchers: Hyper-personalized “care of one” as a baseline consumer expectation

Why bother with personalization? 

Put simply, today’s consumers demand it, reports McKinsey. In the age of Amazon and Netflix, the research firm found seven in 10 consumers expect personalized experiences and get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. 

“If consumers don’t like the experience they receive, it’s easier than ever for them to choose something different,” the report reads. What’s more, by 2025, consumers will expect white-glove service for all, or hyper-personalized “care of one,” as McKinsey describes it. 

Altogether, the stakes of getting personalization right (or wrong) are multiplying, warn researchers. Personalization and its importance to multifamily remains a largely untapped opportunity, with multifamily lagging behind other industries that have long reaped sharp increases in conversions as a result of automating “made-for-me” experiences at scale. 

That’s good news for astute multifamily marketers looking to stand out, outperform and outearn competitors.

Personalization in Multifamily

What’s possible when you personalize renter journeys for every single lead? 

Allow me to share the results of a 90-day pilot with a Chicago-based property management group.

Marketing leaders at the Laramar Group, which manages a portfolio of nearly 150 properties, were looking to revamp their lead management. With limited staff and lots of leads, Laramar teams were struggling to keep up and discern high-value leads from low-value ones, spending a ton of time on low-impact activities like answering repetitive, routine questions. Good leads were slipping through the cracks and the team was frazzled trying to juggle the volume of inquiries and unqualified leads coming at them.

Laramar leaders decided to pilot this new technology at select properties for 90 days, then compare results against metrics from the previous year for the same properties.

Initially, the Laramar team had been focused on an AI-powered chatbot capability to manage FAQs on its websites. With technology, they realized the conversational AI component could also learn from each interaction to customize follow-up (nurture) communications. The more users interacted with the property’s website and inbound channels, the more the AI learned, and the more it could use that intel to personalize individual messaging, cadence, calls to actions and more, to match each prospect’s interests, behaviors, and preferences.

Three months later, Laramar reported:

• 182% increase in lead-to-tour conversions
• 113% increase in website traffic to lead conversion
• 90.4% of tours scheduled, requiring zero human interaction
• 2,858 fewer hours spent managing leads, equating to a $57,160 in payroll value
• $43,116 in savings or cost avoidance in lead generation (more leads generated from web traffic, plus more tours from nurtured leads)

What a difference!

What, exactly, can multifamily marketers personalize?

Prospect data generally falls across three broad categories:

• Basic contact info (e.g., name, email, phone number)
• Detailed first-party data (self-reported preferences like move-in window, preferred floor plans or bedroom/bathroom counts, desired amenities, budget, etc.)
• Metadata (data captured and stored in your technology systems like website visits, traffic sources, devices used, duration of session, etc.)
  
  

What can you do with that data? Personalization tactics might include:

• First name: Using the prospect’s name in your nurture outreach or on your website in a welcome back message
• Move-in window: Using that timeframe to create urgency in your messaging, or to adjust messaging frequency and themes
• Pet preference: Showing how your community supports pets and their owners
• Preferred floor plan: Sending reminders about a floor plan they loved, or similar ones that might interest them
• Website activity: Using past website behaviors to determine the next best step for the prospect to take on the website, nudging them to the next stage in the renting journey
• Communications preferences: Sharing information in their preferred formats or channels

Put simply, if you know a prospect’s preferred amenities or floor plans, for example, there’s a lot you can tailor to those interests in your communications, whether it’s an email outreach, SMS nurture, and even in face-to-face conversations when it’s time for an agent to get involved.

Messaging timing is another opportunity to reflect prospect preferences. People who’ve reported a longer move-in time frame might need messages that are spaced out further over time than someone who’s looking to move more quickly. 

Channel preferences — email over SMS, for example — also offer opportunities to cater to individual prospects.

The data piece and how to capture it

Before you can personalize communications, you must be able to collect and deploy prospect data with ease. And by “ease” I mean easy for prospects, of course, but also easy for staff, without adding to their workload. 

Rather, prospect data should be easily queried and automated so the right message is delivered to the right person at the right time — even if that’s at 2 a.m. when prospect “Joe” is browsing your website during a late-night TV binge.

The best way to capture prospect data? Trade it for something of value. 

One way to do that is to create interactive website experiences (think interactive floor plans, chatbot, quizzes, and more) that can deliver instant answers or support for property seekers.

Potential interactive experiences for your property website might include:

• Expense calculator
• Floor plan match/compare/save for future reference
• Pre-qualification
• Virtual/video tour
• Booking a tour
• Website chatbot interactions
  …and more.

The more data you can capture from prospects, the more you can personalize experiences. In doing so, marketers should shoot for “magical” experiences that competitors can’t replicate with ease, Accenture researchers advise.

Exploring what’s possible

With the right tools, your multifamily team can supercharge renter conversions and onsite team performance. Heck, you might even reduce spending and workload significantly, all while delighting prospective renters. It’s the beauty of blending AI-powered automations and personalization with human talent to get the best of both worlds.

What can you begin personalizing with the data you have today?