3 Simple Steps to Improving Your Facility’s Rental Process
Over the past year, renting isn’t what it used to be. As the pandemic led to the increase in online activity throughout all industries, it’s important that storage facilities adopt a streamlined online experience for their tenants. Consumers expect speed, reliability, and accessibility. By failing to meet your tenants’ expectations, you risk losing revenue from online traffic – which, in this current landscape, could also mean losing your business.
Improving the renter’s online experience is key to remaining successful. Implementing the newest in online rental suite technology, understanding the latest in digital marketing strategies, and prioritizing your facility’s experience can be the difference between staying afloat and drowning from the constant wave of newer facilities.
Enhance the end-user experience and help your tenants using these three steps below:
Use an Online Rental Suite, not a Rental Tool
Simply put, an online rental suite is a robust self storage rental platform of extensive, customizable features that enhance facility awareness, increase online revenue, and provide tenants with a user-friendly experience. In contrast, an online rental tool only provides renters with the ability to select unit sizes, reserve them, and make a payment online.
The difference between the two online rental options is pivotal in maintaining customer retention and enhancing the overall user experience on your website. The online rental suite is built with these three ideas in mind: revenue, security, and freedom. These platforms increase facility revenue, online security, and tenant freedoms with features like Tiered Value Pricing, Detailed Reporting, Advanced ID Verification, eSign Lease Customization and advanced lease options such as eSign Before You Pay.
Rental tools are a one-way method to communicate your businesses’ goals and ideas to potential tenants, whereas Online Rental Suites encompass both the renter and facility owner’s experience.
Online rentals are no longer one-sided with a rental suite. Facility owners can manage their revenue by adding value to units based on location with Tiered Value Pricing and a 3D Map; understand their facility’s various revenue streams with Detailed Reporting; add security to the renters’ experience and prevent misinformation with an advanced ID verification system like SureScan ID Verification. With additional features like eSign Lease Customization, facilities can create one lease for multiple units or one lease per unit, and streamline the signing experience with eSign Sign-and-Pay. By adopting the Online Rental Suite to your facility, you add a robust feature set that proves to your tenants that you care about their experience and that you are committed to adapting with this new digital landscape.
Remaining on the cutting-edge is vital to your facility’s success. Use an Online Rental Suite, not a Rental Tool.
Understand the latest in Digital Marketing
Having a viable digital marketing strategy is key to improving your facility’s rental process. While this step doesn’t provide the direct end-user benefits of implementing an Online Rental Suite, it is pivotal to ensuring that renters find your facility easily through online search. Optimizing your website through SEO guidelines, building your Google My Business page, and ensuring that your site has a consistent brand are important steps to creating a viable digital marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. When your site is truly optimized for SEO, it builds brand awareness and recognition, online visibility, and leads to more website visitors becoming actual tenants. Your rankings on a given search engine results page, or SERP, are important to building trust as a brand, and increasing revenue..
One way to improve your search rankings is by building your local listings, and the best way to promote your local listing is through a Google My Business listing. With Google My Business, your listing can appear in the top three local pack, a knowledge panel profile on the right side of the SERP, and Google Maps. By including your address, services, and phone number, along with your website, facility images, and an SEO optimized description on Google My Business, you increase your brand’s visibility and tenant awareness.
However, while leading visitors to your site is important, a consistent brand keeps potential renters on your page and turns them into fully-fledged tenants.
Consistent branding enhances your online and offline rental experience and leaves an impression on potential renters, creating recognition with your facility. A weak brand can hurt your facility, the rental experience, and your digital marketing strategy. Strengthen your brand with a recognizable logo, colors, social media and website content, and a consistent voice throughout your website’s copy.
Prioritize the Facility Experience
Your facility’s experience consists of both the online and offline experience. Prioritize the facility experience by creating a recognizable branded site that follows the look of your facility, choosing to use a rental suite, and a solid customer service experience that spans all avenues of communication.
A streamlined online rental experience translates into real life sales. The Online Rental Suite keeps users on your branded site, instead of forcing them to switch to a new window like a traditional rental tool. The Rental Suite also compacts the eSign Lease process, allowing tenants to add multiple addendums in a single transaction, and have the lease front-and-center, before any payment is made.
The implementation of all the strategies listed in this article lead to a truly robust online experience that primes them to visit your in-person facility with eager expectations – after all, a happy customer is a customer that’s willing to spend more. Keep your customers happy by continuing to strengthen your facility’s experience.
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Have any questions? Interested in learning more about digital marketing strategies and the ClickandStor® Online Rental Suite, the industry leader in increasing revenue, security, and tenant freedom? Request a demo with The Storage Group today.
