Why Tenant Experience is Essential When Promoting Your Property

Investing in great experiences won’t just help you delight your current tenants, it also improves your marketing conversion and fills more units. The tenant experience can be used as a valuable tool for promoting your properties. We’re sharing some beneficial tips to help your team get started with leveraging the power of tenant happiness. 

What Is Tenant Experience? 

Simply put, tenant experience is the sum of all experiences that tenants have with your business. That includes scheduling their first tour as a prospect, communicating with your team via text and email as a tenant, all the way to their move-out. 

The Effect Tenant Experiences Have On Your Marketing 

There’s been an enormous shift in the marketing landscape in the past decade and a half. Before 2007, marketing teams connected with potential tenants through television ads, radio, direct mail, and other paid advertising channels. However, there was no way for tenants to communicate back and share their experiences with the world. 

The rise of the smartphone caused a major paradigm shift. Nowadays, potential tenants can very easily find the experiences of other tenants. All they have to do is pull out their smartphone, do a Google search, and read reviews on sites like Google and Facebook. Tenants value this social proof—it’s been estimated that 92% of tenants read reviews before making a purchase decision. 

In 2021, your marketing team doesn’t control the conversation, your tenants do.

While marketing teams still serve an important role, their focus needs to shift in accordance with evolving tenant habits. To drive results, marketers need to focus on the following:

1. Ensure that tenants are having a great experience from the moment they discover your business. 
2. Empower tenants to share their positive experiences online on review sites and social media. 

How To Provide A Fantastic Tenant Experience 

To better understand how property management businesses can provide a fantastic tenant experience, let’s break down the typical tenant journey into three parts. 

Desire 

In the desire phase, prospective tenants realize they have a need or a desire for a new place to live. At this point, they’ll start doing their research online. Of course, they are also looking for assurance they’ll get the best experience possible given their budget. Usually, they receive this assurance through online reviews and referrals from friends and family. That’s why it’s so important for property management companies to actively solicit social proof from existing tenants. 

Decide 

When a client is interested in one of your units, they will usually contact you to get some questions answered and schedule a tour. At this point, it’s important to provide seamless communication and quick responses. Phone calls don’t cut it anymore—it’s estimated that 75% of potential tenants who don’t reach you on the first call won’t call back. If they can’t get in touch with anyone on your team in a timely manner, they know that the competition is just a Google search away. That’s why web chat can be so effective—prospects can get in contact with your team within minutes. 

Delight 

The journey isn’t over once a prospect turns into a tenant. A single bad experience is all it takes to get a previously happy tenant to start writing negative reviews online. The best way to counteract this problem is to be proactive in collecting tenant feedback. Sending surveys regularly can help you identify issues before they come up and act before they escalate. 

If you’re able to provide a great experience across all these different touchpoints, you’ll be able to create a flywheel effect for your properties. Great experiences will lead to great reviews. Great reviews, in turn, lead to higher conversion and more units filled.

Choosing The Right Tenant Experience Marketing Platform 

While there are plenty of point solutions that can handle individual steps of the Experience Marketing process, all-in-one platforms can save your team time by centralizing reviews, interactions, and surveys in one place so you can identify the moment a happy tenant turns into a dissatisfied one and take immediate action. 

To learn more about Experience Marketing, check out this guide written specifically for property managers that contains tips and insights on capturing tenant sentiments at scale.

About Birdeye

Birdeye is a customer experience platform that integrates seamlessly with Rent Manager to help reinforce your online presence through reviews, stay in contact with tenants through text messaging interactions, and optimize your business with survey and insights tools.

This article was contributed by Birdeye, a Rent Manager integration.