If the COVID-19 outbreak has taught us anything, it’s that we should be working smarter, not harder. Automation is one way to achieve this.
Automation doesn’t have to mean big budgets and fancy software. It can be as simple as setting up a chat bot on your Facebook page to help you field enquiries. Or it could be a smart email journey that helps to guide those early visitors down the path to conversion.
In the self storage business, owners are always on the lookout for new leads. Attracting new leads to the site, capturing their information, and delivering a message at the right time is key to success. It doesn’t matter if you’re at full capacity, the lead nurturing never stops.
This is where automation can help. When you free up time that was previously spent fielding the top of the funnel leads, you can focus more time on nurturing the warmest leads, re-engaging lapsed customers and improving your customer service.
In this blog, we’ll share some of the easiest ways you can use automation in digital marketing for storage.
What is automation?
Marketing automation is anything you can set up once and leave running. It’s commonly used on social media and email marketing to help increase conversion rates. It may take a little more investment of your time to get everything up and running, but once you’ve built your systems and assigned rules, you won’t have to lift a finger.
Why automation fails
You may have experimented with automation in the past and found it too complicated or too time-consuming to set up. Automation often fails because of one of the following reasons:
Your goals are too broad. When it comes to automation, you need to be very specific about what you want to achieve. This means segmenting your audiences by behaviour and intent and then targeting these segments with the right message at the right time.
You failed to rethink the process. Automation often requires a completely fresh approach to your marketing activity. If you just automate the simplest steps, you won’t notice any change to your results.
You set it up too quickly and make mistakes. Mistakes in your automation can quickly spiral out of control, sending the wrong messages to the wrong people, or sending emails with glaring errors. A mistake in your automation might make you want to keep a closer eye on the outgoing messages.
Automation for self storage companies
Email automation
Email automation is probably the most accessible avenue to explore in your self storage company. But before you can start to send automated emails, you need to segment your audience.
You could segment your customers based on the type of storage they are looking for, the type of content they have engaged with, or even as potential and lapsed customers.
By setting up rules, you can decide to send different emails to your audience based on their previous behaviour. Automation is all about nurturing, not selling. Customers shouldn’t just get a succession of sales emails, but a series of emails that determine just how keen they are to start a storage contract with you. If a customer opens and engages with every email you send them, you can safely assume this is a warm lead.
Social media automation
Social media automation might look like a chatbot that fields your initial enquiries. Having someone around to respond to each and every Facebook message can be very time consuming, so creating a simple chatbot journey can help to reduce the time spent manually replying to messages.
At the very least, a chatbot autoresponder can let your customers know when they can expect a response, and how to get in touch faster if they would like immediate assistance. Many people research companies on social media first, and they expect to be able to contact these companies using Facebook Messenger. By creating a simple autoresponder, you can manage expectations and reduce the risk of losing leads.
Automation doesn’t have to be complicated. With a clear goal and an understanding of the technology, you can create smart automated journeys that help to streamline communications and qualify your leads.
If you’re ready to get started with email automation for your self storage company, get in touch with Auburn to find out how we can help.