Introduction

Nurturing prospects is one of the most important steps to convert a lead into a lease. According to Hubspot, 47% of shoppers look at three to five unique marketing materials prior to reaching out to sales personnel. Lead nurturing campaigns can provide more frequent and consistent touches than a purely human workforce.

Considering that nurturing emails average a 4-10% higher response rate than traditional campaigns, we think you are going to want to invest in it.

So, we wanted to create a playbook that outlines how you should communicate with prospects during the 4 most important prospect journeys. Communicating with prospects consistently during these journeys makes prospects more comfortable and excited to sign a lease!

Let’s explore the email options for communicating with warm and cold leads!

Pre-Tour Emails

Why email prospects before their tour? Due to the introduction of big ILSes like Apartments.com and Zillow, prospects are overwhelmed with apartment options. Emailing your prospects before they tour can set you apart from the competition.

Take a minute and think about how many recipes you have pinned on Pinterest.

If you are anything like us, those new, tasty recipes are sitting untouched on our "Foodie” board. Even though we think these recipes sound good and we have to eat, we still end up making the same five recipes over again.

Why? There are three main reasons:

1. We forgot about our newly saved recipe.
2. We slip into old habits because they are familiar.
3. We don’t want to put in the work to learn a new recipe.

Your prospects do the same thing when it comes to apartment shopping. They have a need to move and they like your property, but lots of times they fill out a guest card and ghost you. They aren’t trying to be mean. They probably forgot or are too busy to do the work to get to know more about your property.

Then, they tour the first three properties they can remember. Prospects assume that since these properties are top-of-mind, they were the best. Even though lots of times that isn’t true.

That’s why you need to email prospects before they tour your property.

Using the Pre-Tour Email Set pictured above keeps your property top-of-mind without spamming your leads. Once your prospect know about the features, amenities and neighborhood, they are ready for a visit! This email combo makes it easy to move customers from new to toured on the customer lifecycle journey!

Now that this prospect is touring, let’s talk about how to nurture them after the tour!

Make Your Post-Tour Follow-up Better Now

You can take all kinds of tours. You can tour museums, cities, apartments, etc. When you are on the tour, you are getting a very real experience about a subject.

Let’s think about this for a minute.

Most people understand that dinosaurs were big creature, but its not until you are standing next to the skeletons at the National Museum of Natural History that you fully comprehend how scared Chris Pratt’s character must have been in Jurassic World.

Yet, a few days later you revert back to your basic idea that dinosaurs were big.

A similar thing happens when a prospect tours your apartment. They can tour your property and clearly see how they would personalize each room to make it their home.

However, after a few days, the homey feeling fades back into “Yeah, that apartment was nice.” That’s why we have the Post-Tour email set. It is made to make your property seem like home again.

Together, the Post-Tour Email Set above remind prospects why they fell in love with your property. They ease the transition from toured to closing in the multifamily customer lifecycle.

Now that your prospects have seen your property and learned about the current availability, it’s time to close the deal. Next, we are going to explore what email topics can help!

It’s Closing Time

For starters, if you sang that heading, you're awesome. If you didn’t, your still cool, but you should definitely spend more time listening to 90’s music. Regardless, this play is all about getting your prospects to sign a lease!

The Closing Email Set encourages prospects to take the plunge and sign a lease. Using a combination of special offer emails, you can appeal to every prospect.

How Does it Work?

This email combo functions differently than the others. The closing email set is made up of a variety of special offer emails. We recommend creating a few special offer emails and rotating them. Each offer should expire after a week. This gives the prospects enough time to take advantage of the offer, but provides a little nudge to sign sooner than later. Plus, by rotating the offers weekly, you can send prospects a new offer that may sound more appealing. 

Now, we understand most special offers equate to a similar savings. Yet, different people are interested in different offers.

To a fitness buff, a waived amenity fee might be really excited since could mean free gym, pool and lake access.

However, a prospect who just got hired might prefer half-off the first month’s rent. It often takes three or more weeks before a new hire gets their first paycheck. By having a prorated first month, it would take some of the stress off of the prospect.

Let’s take a peek at what some of these special offer emails look like.

The Closing Email Set seen above makes it easy to tell prospects about your new deals. Plus, it gives them a variety of offers that speak to each unique customer--- and they accelerate the lead-to-lease cycle!

Now that you have taken care of your active leads, let’s see what we can do about those pesky cold leads!

Baby, Come Back

Not every lead is going to turn into a lease, no matter how well you nurture them. Maybe they can’t afford your neighborhood or want a floor plan you don’t offer. However, things could be different in a few months. We believe that these leads are worth fighting for, so we collected the best Win-Back emails for Multifamily.

The Win-Back emails stick to a tried and true approach to getting someone back (Think: John Cusack only swap the boombox for an email):

1. Telling them you miss them
2. Reminding them why they should be missing you

The Win-Back emails can do more than just get more leases signed. They breath new life into your list rentals too! Instead of spending on new list rentals, you can revitalize your old ones. You’d be surprised how many of them will be apartment shopping again!

The Win-Back Email Set pictured above gives you more prospects for free by reaching out to dormant leads. All you need to do is remind them why you are the property for them. 

Conclusion

These email sets reach out to prospects when they need it most. Plus they are strategically positioned to move prospects one step closer to residency. Now, we realize this is a lot of work to add to your already swamped agents, but there are a lot of email automation platforms that can deliver these emails automatically. Besides, the facts don't lie. Lead nurturing gain 50% more sales ready leads.

That's more than enough to convince us to invest in prospect communications.