New business is always going to be important to a property management company with an eye on growth. Some churn is inevitable, and a growth-based focus then requires adding new properties under your professional care. At Geekly Media, we are all about sustainable expansion: We run a marketing department for the sole purpose of bringing in new property management leads to our clients.
Right now, though, there's some uncertainty in the market—which makes it a great time to talk about customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and client retention.
When things are uncertain, and owners are waiting to see what the market is going to do (and thus not signing on for property management), client retention should be a top focus.
As a refresher, your customer acquisition cost is the amount of marketing spend in a set period divided by the number of clients it brought in. If you spend $1,000 to get five new clients, your CAC was $200 for the period. You can calculate this by channel, as well as overall marketing spend, to get an idea of where your marketing dollars are best allocated. The next number you need to know is your customer lifetime value. How much do you make per client on average? The lower your CAC, and the longer you keep clients, the higher your CLV.
This is why customer retention is so important. We see a lot of strategies to attain new clients, but fewer strategies focused on retaining existing clients. That said, we definitely think this needs to be a crucial attack angle for your business right now as we start moving into 2020 late-game strategy.
Instead of focusing purely on new property management leads, here are some strategies for client retention. That way, your marketing spend can go toward growing your business—instead of maintaining it.
1. Use a CRM
Your customer relationship management program is not just for acquiring clients; it also helps you retain them. By storing the complete history of your clients' needs, goals, issues, and interactions with your company in one record, you can be sure that whoever answers the phone has all the information they need at their fingertips to provide excellent customer service.
Plus, using a CRM is a great tool to build an upsell strategy around.
- Don't stop taking notes on client interactions once you've made the sale!
- Keep a record of their ongoing relationship with you and regularly review for new opportunities.
2. Improve Customer Self-Service
- Build a knowledge base and let your owners, renters, and would-be clients easily access all of your resources quickly and easily from their cell phone as they wait in line for a mocha.
- Every answer they can find online reduces the chance of a long, irritating hold on phones or other bad interactions.
- This increases client satisfaction because, on average, customers prefer knowledge bases over all other forms of self-service.
3. Automate, Automate, Automate!
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With late rent collection automation, you'll always be able to tell an owner where you are in the rent collection process.
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With leasing automation, you'll get your renewals from clients and tenants back faster with less interruption to their lives.
4. Collect and Listen to Feedback
The time to start worrying about client retention isn't after you've lost 50 clients; it is before you've lost any.
- Regularly collect client feedback (both from your owner clients AND your renters) using HubSpot's Net Promoter Score.
- By regularly taking the 'temperature' of your clients, you'll be able to spot a bad review waiting to happen—and head off departmental issues that could cause major churn.
It is better to be surprised by your low NPS than it is by the landslide of lost business!
If you need help with customer retention, we're ready to talk! From property management automation with our Property Management Operating System (PMOS) to client retention marketing campaigns, we've got you covered.
Schedule a 15-minute discovery call with our team to see if we might be a good fit for your automation needs! Or, get started with a free automation analysis to see how much time and money our PMOS can save your property management business when it comes to retaining clients—and finding new property management leads!
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