7 Effective Email Marketing Campaigns for Multifamily Success

Top Strategies for Effective Multifamily Lead Nurturing

Multifamily marketing professionals face unique issues with lead nurturing through the marketing funnel.

For the multifamily market, issues arise in the form of heavy competition from neighboring apartments and issues with customer retention. For developers, problems arise with a lack of awareness limiting incoming leads. For vendors, issues arise with qualifying incoming leads to ensure they are legitimate and within the proper target audience.

While many methods help generate leads, the best way to ensure continued success is to nurture your leads. Through lead nurturing, continued strategic contact can help ensure that the leads you generate are properly qualified and remain interested in your offerings.

While lead nurturing is critical to the continued marketing success of any multifamily business, most companies fall woefully behind. According to HubSpot, 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. This is a huge missed opportunity as organizations that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more multifamily leads at 33% lower cost.

And Annuitus Group suggests that not only do companies who use automation to nurture their leads generate 451% more qualified leads but also that those leads are 47% more likely to make a larger purchase than their non-nurtured counterparts.

Knowing these numbers about lead nurturing, how many multifamily marketers miss it?

Valuing a Digital Multifamily Marketing Strategy

The commercial real estate industry is known for being behind the curve in adapting to the latest trends — especially technology. The same is true for marketing techniques.

Groups with no expertise in the industry have no idea how to use digital marketing to meet their marketing needs strategically. Partner this with a hesitancy to leave behind expensive “tried-and-true” outbound methods, and it becomes clear that commercial real estate marketers are unsure how to invest in digital multifamily marketing.

The key to robust digital marketing is to attribute value to that strategy. Many commercial real estate marketers fail to do so, hurting them in the long run. 

The Advantages of Lead Nurturing

• Sustain Engagement: Keep your prospects engaged and maintain top-of-mind awareness for when they are ready to purchase.
• Guide Toward Sales: Nurture your contacts by seamlessly integrating sales messages within informative and valuable thought leadership content.
• Enhance Conversion Rates: Boost the likelihood of converting leads into sales by adopting a nurturing approach that adds value, ultimately maximizing the return on investment (ROI) for acquiring contact data.
• Prevent Lead Fatigue: Reduce the risk of overwhelming leads with aggressive sales pitches immediately after they download one of your resources. People generally prefer an educational and nurturing approach, which contributes to the success of building relationships and driving conversions.

Finding a Balance

Digital marketing relies on the perfect balance of digital strategies, working together in an integrated manner to ensure consistent messaging and continued contact with an apartment lead or prospect. This means unique content — such as blogging, offers, social media content, email marketing, etc. — should all be tied around a central persona, strategy, and buyer’s journey.

Adding these aspects together and ensuring you have the team and resources to run it all adds up. However, compared to the average standard spend on outbound strategies, the cost is typically much less. In fact, inbound multifamily marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet each dollar spent on inbound marketing generates 3x as many apartment leads.

7 Types of Email Marketing Campaigns for Multifamily Lead Nurturing

Typically, when speaking of apartment lead nurturing, people instantly think of email drip campaigns. These are email campaigns automated to go out to a list over a specific period. While this can be a lead nurturing method, it is not the only method.

The fact of the matter is that many types of lead nurturing emails may be used depending on your needs. And each has a benefit or strength.

1. Welcome and Engagement Nurturing

When bringing new leads aboard, it’s wise to nurture them while they are still hot — actively interested. Capitalizing on the novelty of your introduction to them can be a great foot in the door to a positive impression. However, it’s also important not to scare away your multifamily leads by coming off as overeager. This is where a “welcome” campaign comes into place.

The benefit is two-fold: While engaging your lead with your brand, you can use this campaign to gather information to segment the lead further. Step one of a welcome campaign is always the same — you take the time to welcome your new multifamily lead and let them know what to expect. You can also offer a free resource.

Going an extra step, you can offer these leads a way to get customized information depending on their interests. This may take much work on your backend through list segmentation and automation software. But if the framework is there, it’s work that pays off. Offer a weekly newsletter on multifamily trends, interesting statistics, or relevant industry articles.

Engagement campaigns are similar and can often stem as an off-shoot of your welcome campaign. Want feedback on a certain aspect of your business? Engage a list focused on that aspect of a focus group or survey session, and motivate them to participate. In this form of nurturing, your imagination is the limit.

2. Qualification Campaigns

A qualification campaign allows you to hone in on a lead in a critical interest time. Let’s say a multifamily lead downloads a few offers in quick succession. Adding this lead to a qualification campaign lets you speak to them clearly as they try to discover the answer to their problem. Sending more related offers with opportunities to touch base with your team brings you closer to making the lead sales qualified.

3. Traditional Nurturing Campaigns

A traditional nurturing campaign takes your lead’s interest and continues to offer relevant educational material. These types of campaigns most often accompany your overall marketing strategy. This campaign includes keeping in touch with a multifamily lead, giving them small opportunities to convert.

4. Event Campaigns

Whether hosting an event online or in person, an event campaign can help pique interest and attendance. Even if you’re trying to boost attendance to your booth at an industry conference, event campaigns are a great way to spread awareness, boost interest (usually by a unique offer), offer reminders and other great tips leading to your event, and provide an excuse for strong feedback and thank you emails that can further promote conversion.

5. Promotional Campaigns

If you have some multifamily leads you feel are on the edge of closing, a promotional campaign might be a nudge in the right direction. A promotional campaign should be very controlled, not to cheapen the perceived value of your product. Discounts, free bonuses, or even referral bonuses are good ways to augment a promotional campaign.

6. Re-engagement Campaign

Do you have a lot of leads that have gone cold? Purging these leads from your lists can seem like a waste. Instead of letting these multifamily leads go, why not implement a re-engagement campaign? This includes reminding them of your value or offering them something special to engage.

7. Upsell Campaign

Don’t let the title concern you. While upsell campaigns have a negative connotation, they don’t always have to mean or reflect upselling. Rather, an upsell campaign promotes your offerings to existing customers. In some cases, this means offering additional services.

Return Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Knowing that multifamily lead nurturing is far more complex than most marketers realize, the question becomes, which form offers the best return? The answer is not so simple. While each of these nurture campaigns requires a certain amount of upfront investment, the payoff depends entirely on your business.

The question comes down to which problem you are facing the most. If your issue is moving leads down the pipeline, a qualification campaign will most benefit your needs. If you are working on reviving multifamily leads, engagement, and re-engagement campaigns should be your go-to.  

Choosing a nurture campaign tied to your strategy is more important than taking a set-it-and-forget-it route. This is where you can make the most significant impact on your business. Only then will you see sustainable success in nurturing your multifamily leads.