A great website and marketing team will only take your community so far—it’s absolutely essential that your site is set up to drive conversion. Yet many communities’ sites present hurdles and barriers to conversion that can cost you leads, tours, and leases. To help you assess your site, we have identified six of the most common mistakes apartment communities make and explained why they can hamper your best lead-gen efforts.
1: Low-quality images
Humans are visual beings—more than 50% of our brains are devoted to processing visual information. Because we are so visual, images are the key to great customer-brand connections.
Most apartment seekers start on your home page, move quickly to floor plans, and then visit your gallery pages to understand what your community looks like.
Many communities’ images could benefit from regular updates. If your images are of poor quality or are outdated, your prospects might not convert. Ensure your images are up to date, are good quality, and show all your community has to offer. Optimizing your images for web will help keep your website safe from slow load times—another costly mistake we will attack in a few points.
2: Lack of key information
Most apartment seekers have similar questions. They want to know your pricing and floor plan availability. They want to know if your community is pet-friendly. They may have questions about amenities.
Make sure to display your community’s phone number and address at the top of your website so it is easy to find. Be sure both are clickable, so prospective tenants can call your community or map your address easily.
Accurately portray your current pricing and availability on your floor plan pages so active apartment seekers know what they have to choose from. In addition, make it easier for prospects to ask questions when they browse your site. Our Live Chat is particularly effective in giving your prospective tenants the answers they want. Nearly 80% of conversations convert into leads, and one in three chat leads schedule tours.
3: Not enough area info
Your tenants are interested in more than floor plans and amenities. They also want to know what the surrounding community offers, and they may not be as familiar with the neighborhood as you are. Be sure to include information on nearby activities, amenities, restaurants, landmarks, and attractions on your site. In your ad copy, be sure to include the location name and neighborhood. Don’t assume that your prospective tenants are as familiar as you are.
Some communities incorporate maps that show their location as well as nearby shops, restaurants, bars, and other attractions. If you have this feature, you have to ensure that if users choose to filter for restaurants, for example, results will populate. Otherwise, frustration can mount.
4: Weak CTAs
Once your visitors are on your site, you want to engage them in taking the next step with clear calls to action (CTAs). A contact form doesn’t cover it—and in fact can act as a barrier to conversion. You want to compel conversion when interest is highest.
Show your tour availability and make it easy for people to take the next step with an easy-to-use automated scheduling tool like ScheduleGenie. Make it easy to find your phone number and enable Call Us Now when your on-site team is available. As above, engage with Live Chat to increase conversions. In addition, our tools work on mobile, so your site won’t lose its CTAs when visitors are using smartphones or tablets.
5: Slow load time
It’s true: slow load times hurt your conversions and your bottom line. And load time is really a numbers game: 53% of users will bounce if your page takes longer than three seconds to load. And almost everyone bounces if load time exceeds 10 seconds. That sounds like a long time, but the average mobile site load time in 2019 was 22 seconds.
While load time can affect your conversions, it is also critical to good user experience, and it affects your ad results. In fact, Google will not prioritize your ad over another if the load time on your landing page is slow.
Load time is slowed by larger images or images that haven’t been optimized for the web, so this is a place to start if your load time is slow. In addition, the way your website is coded and where you host your videos can also affect load time (hint: be sure you’re hosting your videos via other sources than your site).
Start fixing your load time by diagnosing your web speed across all devices with PageSpeed Insights. You can also analyze your mobile speed and access insights on the load speed for your competitors with a tool called Test My Site.
6: Not mobile-friendly
There are 100 million renters in the US, and the majority—nearly 60% of them—start the search using a mobile device. In addition, according to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site if they had difficulty accessing it on mobile—and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead. Put simply, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your community is missing out.
The mobile version of your site can have formatting errors, or the calls to action—like your Apply Now and Call Us buttons—can be lost. Use Test My Site for specific insights for your mobile site and how it performs in relation to your competitors.
Interested in learning more about how we can boost your website traffic and conversion rates?
Reach out to talk with one of our experts!
Conversion Logix supercharges your multifamily marketing with lease-driven campaigns, powerful conversion tools, and industry-leading customer service. Since our founding in 2010, we have assembled a team with decades of industry experience and provided leases for hundreds of communities across the country.
