What Is Conversion Rate Optimization in Property Management Marketing?

Do you know—or could you find out—the answers to these questions?

• What is your visitor-to-contact ratio?
• What are your landing page conversion rates?
• Email open rate?
• Email click-through rate?
• CTA click rates?

With the economy taking a downturn, your property management marketing needs to start working smarter. We're not trying to be alarmist: but traffic might start to fluctuate. As a property management business, you need to make the most of what you have—and increase the number of leads already coming to your site.

 The process of optimizing the ways your internet traffic becomes leads is called conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Conversion rate optimization can be done manually by collecting data and measuring how changes affect it and through programs like HubSpot that support A/B testing and can be set to automatically make changes based on your rules.

CRO the Manual Way

• First, you need to determine the conversion rate of all of your conversion points throughout your property management website.
• Depending on the host of your site and the reporting tools available to you, you may have to do this manually.
• If conversion rates are not provided, you can just divide the number of conversions by the total views.
• It's a good idea to track this monthly so you can tell whether your efforts are working.

Here's an example so you can see what we mean: if a form on your home page has three conversions in a month for 2,500 views, its conversion rate would be (3/2500)*100=.12%.

Track everything on a spreadsheet monthly—quarterly at the least—so you can see the results of your efforts. Next, pick your top five most valuable pages, the pages that the best leads come from, or the pages with the highest traffic. You'll probably want to start your efforts on these pages, so you bring in more of the leads that bring good business while you optimize the rest of your property management marketing through your website.

The key to conversion rate optimization is to use data to make decisions. It isn't about a gut feeling or what your executives want—it is about hard data. Using tools like heat mapping can help you make decisions that will improve your conversion rate. Look at what parts of the pages you are optimizing your visitors spend the most time on:

• Do they scroll down far enough to find your form?
• Are they hovering their mouse near your conversion points?

Once you understand the behavior of your property management website visitors, you can start to make decisions to improve the conversion of your pages. If your pricing page, for example, is the page with the highest traffic other than the home page, you'll want to start by optimizing there.

• Is there even a conversion opportunity on this page? If not, start there!
• If there is, is it easy to see?
• Is it near the top of the page, or do users have to scroll down to find it?
• If it is there and is easy to see, does it have a compelling call to action (CTA)?

Go through this process on your pages, then track your traffic and conversions for the next few months to see if your changes are improving your conversion rate.

CRO with HubSpot

If you have HubSpot, your conversion rate optimization is going to be a lot easier! HubSpot has built-in metrics monitoring, so you can easily track your conversion rate of every page hosted on the HubSpot CMS by just viewing your HubSpot reports. From there, you can easily use the built-in A/B testing to optimize the easy elements, testing things like calls to action. 

HubSpot's A/B testing allows you to split your traffic into two equal segments automatically and then pick the statistically significant better option. The trick is only changing one thing at a time, so you know for sure whether that change was what increased conversion.

Split testing for conversion optimization doesn't have to stop with things like whether your CTA is blue or red. You can use split testing to determine if adding additional photos to a page helps conversion, or adding an infographic. You can test anything you can change on a page, then set the program to monitor results.

Conversion rate optimization makes the most out of the traffic you have, so when times get tough, you don't suffer as much. Conversion rate optimization is also an ongoing project that never ends. In essence, consumer behaviors change over time, so you'll always want to keep an eye on your property management metrics, so you know when you need to make adjustments to get more leads.

Using the HubSpot platform for your marketing makes CRO easy—and partnering with Geekly Media makes it effortless! We'll help you get more leads with the right content and conversion opportunities at the right time. Contact us today to get started improving your conversion ratio! There's no reason to let your property management marketing go to waste even in the face of uncertainty.