The recommendations in this article are specifically meant to assist in lowering on-market times, improving staff efficiency, and reducing marketing spend. We know that's a tall order, but those are the goals ShowMojo was built to achieve.
There a several items to consider here, and we will work through them one at a time. That will include linking off to additional articles for implementation details. Depending on how deep you go, be prepared for this to take some time. The great news, though, is you are ensuring that ShowMojo's Leasing Automation acts on your team's behalf, with the high-touch activities and performance expectations that matter most.
One note: All of the features discussed in this article are included with our PRO, ELITE, single-family and multi-family accounts (but not all are included in ShowMojo CLASSIC).
1. Daily Performance Alerts
The first step is to ensure that a comprehensive monitoring system is in place, so your team knows what issues to act on.
Daily performance alerts monitor lead flow, listing performance, and showing agent performance. Any triggered alerts land in your inbox (and team member inboxes) each morning. Many of these alerts include thresholds like a certain number of leads per day or a certain number of photos per listing. Alerts can be individually disabled. And custom alerts can be created from a combination of individual alerts.
By reviewing and tuning these alerts to your team's specific expectations and needs, you ensure that your team receives timely, relevant and actionable alerts about the things you care about (and not generic alerts about things that might not really matter).
One thing we want to focus on here is how much these alerts do matter and how much they should drive your team's overall approach. They're built to monitor adherence to industry and ShowMojo-specific best practices, including:
- Listings marketed with sufficient (and sufficient-quality) photos, descriptions, titles and essential details.
- Showing schedules that provide ample availability.
- Agents who conduct showings with few reschedules or cancelations.
- Monitoring of sub-par listing and showing feedback scores (so corrective actions can be taken).
- Monitoring of sub-par lead flow (so corrective actions can be taken).
- Rent changes in response to anemic or excessive lead flow.
Your action item in this section is to review and update the Daily Performance Alerts sections on the Alerts and Reports Settings page.
For additional assistance, you can read Essential Monitoring with Daily Performance Alerts.
2. ShowMojo PHONE and Auto-Reply Emails
Next, let's make sure ShowMojo is receiving and immediately responding to every one of your leads.
Let's start with ShowMojo PHONE:
- Go to the ShowMojo PHONE section on the Phone Settings page.
- Confirm the second to last setting is configured so ShowMojo PHONE will be used in all marketing.
There is the occasional valid reason not to do this, but unless you're 100 percent sure of one, you should be marketing with ShowMojo PHONE. There's enough options available for ShowMojo PHONE to ensure it will fit your needs, whether it will answer immediately, after your team has had a chance to answer, or some other scenario.
If you don't use a listing-based marketing or syndication service outside ShowMojo, then you are done. (But if you import listings into ShowMojo from another system, do be sure to confirm that system does not also syndicate your listings.) If you're sure there's no marketing or syndication of your listings outside of ShowMojo, skip the rest of this section.
If you do import listings from a service outside ShowMojo, and it also syndicates your listings, then let's hop back over to the Daily Performance Alerts sections on the Alerts and Reports Settings page. When you are there, make sure the following two alerts are enabled:
- ShowMojo PHONE Missing (assuming you heeded our advice and are marketing with ShowMojo PHONE)
- Auto-Reply Email Address Missing
These two alerts will warn you daily if listings are imported with information that would keep all your leads from going right to ShowMojo. If you see one or both these alerts in your email, you'll find your next steps in the article: Investigate and Resolve Daily Performance Alerts.
Finally, if you syndicate or market from a service that does not import listings into ShowMojo nor pulls listing data from ShowMojo, then you're off to the article: Configure All Third-Party Systems for Marketing with ShowMojo. Hopefully you've already got this covered, but this is a sanity check that you do.
3. Dynamic Prospect Notifications
Now we will focus on generating more interest and engagement from the leads you already have. Dynamic prospect notifications automatically reach out to your prospects. Engagement starts with straightforward communications, including rent reduction announcements on listings in which prospects have already expressed interest. After that, ShowMojo regularly (but not too regularly) reaches out to your prospects about your other on-market listings that match their current interests. And engagement continues out as far as two years after the prospect first expressed interest in your on-market rentals (based on the predication that a "lost" prospect might be out looking for something new either a year or two years in the future when they'd be up for renewal).
These notifications are both a meaningful best practice and (when you are using ShowMojo) an easy win.
The first step is to review and update your cross-marketing settings. These are specific to your account and tell ShowMojo how to best match your prospects to additional listings you have on-market. Your steps here are:
- Review and update the Other Places You Might Like section on the Gallery and Branding Settings page.
- For additional assistance you can read Cross-Marketing Location, Rent and Bedrooms.
After that:
- Review and update the Dynamic Prospect Notifications section on the Communication Settings page. Our general recommendation is to enable them all.
- For additional assistance you can read the Dynamic Prospect Notifications Feature Overview.
4. Auto-Reply and Follow Up Notifications
Now it's time to review, sanity-check and (if you like) fine-tune all ShowMojo's automated outbound communications. The primary goal with this activity is to ensure your emails and texts to prospects are communicating as you would expect. That is, effectively driving prospects to schedule their first showing (or another showing).
A secondary goal -- if you choose to undertake it -- would be to add your own special customizations (such as a video link placeholder). Basically, customizing this communication to whatever you think best encourages the prospect to schedule that showing.
Start at the Listing Sites Settings page and review each template on this page.
Then go to the Communication Settings page and focus on the sections from Follow Up Text Message for In-Person Showings down to Reschedule Request Email.
5. Listing Boost
If you pay for syndication or marketing, then you need to keep reading. Most any paid syndication service (Zillow, Zumper, and Rentals.com, for example) can pull your on-market listings from ShowMojo. And most of them charge by on-market listing. That's where listing boost comes in.
Listing Boost saves money on paid syndication services by directing marketing dollars only to those listings that need an extra boost. ShowMojo can automatically manage that boost activity for you, or you can boost and unboost listings manually.
For your next steps on this, check out the Listing Boost Feature Overview.