As a Broker, you have noticed the changes in the leasing industry over the past couple years. If anyone questions this just go to leasingnews.org and review “The List”.
The industry is going though changes, has your marketing plan? Are you marketing to vendors differently than you were a few years ago? You are probably doing some direct mail, or sporadic broadcast faxing, but is that enough? It is if you want average results. If you want remarkable results, however, you must do more. When you put on your marketing hat you must concern yourself not only with who you will reach, but also how you will reach them and with attaining a satisfactory response rate.
Lets focus on those three basics. Who will you reach? Active vendors? Prospects? Inactive vendors? I suggest a spreadsheet for the entire year outlining what marketing piece to send to each category of vendor or prospect. You don’t have to fill in the whole year at first, just keep a running log of what you have sent, and that will help determine what to send in the upcoming months.
I just got a marketing piece in the mail from a broker. It was a beautiful expensive “kit”. It cost 80¢ to mail and included a 8 ½ x 11 glossy brochure, and five inserts with an application, a business card, and a plastic card for my rolodex. It was sent to my business as a potential lessee. It had to cost over $3.00 to produce and I threw it out as soon as I opened it. This was a marketing piece that was meant to be very broad for any lessee. Marketing pieces like this to lessees are less effective and therefore you should be careful what you spend on them. I suggest focusing on specific segments of vendors or lessees, and saving the expensive mailers for vendors who are truly “hot”. By categorizing your “active” “inactive” and “prospective” vendors you can tailor a marketing piece that will be more effective for your audience. Try to say something to somebody or else you end up saying nothing to everybody.
How will you reach them? This is where I suggest change. If you’re like the broker who just sent me the expensive mailer, and just mail out every once in a while when business is slow, why not try e-mail marketing. You’re reading this aren’t you? Guess what? I have no printing costs, no postage expense, and as soon as I send this out I’m going to post it on my Web site as a new article. Trends show that a blend of e-mail marketing, postcards, and Web-based marketing are very effective ways to stay in front of your vendors.
What is a good response rate? How do you track it?
I asked one of my friends who worked for a major lessor in their marketing department what a good response rate was & how they tracked. She said:
“From my experience, a 5% response rate was good. Anything over 15% was phenomenal. 25% was unheard of. Way back in the beginning, we used to track response rates on yellow sticky notes! We would keep them on our desks and just tick off responses. Then it evolved into Excel, keeping counts of what went out, responses and the percentage was calculated dynamically. Eventually, it worked its way into Access, where I would enter the marketing code and the respondent's number so we could see exactly WHO was responding. I created comprehensive reports that showed breakdowns of market areas, response type, and percentages for each, plus an overall percentage. This worked well when we had a log of different campaigns going on at the same time because we could gauge the effectiveness of a creative piece easily.” If your response rate is below 3%, you may want to reconsider what you’re doing.
So you can track responses on a yellow sticky, in Excel or Access but if you want to know what’s working it’s important to track.
The industry is evolving and hopefully your marketing program is too.