Real estate marketing for rental properties can be similar to working with a franchise. You’ll serve many individual businesses who have similar strategic goals, yet also have their own unique quirks owing to geography, demographics, and the management of their owner-operators.
Digible is a Denver-based digital marketing agency specializing in advertising campaigns for multi-family apartments. With a few dozen clients under their belt, their business model needs marketing tools that are flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use.
Calls are a critical part of the sales funnel for property rentals — picking a place to live is one of the biggest investments someone can make, so prospective renters naturally want the peace of mind that comes with speaking to a real person. For these reasons and more, Digible has made CallRail’s call tracking technology one of their core service offerings.
Digible’s data-driven approach has yielded some big dividends for their clients: In one case, a client was able to cut their cost per lead (CPL) by more than one-third after they adopted call tracking for the first time.
Unique challenges (and opportunities) in the rental market
Rather than advertising on behalf of individual rental complexes, Digible works directly with property managers who each represent dozens (or hundreds) of individual properties.
“Our business is similar to a franchise — we work directly with multi-family apartment complexes and the property managers and apartment companies,” explains Nicole Brennan, director of client services at Digible. “Each client can represent anywhere from 40 to 1,000 different apartment complexes across the US.”
This meant Digible needed a simple and reliable way to implement call tracking for a wide array of different rental units, property managers, and geographic regions. After experimenting with just about every call tracking vendor on the market, they kept returning to CallRail for its simple setup, its ease of use, and the rich analytics it provides.
“We’ve tried using just about every call tracking software out there, and for us there’s no competition: CallRail has been the most reliable,” says Adam Walters, digital marketing manager at Digible. “There’s nothing else out there that has the simplicity and reliability of CallRail.”
Thanks to CallRail’s simple installation, rich feature set, and ease of use, all of Digible’s clients have been able to benefit from the agency’s data-positive approach. And best of all, Digible found that call tracking technology provides big benefits for their clients, far beyond just their inbound sales teams.
Winning the sales race, improving customer service
Although Digible initially set out to use call tracking to boost their clients’ marketing efforts, they found that the data they’re tracking has useful and impactful applications not just for the sales team, but for other departments as well.
“With our clients, we may see that they’ll have a lot of calls and good potential leads coming in, but those calls are going unanswered or they’re not being followed up on properly,” Brennan says. “In cases like this, we can use our call reporting, and features like call recording, to flag these calls for our clients.”
The Call Recording dashboard in CallRail
She adds: “There’s other data we track that we normally think of in a sales context, but can be very useful for customer service too. Things like call length, the search keywords associated with a call, and being able to listen to playbacks.”
This discovery inspired Digible to take a hands-on approach to call tracking: Rather than focus entirely on clients’ marketing and sales, they also started conducting in-house reviews of call recordings.
“If a client is getting a lot of calls but they aren’t generating the proper rate of conversions, or they’re getting a lot of repeat calls from a certain number, we’ll listen in to those calls to see what’s going on,” Brennan says. “That helps us pinpoint any issues around sales or customer service, which in turn helps our clients with stuff like tweaking the scripts their agents use.”
By showing how call tracking is useful across an entire organization, and not just in a sales and marketing capacity, Digible is letting actions speak louder than words. They’re proving not only that they’ve earned their keep as an agency — they’re also true-blue partners who have their clients’ best interests at heart.
More leads for less money
The in-depth analytics Digible gets through CallRail are integral to their business model. In ways both big and small, this comprehensive call data allows Digible to definitively prove that their marketing is having a positive impact on their clients’ advertising and ROI.
“For us, being able to track every aspect of a call — the channel, the length, the keywords — helps us show that we’re not just driving new leads for our clients, but that they’re quality leads,” Walters says, pointing to call length as one of the most valuable metrics for their business. “If a sales call lasts longer than a certain amount of time, we can be sure that it’s a good lead. That’s a big part of how we show clients that our marketing is working for them, and that it’s helping their business.”
With these hard metrics at their fingertips, Digible has learned how to cut through the confusion and make their work far more tangible to their clients. This is especially helpful when dealing with less tech-savvy clients who might balk at an analytics report with granular figures ike impressions, clickthroughs, and unique views.
Of course, one of the main reasons Digible are such big believers in call tracking is because they’ve seen for themselves just how big an impact it can make for their clients. Not only can it spread your message to a wider audience, it’s a great way to maximize your budget and get the most out of your precious marketing dollars.
“One of our clients wasn’t using call tracking, and they were spending a lot per lead, more than $150 per lead, and having a tough time bringing in leads,” Brennan says. “The first month after they started using call tracking and our services, we not only increased the number of leads they brought in, but we also cut that cost per lead to just under $100.”
She continues: “And thanks to our CRM, and the call data we’re using, we’re able to tie that back to the initiatives we were running for them, and show how we’re having this huge impact on their lead generation and ROI.”
Through the call tracking data they collect, Digible can not only prove that their marketing is driving phone calls, they can also provide detailed attribution for the leads that came in through those calls, and their conversion rate. Then, they share this data with their client, so they can match the lead to the customer activity they’re seeing on their end — more proof of how Digible is performing.
“It makes our services so much more tangible for our clients, in a way that wouldn’t be possible without call tracking,” Brennan says. “Call tracking really sets us apart from other agencies, and it also gives our clients hard data they can use to understand these marketing concepts that can otherwise be difficult.”