Have you ever read one of those “secrets of X success” posts? The interview asks a gajillionaire for their advice on how to emulate success, and gets a bunch of answers like “I wake up at 4 am every morning!” or “I set aside 87 cents of every dollar I make!”
Then we set our alarms and try to figure out how to pay the mortgage with only 13¢ on the dollar - 4 am rolls around and we are no richer or more successful, just irritated.
This type of advice often comes down to “do more!” or “do it better!” but is short on specifics.
In this article, though, we’ve got more specifics than you’re going to want. You’ll try to give us some specifics back, but it’ll be too late!
Check out the 10 marketing metrics Universal Storage Group tracks to ensure their self storage facilities are thriving - and what to do if they’re not!
We recently had Universal Storage Group give a presentation in one of our workshops, and they brought the details. You may know Anne Ballard as The Hat Lady, but she’s got a lot more than an awesome milliner. Her team runs a huge storage operation, and these are the metrics they use to keep track of it all.
If you’ve got doubts about your marketing efforts, or you’re looking to grab a bigger portion of the available demand, use these 10 metrics to find areas you can improve.
To find your conversion percentage, compare the number of walk-ins you get to the number of people who rent a storage unit over a certain period of time (usually a month). You want to be turning most of the people who visit your facility into a renter - though you can’t get everybody.
Measure the number of calls you get compared to the total walk-ins too. The best result of a phone call is that lead coming to the facility. Once they’re on the property, it’s much easier for them to rent with you than to go somewhere else. On average, USG has one and a half walk-ins for every phone call (since there are lots of people who don’t bother calling first, or who found you online).
Universal Storage Group converts about 85% of their walk-ins on average across stores. That’s huge! But it also gives you a goal to work towards. If you’re only converting 50%, there’s plenty of room to improve.
If you’re not sure what’s going wrong in your lead conversion pipeline, check out our Sales 101 for Self Storage Managers eBook!
What percentage of your new customers leave a review for your facility? Most reviews will be on your Google Business Profile, but you can track other review sites if your customers use those. This metric is very important, because reviews are one of the main ways Google determines which business is doing a good job! More reviews, more frequent reviews, and more detailed reviews can boost your SEO massively.
USG aims to get 20% of new tenants to leave a review. This number may feel low compared to the prior conversion rate, but that’s because you’re not allowed to incentivize customers to leave you a review. All you can do is provide great service, make it easy to leave a review, and ASK!
Cost per lease will vary tremendously based on the market you’re in, but USG has an average cost per lease of $88.56. If these numbers don’t seem relevant to your market, you can use aggregators as the high end of your lead-acquisition and self storage referrals as the low end. Referrals should be about $50 per lead, and you probably won’t find any method that averages lower than that.
This metric shows you which efforts to put more focus on and which ones may not be worth your time.
See what percentage of your leads come from your website and your Google Business Profile. You’ll need a website that has tracking metrics enabled - which might be something you hire a professional to handle. If you’ve got a high-level self storage website, this should already be taken care of and all you have to do is go into your dashboard and record the number!
Industry averages are around 40%, so if you are significantly below that, you may need to work with your website provider to amp up your SEO. If you’re significantly above that 40% number, you may need to improve your signage and local presence. People might be driving past without noticing you even exist.
By “significantly,” I’d say if your % of digital traffic is below 30% or above 50%, you should take note. On the other hand, if you’re turning all those leads into renters, you may not want to change anything!
This isn’t the most actionable metric, but it’s also very easy to check. Whatever software you’re using to send emails should be able to tell you what percentage of those emails were opened and read.
Again, markets differ so much that we don’t have a great benchmark number for this. If you only send bills via email, that should have a really high open rate. If you send a lot of promotional and news emails, your open rate will be lower - maybe 20-30%, depending on how good your copy and information is.
The thing to pay attention to here is whether or not people are finding your emails helpful. If you send a ton of emails and have an 8% open rate, you’re probably wasting your time.
This metric is a measurement of how many times your managers have made marketing visits to other businesses or places you might get a referral. This is a big part of your referral program! Reaching out to other local businesses is a great way to seed referrals, and you should aim to visit a certain number of businesses a week.
Stacie Maxwell recommended visiting 10 a week on a rotating schedule. These visits should be quick, in-and-out, with a little something left behind, like donuts or cookies or some other treat, along with your business cards and info about your referral program. Offer to take and display the other business’s marketing materials as well. Local businesses can benefit greatly from teaming up against the big national players!
For a more in-depth guide to marketing visits, check out our 5-Minute Local Business Outreach Guide.
Again, there’s no specific number to shoot for here - higher is better, and if you’re just starting a referral program, getting a single referral is a win. Compare the number of referrals you’ve gotten to your own metrics from the months prior. This will show you if your referral marketing is growing, or if people aren’t really talking about it.
If your referrals are shrinking, the reward may not be high enough to stick in peoples’ minds (or they may not want to refer you because they had a bad experience). Remember that once your facility is full, or nearly full, your referrals are going to drop off because even people who would want to rent with you can’t.
This is very similar to #4, but reservations aren’t exactly the same as rentals. If a customer has reserved a unit, you haven’t collected any payment yet, though they have expressed interest. These potential customers need to be contacted by your team until the rental is completed.
If you’re getting lots of reservations online but aren’t turning them into rentals, that’s a huge opportunity to improve your conversion rate without a huge outlay of money.
This is one of the biggest determining factors for your facility’s success. Are you gaining more rentals than tenants are moving out? If your facility is empty, you need to be gaining a lot more rentals than you’re losing. If your facility si mostly full, you should probably be raising rates until that isn’t the case any more!
That means there’s no “target net rental” number to aim for. It depends entirely on your facility. For a facility in lease-up, getting more net rentals is better, but you also have to be making decent numbers from each tenant to stay in business. This is an easy number to keep an eye on and see if your business is getting new tenants or losing them.
These numbers won’t match yours, but they’re a decent place to start (or to aim for). Your two biggest sources of traffic are going to be people seeing your facility as they drive by and those who visit your website.
So there you go! Thanks again to Universal Storage Group for sharing this data with us - knowing the numbers to aim for can be incredibly helpful.
If you haven’t been keeping an eye on these metrics, now is a good time to start. Comparing your numbers to USG’s can show you places that might be good opportunities for new programs - or just show you that yeah, you’re already killing it!
StoragePug is a modern marketing company for self storage. We create intelligent marketing websites that allow you to rent units & take payments through your facility's website.
