Do you know your conversion rate?
The percentage of shoppers who click rent and actually end up paying for a storage unit?
For a lot of operators, that number is significantly lower than they’d like. You’ll never get to 100% - people change their minds for all sorts of reasons - but you can make it better by removing friction from the rental process.
Friction are numbers written with a numerator and denominator, like
Friction is when something slows your renter down or rubs them the wrong way. Any time you ask the customer to press extra buttons, put in more information, or answer questions, you’re adding friction to your online rental experience.
Some of this is inevitable. You can’t skip the personal and payment information steps, and of course, you need your customers to choose the units they want.
You will lose potential renters even with these basic steps. Some folks will get distracted while filling out the form, or will decide that they don’t want storage after all. But as an operator, you want to improve your conversion rate as much as possible.
Marketing brings you leads. If you’re not turning those leads into customers, you’re wasting money, time, and effort.
In this article, we’ll show you how to reduce friction in your rental process to turn more leads into renters.
I’m going to recommend you cut out a bunch of these hoops - but there are good reasons operators put them there in the first place. You’re running a business, and you want to control who you’re renting units to (and who you’re not).
More information is certainly helpful, too! Better data can help you make better decisions, and if you’ve already got all the ID you need before a tenant moves in, that’s good for security.
Operators use these steps to get more control over their business. This is good! You want to have control. But you don’t necessarily want to have control at the cost of revenue.
Each approach has trade-offs. Control can make your facility safer and your job easier, but if you’re not getting enough renters, no amount of control will help.
So! Keep that in mind as you read through the options - everything is a trade-off.
Reservations are basically an agreement to rent a unit later. The operator will hold this unit open, and the renter will pay for it soon.
Unfortunately, reservations don’t always turn into rentals.
Many operators push reservations because they want to do the actual rentals - where money is transferred - in the office. This makes sense, because again, you have more control, but it loses lots of renters.
The biggest difference between renting and reserving a unit is whether or not money changes hands. Without money changing hands, reservations are just good leads.
Push people to rent instead of reserve where you can. If you discover that you don’t want to rent them a unit later, you can always just issue a refund!
Someone is trying to rent a storage unit after work on a Tuesday. She does not want to move in Tuesday night (who has time?), and she won’t be free during the day until Saturday.
If your self storage website doesn’t let her book the rental for Saturday, what do you think she’s going to do?
Will she remember your name and come back and book Saturday morning? Or is she going to find a new site that lets her rent a unit now and move in later?
This potential tenant has sat down to rent a unit, not to rent a unit from you. If you won’t let her complete her task, she’s likely to go elsewhere to find someone who will.
We recommend allowing rentals up to a week in advance. This could lose you a bit of money (since you’re not making money on that unit for a week), but think of it like a discount. First month free AND a bonus week doesn’t sound as bad.
Plus, if they’ve paid for the unit you can be fairly certain they’re going to show up on Saturday.
Selling self storage insurance is a great way for operators to make some extra money! On top of that, the provided protection can solve a lot of headaches for the facility and the tenant.
However, if you mandate insurance during the rental process, you’re going to cause a lot of friction.
This friction doesn’t mean the renter doesn’t want insurance! The amount of information required can be offputting and can slow down the process, though.
You can offer insurance as a separate transaction that occurs in the office when they come to get their code, or you can leave it off altogether.
If you’re making good money off of insurance (and you’re getting enough renters), you don’t need to make any changes. Think of this as a lever you can pull when you need to improve your conversion rate!
Many operators want to get a photo ID and a secondary contact before renting to anyone - and for good reason. These steps make it much harder for someone to dump a load of mattresses in your facility and then disappear (yes, that’s happened).
We still recommend getting all that information, but maybe don’t do it until the unit has been rented.
The new tenant will need to come in to sign the lease, get a lock, get the gate code, etc. This is the perfect time to get all the information you need on your new renter.
As long as your rental platform doesn’t send out gate codes with the completion message, you can talk to the tenant and vet them before you finish the rental.
Now, if you have a completely online rental, with online lease signing, you may need to require any information you want ahead of that. Or maybe you just find it easier to get the info digitally - that’s fine too!
All of these are simply levers you can pull to decrease friction in your rentals. The less friction your tenants face, the more rentals you’re going to get.
You have to decide how much those new renters are worth compared to the control you can get with the extra fractions friction.
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