Storage Business Owners Alliance 30665 Northwestern Highway  Suite 100 Farmington Hills, MI 48334 USA Toll Free: (248) 254-9000 (248) 254-9000 Phone: (248) 254-9000 Fax: (248) 538-4327 Email: info@thesboa.com

How to Convert an Online Reservation to a Rental

The online reservation dynamic in the self-storage industry has evolved over the last several years. It has moved from many self-storage operators considering online reservations as a nice “bells and whistles” feature to now absolutely essential to capture leads.

Year-after- year the importance of an online reservation system grows exponentially. If you do not have online reservation functionality for prospective renters, then your store is not a choice in the decision-making process and you lose renters to your competitors.

SiteLink Web Edition™ offers the online reservation capability on your Website, as well as direct integration with many lead aggregator Websites on the Internet.

Capturing reservations online is important, but it must be easy and convenient for the prospect to use. Your Website should be easy to understand and the reservation process should be quick to implement. Once the online reservation process has been completed and the information from the prospect is received by the manager, daily follow-up should be of upmost importance.

For many self-storage facilities the follow up process can always be improved. The manager’s goal should be to follow up with the prospect as quickly as possible. The longer the period of time between the reservation and follow up, the chance is greater for the prospect to rent with a competing facility.

Your store should formalize a process to determine when and how often prospects are followed up. Once this process has been formalized, the next step is to analyze the data for conversions. If you do not measure the number of reservations you receive and the conversion rate, then you cannot measure your closing effectiveness.

SiteLink Web Edition™ streamlines this entire process. The SiteLink template or API provides a fully integrated solution for reservations to occur quickly on your Website. Once the prospect has completed the online form, their information is instantly downloaded

The online form has been completed and instantly downloaded into SiteLink

into SiteLink. The manager is notified based on your parameters of when and how to communicate with the prospect. The prospect can seamlessly be notified by email, print and text messaging functions within SiteLink. The manager can also be prompted to the phone. SiteLink phone integration provides an immediate account pop-up screen to quickly open the prospect account and facilitate a payment or move in.

Phone pop-up screen appears when a prospect calls.

Once the prospect is converted to move-ins, you will immediately see the conversion rates as well as other metrics in the inquiry tracking report.

Online Reservation Measurement Reporting

SiteLink Web Edition™ integration enables you to offer online reservations and follow up in a timely manner so that you will see more move-ins and higher revenue for your facility. If you are not using this functionality, it’s time to get started!

SiteLink’s customer support team is available 24/7. If you have any questions about the online reservation functionality, please email support@sitelink.com.

Author: James Renouf, SiteLink Tech Support