Website forms are often regarded as the best tool for apartment lead generation. It’s all too common for marketing teams to turn their strategies upside-down in an effort to get prospects to fill one out. Removing form fields to a bare minimum, A/B testing to death, making the submit button bigger—no, even bigger! Sound familiar?

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Once a lead decides to fill out a form, in many cases, the follow-up from leasing offices is too little and too late. Apartment prospects expect fast response times from leasing offices. According to Zillow, 73% of Millennial renters say they expect a reply in a day or less—many wanting a reply within a few hours. Plus, 35% of them will move on to the next option if they don’t hear back in their desired response time. Thus, leaving your marketing team’s hot web leads to turn cold very quickly.

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What if there was a better way to generate leads for your properties? Make the phone ring instead. BIA/Kelsey estimates click-to-call influences more than $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending. They also project businesses will receive 169 billion mobile calls by 2020 and will be driven primarily by smartphone penetration and the natural handoff between mobile engagement and phone calls.

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Here are three reasons why a telephone lead is most likely to be your most qualified prospect:

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1. They’ve already done the research.

• Prospects begin their search online—research shows that four out of five renters use online resources to assist in their home search.

• When a prospect decides to call, they are highly motivated and more likely to be in a position to sign a lease.

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2. A personal connection can be made.

• One-on-one help from the leasing team can alleviate concerns and objections.

• The leasing team has the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell.

• There’s opportunity for emotional selling to help the prospect really picture what it’d be like to live at the property.

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3. They’re easy to track.

• Call tracking numbers can be easily placed on your ad sources and property websites.

• Software solutions, like LeadScore AI, use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze the calls to reveal caller intentions, like if the caller is a prospect with leasing intent.

• Use insights from tracking your calls to shift marketing spend to the sources generating the most prospects.

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In our digital age, it’s easy for potential renters to call your properties with the click of a button. Instead of focusing all of your marketing efforts on lead forms, spend some time optimizing your call-to-click strategy. Just be sure your leasing offices are ready or have an AI-powered leasing assistant to answer for when the prospects start ringing!