In March of this year, the rental market was slow in Edmonton, and we tried a few experiments to help pick up the pace. Over the course of one month, we started playing with our advertising to fine tune it.
Internet sites change quickly, and what worked last year was not working this year. The number of calls was way down. What was wrong? Winter in Edmonton is traditionally slow.
Starting with 4 email addresses, and 4 cell phones, each with voice mail, we were able to track the number of calls, time and area code. Email responses do not tell us where they originated from geographically, but area codes can be in interesting source of information.
So we started in Week 1, with a 2 bedroom garden apartment. We ran 4 identical ads with only the email and cell phone number offered as a contact. We used unique email and cell phone combination to go with each internet site
The Response
|
Site |
Emails |
Calls |
|
2 |
0 |
|
|
0 |
7 |
|
|
1 |
5 |
|
|
0 |
0 |
Stay tuned for the results from the rest of our experiment.
Brent Davies
Property Manager
The King of Eastwood (82nd Street)
Davies Management & Realty Ltd.
(Chris’s Note: Earlier use of this system was the inspiration for some of my suggestions in my post about advertising vacancies, although Brent isn’t using the Gmail system I described.)
