By Nick Bilava, Storage.com
Your storage facility’s website is a fantastic tool to draw customers to you. It’s always there for them to access and see everything you offer.
But is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing?
There are a number of things a website can do to draw in clients, but all too often, storage facility websites do a better job of driving customers away. Your front page only has a few seconds to invite customers in for a closer look, or else they will click the back button, shut the window, or find another facility.
Whether or not you are considering a redesign for your site, you can easily make some changes to existing homepage content to create a positive experience for your website visitors.
Big Headlines Send a Big Message
Like the old song says, you’ve got to “accentuate the positive.” There should only be verbiage on your site’s homepage that speaks to benefits and features and avoids negatives. Your front page should highlight all your facility’s amenities and services in a quick, easy-to-scan way and explain how they benefit the potential customer.
Some facilities forget this and have negative messaging on their site. Examples of negative messaging are statements that communicate some sort of loss or undesirable result if the customer fails to be a good customer in some regard. Facilities that have this kind of messaging prominently on their site do so because they probably have been burned by customers in the past. Still, it makes good business sense to avoid this practice.
Fees: The Big and Small of It
Another type of negative messaging is content that emphasizes extra fees or charges. A facility may prominently exhibit an administration, clean-up, or auction fee, but your site’s front page is not the place for it. This type of information should be found on your fee schedule rather than your homepage. Access to your fee schedule should be easy to find and typically should have its own navigation tab. If special or extra fees don’t have their own tab, there should be an easy way to find this information, such as a prominent link from somewhere on your offered units page or billing and payment page.
Communicate Policies Politely
Policies where customers stand to lose a deposit, incur additional fees, or have their belongings put to auction do need to be communicated. However, it should be done in an unobtrusive way and written as positively as possible. A good idea is to communicate that, as an owner, you do understand that renters may experience difficulty, financial or otherwise, in their lives. Express that you are open to working with them through those difficulties, but at some point, action may have to be taken to protect your interests. Once again, these policies do not need to be featured prominently on the front page and should be accessible by a link to a policies page.
Think (and Think Again) About “Benefits”
What you might be inclined to express as a benefit may not be so in the eyes of your prospective customers. Putting something on your site’s front page (or perhaps anywhere) such as “Free rodent trap with every unit rented!” may not instill confidence in the average storage consumer. It’s the same story with statements like, “We spray weekly for insects!” If there is a feature you want to promote on your site, run it by a few people outside your operation first to make sure you’re sending the right signal.
Keeping a Positive Message Front and Center
Here’s a quick list about what kinds of messages to avoid on your site’s homepage:
- Administration fees
- Loss of deposit
- Accounts going to collection
- Unit contents going to auction
- “Benefits” that can be misconstrued
When thinking about what to put on your homepage from a verbiage standpoint, keep in mind that prominent negative messages will generate many more clicks toward the back button than to other pages on your site. Writing your website copy to focus on positive aspects of your business, such as features, benefits, and value, will keep potential renters clicking around on your site much longer and you’ll be more likely to see lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates.
