Automating your self storage business helps reduce costs and admin and frees you to focus on more impactful tasks, such as business growth. In fact, 88% of small business owners say automation allows them to compete with larger companies.
With the right tools, you can automate almost every aspect of your storage facility, reduce overheads, increase profit margins, and attract more sales.
This is exactly how Stora started: I wanted to start my own automated self storage business but found that the software available to do this was limited—so I decided to develop my own.
💡 More reading: Read my article on LinkedIn to learn more about how I started my first self storage facility.
I’ve learned a lot from this experience and wanted to share it with you. This article explains all the aspects of your self storage business that can be automated. I’ll also share the best tools to use to automate your facility.
Why You Should Automate Your Self Storage Business
Source: Freepik
There are several benefits behind automated self storage:
✅ Reduced costs
Automation reduces the need for on-site staff, as tasks like customer service, bookings, and payment processing can all be handled through automated systems.
This means you may not need as many employees, or you can deploy them in ways that are more beneficial to your business, like marketing and driving growth.
✅ Less admin
Automated systems allow customers to book units, sign agreements, and set up recurring payments, reducing the need for staff to enter and process data manually.
Additionally, automated customer communication can handle routine communications such as late payment reminders and lease renewals, reducing the time staff spend on these resource-intensive tasks.
Finally, automation software like Stora can also track unit occupancy, monitor availability, and even adjust prices based on demand.
✅ Attract more customers
By automating your business, you could attract more customers and get more sales.
For example, automated systems are often no-contact and provide 24-hour access to your storage units, which many customers may find attractive.
Additionally, automated systems can provide a seamless and convenient experience for customers. This includes online booking, digital contracts, and easy payment options, making it simple for customers to rent a unit anytime. This improves customer satisfaction and gets you more business.
👉 A Quick Word from Me Of course, your business can still run successfully without automation, but as the industry grows and matures, self storage providers who adopt modern technologies to drive efficiencies in their business will win. |
How to Automate Your Self Storage Facility
Now that you know why automated self storage is so beneficial, let’s unpack the aspects of your business that can be automated:
➡️ Office admin
Office admin tasks are time-consuming and tedious when done manually. Automating office admin is the first step in automation for your business.
You can automate:
📧 Emails: You could automate emails to send automatic follow-up emails after a customer inquiry, facility tour, or contract signing. This ensures timely communication without manual intervention. You could use tools like Mailchimp or Zapier to set up these follow-up emails or an all-in-one tool like Stora.
✒️ E-Signatures: Your customers will need to sign contracts and leases to rent their units. With automation, there’s no need for them to visit your premises to complete this documentation. Instead, you can use our integration with PandaDoc to sign documents.
🆔 ID Check: Instead of customers having to visit your office for you to verify their identification, you can automate this process. With Stora, your customers can verify their identity instantly on desktop or mobile devices, so you can streamline your KYC processes and reduce the risk of bad actors. Customers can upload their ID and a selfie, and photos are then automatically checked against global databases so you can verify your customers’ identity with confidence.
➡️ Your website
Your website can be used to automate bookings, payments, lead capture, and quotes 24/7.
Here are a few steps to follow to create an excellent website for your storage facility:
👉 Buy a domain name
The first thing you need to do is buy a domain name for your website. This is the URL that leads people to your website.
👉 Purchase hosting
Many website builders, such as Shopify and Wix, allow you to buy hosting services from them. These builders can also automatically generate websites for you, although they do come with some limitations, such as scalability issues, limited customization and flexibility, and a lack of integrations.
👉 Build your website
Your website should:
Be well-designed.
Be discoverable on search engines like Google.
Allow for direct bookings and payments.
Enable customers to contact you.
Provide user-friendly forms.
Be consistent with your branding and tone of voice.
👉 List your pricing
When I first started Stora, I found that many storage facilities didn’t advertise their pricing on their websites. This is likely so that different customers can be offered different prices.
You need to show your prices on your website to enable online bookings and have payments collected before customers move in. This allows you to automate the entire customer journey from their booking to moving in.
⭐️ Get a Completely Automated Storage Website with Stora As a part of our all-in-one self storage software, Stora provides simple, powerful website templates and support for storage operators. The websites we offer to our customers provide high conversation rates and are expertly search engine optimized. Our websites are engineered to help you grow your business, with fast loading times, mobile friendliness, and hosting that ensures your site never crashes. With your Stora website, you can also tailor your booking flow and capture intent with popups and forms. |
➡️ Self-service and online booking
An important part of automating your storage facility is allowing customers to book units online themselves and to be able to handle recurring payments.
One tool you may want to consider using is Stripe, which handles recurring payments. Our software conveniently integrates with Stripe.
When you use a Stora-powered website, you’ll offer your customers flexible payment methods. They can choose between card, direct debit, or even manual payments. This saves you time, as you don’t have to chase payments or raise invoices.
➡️ Buying storage
You need to allow customers to engage with your business, including renting out units, in a way that suits them. Here’s how you can get this right:
🌐 Website: You can use the free version of Hubspot to provide live online chat to let potential customers arrange a time to view your facility. You’ll get a notification when you need to be on-site to meet them. Stora integrates with Hubspot, and our support team can help with this integration. You can also have a page on your Stora website where customers can arrange a viewing of your facility and embed a tool like Calendly.
📞 Telephone: By using TTNC, you can provide a local telephone number that comes through to your mobile phone.
👋 Walk-ins: Although there are other channels to contact you, people may still turn up at your facility and expect someone to show them around. You can give them a remote tour of your facility using an automated smart entry tool like the nokē system to open doors for them. Stora seamlessly integrates with the nokē system and most other smart entry systems like BearBox and Sensorberg.
➡️ Facility management
A storage facility management system like Stora’s self storage management software lets you connect your payments and booking systems with your locking system.
With Stora’s property management system, you can:
🏠 Automatically allocate units to new bookings from your website and allow customers to move in (or out) whenever they like.
🏠 Use your smart entry system to give customers access to their units via an app or with automatically generated codes.
🏠 Send automated emails to tell customers exactly how to access your storage facility and their unit, giving you one less manual admin task to do.
🏠 Automatically lock out tenants whenever they miss a payment and reactivate access once the payment clears.
🏠 Use our facility map feature to see who’s waiting for allocation and which units are empty, and manage them all from data-rich, interactive floor plans.
➡️ Finances
By automating your finances, you never have to worry about visiting a physical branch ever again. You can use tools like Xero and Tide, (or Brex if you’re in the U.S.) for your banking to automate your accounting:
Xero: A cloud-based accounting software that provides financial tools to help businesses manage their finances more efficiently. Stora currently integrates with Xero, making your accounting that much easier.
Tide: A business banking platform in the U.K. that offers a combination of banking and accounting services. Alternatives in the U.S. include Brex, BlueVine, or Novo.
When starting out, I used Xero and Tide to manage my accounting. My Stripe payments went to my Tide account and were then automatically posted to Xero as revenue. All my expenses were put onto my Tide debit card so that they could also appear in Xero automatically.
➡️ Security
One of the goals of automation is to have fewer employees, so there will be fewer staff on-site to monitor your units and their contents. This makes self storage security a concern.
Giving your customers an access code or app to get into your facilities offers a good base of security. But criminals may still gain entry, steal belongings, or commit vandalism.
One automated security solution is to install CCTV cameras that connect to a mobile app that lets you monitor your site remotely. If you’re in the U.S. Rhombus provides smart cameras that connect to your phone or laptop for monitoring.
Source: Rhombus
If you’re in the U.K., DSOC offers remote continuous monitoring of your self-storage CCTV systems, improving your facility’s security.
You can also install motion sensors that notify you via your phone whenever someone is on your premises. The Swann Motion Alert Sensor detects movement from people and cars and then sends instant push notifications to your phone via their security app.
Source: Swann
You can also use end-to-end access systems that allow your customers to enter your facility and their individual units. This usually includes automatic main gates that use smart entry methods such as key cards or mobile apps.
➡️ Your Google and Facebook ads
You can automate your Facebook and Google ads as a part of your storage facility’s marketing efforts.
Google Ads are a type of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising where you pay for your storage facility to appear in the sponsored search results on Google.
When someone searches for storage on Google, your ad can appear at the top of the search results.
This is what your Google ad may look like:
With Google Ads, you only pay when someone clicks your ad and nothing else.
Facebook ads are when you pay Facebook to display sponsored posts about your storage facilities in people’s newsfeeds.
Facebook offers highly specific targeting options so you can reach the exact audience that would be interested in your storage facility. In addition to clicks on your ad, you can pay for impressions, reach, and other metrics.
Here’s an example of a Facebook ad for a storage facility:
Source: SpareFoot
You can automate Google and Facebook ads so that you don’t have to put manual effort into running them:
Automated rules: This tool allows you to set rules to automate various aspects of your campaigns, such as adjusting bids, pausing or activating ads, and sending notifications based on specific criteria.
Ad scheduling: You can also use ad scheduling, which tells Google and Facebook what time of day or week you want your ads to be shown to your target audience.
➡️ Reporting
In order to understand how your business is performing and where you need to improve, you need comprehensive reports. However, creating these reports yourself by analyzing spreadsheets is time-consuming.
Reporting and the ability to digest and analyze data easily are paramount to helping storage operators make decisions and unlock growth.
The existing reporting solutions in the storage industry aren’t fit for the modern world. That’s why we’ve developed world-class reporting solutions for the storage industry. Our reporting doesn’t only cover deals in sales and occupancy-related data, but thanks to the all-in-one Stora product, it also covers website and conversation data.
Our software includes built-in reporting on the metrics that matter most. Our intuitive dashboard:
📈 Provides flexible insights across any time frame.
📈 Is built with scale in mind, tracking an operator’s data over time as they grow without an impact on performance.
📈 Allows for rapid data processing and visualization.
📈 Enables real time data rendering.
📈 Offers an excellent user experience.
Fully Automate Your Self Storage Business with Stora
Automating your self storage business can help you save time and money as well as turn a bigger profit. It can also help you increase sales and attract new customers to your facility.
Stora is an all-in-one automation solution designed to help self storage operators automate their entire business. Just some of the solutions we offer include:
✔️ Web design for self storage websites.
✔️ Online sales, including bookings and recurring payments.
✔️ Facility management.
✔️ Business insights.
Don’t hesitate to contact us for advice on how to automate your storage facility.
Visit our website to book a Stora demo today to learn more about how we can help automate your entire self storage business.
