We get it. Your self storage business has always been about the face-to-face, getting to know your customers and nurturing a relationship before you give them a quote for storage. You might think your customers appreciate this as though you’re doing them a great personal favor with a dazzling deal just for them, but research tells us otherwise. What they really want is to find that information themselves, act or move on.
As technology continues to innovate and move forward at break-neck speed, and with it the wants and needs of internet users, if you’re not reading between the lines you could be missing sales and not even know it!
Give the people what they want
According to website usability experts, Nielsen Norman Group, one of the most important things your prospective customers want to see on your website is your pricing. And they want it fast. And if that’s not enough to convince you, Vice President of Research at Forrester, Lisa Singer says ‘There is a strong argument for publishing prices, as such transparency can often accelerate the sales process and increase sales productivity.’
Yes, the bulk of this research has been conducted in a B2B context, but let’s be honest here, there are people behind those businesses, each behaving in a similar way whether they are looking for a SaaS product to innovate their business (in fact, this is the reason Stora publish their prices) or buying a games console for their child’s birthday. No price, no deal…because people in general are time poor—so much so that they are more likely to look for your price before they look for all the trappings of your service. So, if you’re hoping to sell them on the benefits of your storage facility before you give them a price, you might just lose them before you even knew they were there.
Short attention spans
You’ve probably heard about how short our attention span is online. If you haven’t, then buckle in!
According to Jakob Nielsen from Nielson Norman Group, users will leave a web page in as little as 10–20 seconds over pages with a clear value proposition that can hold people’s attention far longer. He states, "to gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds."
But how do you communicate your value proposition in a highly competitive market without publishing your prices? Put simply, you can’t. Or at least, it’s nearly impossible. If you can’t give prospects what they are looking for in 10 seconds or less then they will go to a competitor who can. Yes, many of your self storage facility competitors are already doing this, and probably in your area. So, are you inadvertently sending business their way?
Barriers and competition
Going back to our original point, it is completely understandable that your self storage service is customized for each client and you probably have a proposal process in place that you want to maintain, but if you have “packages” that you offer at a fixed rate, why not include them on your website? Having transparency around the offer helps to remove any barriers to a customer wanting to experience value for money. After all, your competitor might have a few more bells and whistles than you do, but if those bells and whistles are not in the buyer's ‘need to have’ check list, your pricing transparency could just win over that customer before Joe Bloggs Self Storage has had his face-to-face pitch and finally put his quote on the table. Expediency is key here.
Forrester’s Lisa Singer offers another angle to this argument: ‘If you want to compete on price and target price shoppers, listing prices on the website is advisable. If your organization is in an established market that competes somewhat on price, not listing prices may send a signal that your prices are too high. However, if you want to send this signal and avoid engaging price shoppers, keep pricing private.”
The whole point of this article is to show you why you should have your pricing up front and center, so honestly we don’t have any good reasons that you should keep pricing private. That’s usually the reserve of luxurious ‘lifestyle’ brands with a demand generation strategy behind them.
The marketing and sales funnel
Now let’s look at it from a marketing and sales funnel perspective. When you don’t have your prices on your website you might get 20 calls in a day, with only 10% converting to a sale. When you look at the funnel from the top down, there is a lot of effort and time spent convincing the prospects before you convert. This is because having a longer funnel with more unnecessary steps means that the leads at the top are still in the research stage, so their intent or readiness to purchase is low. Meanwhile, you’ve committed costly resources to a process that yields a less than favorable rate of conversion. Time is money after all.
So, let’s see what a sales funnel for a price-transparent self storage facility might look like.
First thing you notice is how much smaller it is and that’s because you have cut out all the unnecessary resource utilization between lead and sale and because the price information stage enters sooner. In turn, this makes the customer's intent to purchase arrive sooner in the funnel before you experience any significant drop off. Thus, the intent to purchase is higher for longer, and a significantly higher percentage are likely to move through the funnel to the close of a sale.
So, there you have it. If we haven’t convinced you that your self storage website should feature pricing and make that pricing information easy to discover, then perhaps we never will.
But if you want to give us another shot at winning you over, why not book a Stora demo? We’ll show you how our solution puts transparent pricing, self-service rentals, and check-in and move-in via smart entry automation up front—putting your customers' wants and needs at the forefront of your self storage business.
Want to know more about Stora?
Our self storage platform helps the next generation of storage businesses sell online. Learn more about how it works or schedule a demo today.
Sources:
State the Price to Give B2B Sites a Competitive Advantage
