This is insanely cool and will radically reduce your per lead cost.

By Steve Moran

This is insanely cool and will radically reduce your per lead cost.

Have you ever looked at your community website traffic report where you can see that you are getting bunches of visitors each month and wonder who those visitors are? You know that much of the traffic is junk . . . search engine crawlers, “Bots”, competitors, vendors but you also know some of those visitors are or, more accurately could be marketing prospects who visit but don’t fill out an inquiry form or call.  

They show up, wander around a bit, and then disappear like a puff of wind.

Who Are They?

The problem is that while every visitor leaves a trail — including an IP address — it is . . . or has been . . . impossible to know who those visitors are. Making it more painful, you wonder how many of those prospects ultimately end up coming back to you via a referral agency, costing you a ton money when they had already visited your website.

Senior Housing Forum partner, Eldermark, using their new tool, “Prospector”, has figured out how to legally, ethically, and accurately turn those IP addresses into the names and addresses of prospects.  

Nuts and Bolts

Here is how it works:

  • Every time there is a new visitor on your website, Prospector grabs the IP address of that visitor and does an initial evaluation to ignore crawlers and bots.   
  • It checks the IP address against permission-based databases and then does some other cool secret sauce stuff to identify those visitors that are most likely to be real prospects.   
  • Those prospects will receive a series of snail mails promoting your community, starting with a postcard inviting them for lunch like this:

Does It Work?

There are a handful of early adopters who are using the Prospector tool with great success. Each month they are seeing a handful of prospects, they had no idea even existed walking through their front door for lunch and a tour. And some of those tours are turning into move-ins.

It seems unlikely that this will completely replace referral agencies, but imagine what it would do for your occupancy and your marketing budget if you saved just one or two referral fees a month at each of your communities. What else would you be able to do for your residents?

Over the next few months, we will be telling some real-life stories about how this is working. But you can check it out HERE.

You can learn more about Eldermark by checking out their website:

Download a PDF copy of this article by clicking on the button below: