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The CRE landlord’s guide to tenant app analytics

Track and measure the right data to enhance your assets, improve tenant relationships, and build leasing strategies.

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To build a thriving tenant community and attract the hybrid-working tenants of the future, you need a steady stream of data flowing in from all possible customer touchpoints: Communication, retail, services and amenities, building operations, events, and more.

COVID-19 has catalysed an unprecedented evolution in commercial real estate, changing office space into a consumer product and everyday employees into key decision makers. The offices of the future will be remade in the image of hybrid working individuals, who have more choice and flexibility than ever before.

Companies, in turn, will choose their workplaces based on new priorities, such as technological amenity (e-commerce and touchless access control); first-rate customer service (events, activations, Apple Store-like flash); commitment to ESG programs; and quantifiable improvements to productivity and employee wellbeing. All of this they will do to ensure they secure the best and most discerning talent.

“To be a winner,” suggests Dror Poleg, author of Rethinking Real Estate, “means building a consumer brand, taking all sorts of risks, having a point of view, and adopting all sorts of trade-offs that historically, office landlords didn’t have to make.

“You have to adapt your product to a very specific type of customer, and go all-in on them… The people at the top will be those that have a brand, that have their own distribution, that resonate with their customers, that have some sort of relationships that mean something.”

How landlords win in the new hybrid-working world

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What paves the way to such a victory? Meaningful, plentiful data.

“Now, more than ever, CRE companies need to capture and analyze high-frequency data to create a meaningful tenant experience,” writes Deloitte in its 2021 Commercial Real Estate Outlook report. “This could include data around how tenants use different amenities, and/or engagement and performance levels.”

With the right analytics platform, linked to a comprehensive array of customer-facing systems, CRE landlords and property managers can make informed decisions about improvements to their assets and tenant services. With a tenant experience platform and in-built analytics dashboards, it is possible to reliably track behaviours, habits, and sentiments of customers, even as they work remotely. And, even more critically, it is possible to build robust lease renewal strategies tailored to individual tenants.

“Companies can analyze tenant engagement levels and behaviour to understand preferences and provide a more customized experience,” Deloitte writes. “For instance, owners/operators can combine and analyze the occupancy, movement, and temperature sensor data and assist tenants in creating COVID-19-safe seating and space utilization decisions.

“They can also use tenant data to predict lease renewals and devise appropriate strategies for tenant retention.”

The 6 key benefits of tenant experience app data

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Tenant experience analytics are tied directly to the behaviours of tenants in your assets, as evidenced by interactions with your tenant experience technology suite. These analytics, combined, build a comprehensive historical picture of building and technology usage, and prescribe iterative improvements to building management teams.

Let’s examine first the overarching material benefits of investing in a combination smart data-analysis platform.

1. Better understand your tenant population

A crucial component of effective marketing is granular segmentation. To market your tenant app effectively to your diverse building population, you need to build comprehensive and accurate profiles of each customer group (or segment). Why? Consider Meredith Hill’s time-honoured adage: “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.”

A community is not built on boilerplate memos or generic e-handshakes – it is the sum of small, personalised engagements. This is, in part, what Dror Poleg means when he talks about the winning landlords of the future.

Your average CRM may give you demographic information on a company level (e.g., industry and size), but it is far more difficult (and extremely rare) for landlords to maintain veracious records of the customer groups that transcend company and industry. Equiem enables you to capture a virtually endless amount of customer properties, such as:

  • Name
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Role
  • Level of seniority
  • Interests
  • Remote working habits

These personal properties can be combined with building-based details (such as floor, area, tower, etc) to form super-targeted customer segments. Once you know who in your building cycles to work, or which tenants specifically are concerned about COVID-19 safety measures, or even which tenants like to have their dry cleaning handled on-site, you can tailor your engagement programs specifically to those segments.

Accurate segmentation through regular data capture is one of the key functions of Equiem’s tenant experience platform, and it gives building managers and customer success teams a dazzling list of opportunities to provide innovative and memorable customer service. Such service will inevitably come in handy when the time comes to discuss lease renewals with key tenants – more on this below.

Another simple pathway to better tenant understanding is qualitative feedback. By conducting regular polls and surveys using your tenant app, you can gauge tenant sentiment and gather useful insights to improve products, services, and engagement activities.Polls are totally custom, giving you the freedom to ask your tenants whatever you like, over any time period you choose, in order to form your own asset or portfolio benchmarks. For example, during COVID-19, landlords were burning to know:

  • Are you enjoying working from home?
  • When are you planning on returning to the office?
  • How can we improve your office experience when you do return?

And so on. During the pandemic, Equiem clients could ask these questions quickly and easily via their tenant apps, and have their insights delivered directly to their Analytics Dashboards. In doing so, they were able to improve their assets and customer engagement strategies based on the responses they received. To see what they learned, check out our 2020 Global Office Tenant Report.

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2. Streamline operations

When it comes to everyday tenant management, property and customer success managers have a vast and complicated remit. The right tenant app digitizes and therefore simplifies traditional logistical processes, such as the signing of waivers or the booking of meetings or facilities. The data, captured after those actions have taken place, take you one step further: They illuminate inefficiencies and prescribe iterative fixes, optimising the front and back-end user experiences for your customers and team members, respectively.

Here’s a common use case we encounter with our work orders system. The platform, which dovetails seamlessly with your base tenant app, enables tenants to submit work requests and hazard reports. Your team can then view orders, assign contractors, update the statuses of work orders, and more. After a while, the data often uncover areas for improvement, such as the average delay from job call-out to completion. Your analytics might also identify opportunities for preventative maintenance – a floor where lightbulbs regularly die, for example, may warrant the closer eye of an electrician and a larger-scale upgrade to infrastructure.

3. Build better leasing strategies

Leasing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solutions have helped landlords and leasing teams create and manage lease payments and renewals for a while now. But let’s say you don’t have a dedicated platform to help you strategically prioritise and chase renewals; or say, perhaps, that you are missing some of the key data points necessary to formulate comprehensive tenant profiles. Maybe you need new methods of personalising outreach in the wake of COVID-19.

The right tenant experience platform can strategically support leasing teams by:

  • Simplifying the process of prioritising renewal targets
  • Providing more of the critical data required to understand what specific tenants want, think, and do
  • Helping to formulate and execute tailored retention plans
  • Galvanising relationships with tenants based on personalisation and goodwill


We have a four-step retention action plan template built specially for leasing professionals – check it out here. The upshot is this: all of the information you need to build a renewal target for a specific tenant is produced and distilled for you by Equiem’s Analytics Dashboards.

Let’s be more specific: Using the ‘Tenant Activity’ dashboard, for instance, you can compile a three-month summary of the behaviours and preferences of a specific tenant. In so doing, you will learn:

  • The expiry date of the lease
  • Total number of tenant app registrations for that company
  • Quarterly (three-month) active usage rate
  • Department spread of registered users (e.g. 20% admin, 50% marketing/sales, etc)
  • Most-read content
  • Favourite app engagement activities (e.g. comment-to-win contests)
  • Most popular events
  • Most-used services and amenities
  • Any tenant-specific pieces of qualitative feedback (either from polls or surveys)

These metrics, if properly mined over time from across your tenant experience technology suite, can bolster your understanding of specific tenants (see benefit 1) and help you build tailored engagement campaigns based on what they do, like, and think.

4. Improve engagement programming

To be truly effective, your analytics solution must provide exhaustive and detailed metrics covering all customer touch points. Conversely, it must also distil those metrics into quick-glance visualisations and actions. This is for the benefit of diverse building management teams: Customer success managers or marketing professionals may need to examine newsletter results in great depth, in order to test hypotheses and improve readership rates; landlords, however, need only the broad strokes, the long-term trends, be they up or down.Equiem’s Analytics Dashboards offer you this flexibility. Let’s look at the main engagement verticals, and the benefits of capturing meaningful data from each.

The 'Last 30 Days' and 'Overview' tabs are designed to give you a quick-glance report on the last month of activity across your platform and products. Here you can easily see active usage rates, new registrations, retention rates, and more. Compare recent activity with longer-term trends.

The Content tab gives you comprehensive results on your content strategy: post views, likes and comments; performance over time, readership habits across company, building, and time of day, and much more. Here is also where you can check on newsletter performance, including open and click-through rates. All of this helps you to optimize your content strategy so you can keep your tenants engaged.

The Events tab gives you instant feedback on the performance of your event engagement: RSVPs, attendees, the most popular events by time, date and season, and more. Optimize your onsite programming based on event attendance by company to maximize your event budgets or tailor your programming to your unique tenant mix.

Under the 'Services & Revenue' tab, you can see the performance of your e-commerce platform. Data on vendor revenue, Space bookings, popular store items, customer peak periods, and more all appear here. Understand the utilization of onsite amenities and the health of your onsite retailers, and develop strategies to generate revenue through onsite amenities and services.

Tracking these hard numbers is crucial because tenant feedback, of the kind mentioned in benefit 1, will only take you so far. Tenants will tell you what content they like (or don’t like); they will recommend event ideas to you; and they may even point to elements of cumbersome design. These are all helpful insights, and are not to be discarded, but they are not likely in isolation to help you achieve new heights of usage and customer satisfaction.

UX researchers Nielsen Norman Group advise the same thing: ‘To design the best UX’, they write, ‘pay attention to what users do, not what they say.’ This philosophy also applies to tenant engagement analytics – with the right data, you can uncover more about what your tenants want and do than they could ever tell you.

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5. Inform capital improvements

In the post-COVID-19 world, it is all but certain that commercial office buildings will change drastically. New leasing deals will be struck, retail precincts will grow or shrink, tenancies will shift, floor space will be reallocated, a swathe of new We Work-styled flex space zones will crop up – and this forecast is by no means exhaustive. Hybrid-working individuals are wont to be fickle.

For landlords facing the prospect of refurbishment, remodelling, innovation, or tenancy downsizing, it can be hard to prioritise the allocation of capital. Market uncertainty adds an additional layer of complexity. What will my tenants want in three, six, 12, 24 months? Which tenants do I invest in, through improvements to infrastructure or service, in reasonable hope of a return via renewed leases?

The questions abound. Fortunately, tenant app data can provide minimum viable improvements, which are a good defence against the tumult of the future. Do the best smallest thing you can do, test, iterate, and repeat.

Equiem is crucial to landlords who want to engage remote workers

Keren Eichen, Director of Real Estate Services at Unico Properties, understands how Equiem tech produces better, longer tenant relationships.

“When we go to renew with a tenant,” she says, “we want to understand what they’re doing, what they like, and what they don’t like. By having not only a place where we can advertise events, but where we can see participation in them, that’s huge. And I think we’re only just now scratching the surface of what that data will do for us.”

 

Consider the growing popularity of smart building tech, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. A platform like Smart can tell you how tenants navigate your building, where the traffic choke points are, which tenancies are underutilized or badly laid out, and more. With that information you can make informed decisions about capital improvements: For instance, you could plan a revitalisation to your onsite retail precinct by analyzing and rerouting lobby foot traffic.

6. Prove that working from the office can be more productive than remote working

In his recent Propmodo article De-Densification and the New Metrics of the Office, Antony Slumbers advances the idea that offices, if properly configured, can achieve new relevance and purpose in the hybrid-working world as hubs of measurable productivity. Employees will have their home offices, with all the attendant benefits, such as work-hour flexibility and the lack of commute – but the office can be more than a cumbersome like-for-like substitute, or a periodic meeting place.

If landlords can prove that their buildings are quantifiably better for productivity than the home office, then companies have a compelling reason to continue and renew their leases. “No business actually wants an office,” Slumbers writes. “What they want is the best outcome for the office. What they want is a productive workforce. They want a creative workforce. They want a happy and healthy workforce.

"...So what if you made improving the productivity of people the core value proposition within the office? What if we stopped thinking about space, and started thinking about improving the productivity of people?”What makes people productive? The answer is simpler than we might think. According to Metrikus – our partner in providing Smart, our building occupancy and air quality tracking system – lower CO2 levels make for more productive humans. Citing research from the UK, they point out that high levels of CO2 cause a 23% impairment in decision making, and an 11% reduction in productivity.

Using Smart, you can track lobby traffic, building occupancy, air quality and more – across tenancies, common areas, elevators, buildings, and even your entire portfolio. Even better, all of this tracking data is fed to you in real time. This real-time data helps you to improve the health and wellbeing – and thus the productivity – of your tenants.

Keren Eichen, Director of Real Estate Services at Unico Properties, understands how Equiem tech produces better, longer tenant relationships.
“When we go to renew with a tenant,” she says, “we want to understand what they’re doing, what they like, and what they don’t like. By having not only a place where we can advertise events, but where we can see participation in them, that’s huge. And I think we’re only just now scratching the surface of what that data will do for us.”

What contextualized data actually looks like, on a day-to-day basis

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Contextualized data, as the phrase suggests, is all about data generated by practical tenant actions that point to actionable insights. In our experience, real estate analytics tend to be represented as walls of endless numbers, framed by lines of obtuse jargon. We want commercial landlords to look at a visualisation of data, know instantly what it means, and what it tells them to do next. We want to generate causal links and strong correlations.

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Next, to give you examples from our ten years’ experience analysing tenant data, here are the most common blindspots experienced by CRE professionals, and how they are illuminated by the right analytics.

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There are, of course, many other use cases for analytics and the products that capture them. With Equiem's Analytics Dashboards, you have access to the most advanced data analytics feeds in the market. Our platform surfaces millions of data points across 11 user-friendly dashboards to give you a complete picture of your building, tenant community, and the performance of your tenant engagement strategy. Your 11-dashboard platform covers global and regional benchmarking, content, events, services and revenue, tenant activity, leasing, polls, surveys, and more.

Getting started: 7 of the most important analytics metrics to track

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These metrics – you might also call them goals, or objectives – should be captured using the analytics tool built into your tenant app and greater tenant experience software suite. For ease of reference, we have here reiterated some of the metrics discussed in the benefits section above.

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1. New registrations per month

How to set your building target:‍ NR/M = (building pop x desired % total registrations) / 12

This target is usually determined as a small proportion of total building population, if that number is known. So, if your building pop is 3,500, and you aim to have at least 50% of your building registered to the platform within its first year of operation, you might set a new registrations-per-month target of 145 users. This monthly target will help direct and refine the activities of your marketing and customer success teams, all in service of the yearly goal.

Going deeper: This metric may seem obvious, but it is a helpful jumping-off point for deeper, more contextual analysis.

If your registration rate continues steadily over time – or even increases – outside of major launch events or activations, this commonly means that you have a healthy community based, at least in part, on peer referrals. You might supplement that hypothesis with an NPS survey – if the majority of your users would recommend the platform, and their recommendations are actually resulting in conversions, your ROI is all but proven.

Tracking new registrations over time can tell you interesting things about how existing tenants use, and promote, your community.

What if your rate of new registrations spikes during onsite activations, but otherwise falls below targets? This does not mean your platform is not attractive to new users, and is therefore not providing the desired return. Instead, it proves that your experiential marketing strategies are particularly effective in securing ROI – that is, new users can be easily convinced of the value of your platform when it is demonstrated to them, in person. Based on this knowledge, you can alter your marketing strategy accordingly. You might, for instance, run a campaign wherein you hire product ambassadors to engage and demonstrate the product to tenants moving through high-traffic lobby areas.

2. Increase in MAU (Monthly Active Users)

How to set your building target: First, you have to set your baseline MAU target.

An MAU of 30-50% is most typical for a healthy, well-engaged community. So, in the first year operating your platform, you might set a baseline MAU target of 30%, or 300 users out of the 1,000 registered to your platform.From this, you might set as your target an MAU increase of 10% (of total registrations) for year two. That means you’re striving for an additional 100 active users per month (unless your total building population changes).

Going deeper: MAU is perhaps the most commonly-referenced metric in the tenant experience industry.

If you set a goal of 40% MAU (that is, 40% of users registered to your platform use the platform in a given month), and hit that 40% goal every month, you have achieved your desired ROI. A better, more ambitious objective is an upward trend. If your MAU increases, over time, you can be even more certain that your community is responding to the usefulness of your technology and the appeal of your engagement activities. Targeting trends also motivates your customer success teams to innovate, to provide additional points of interaction and value, rather than rely on the same seasonal activations and competitions every year.

For instance, we find that a comprehensive content strategy is a slow-burning method of elevating MAU over the long term. You might build a daily and weekly schedule filled with informative blog articles, industry news pieces, partner offers, and more. You might not see high engagement with that stream for several months (and sometimes, even a year or more). However, there is a point of critical mass, at which users become familiar with your schedule and begin to interact more with the content – comment on it, like it, share it with other users. As they do, MAU slowly increases, because a greater proportion of users have more reason to interact with your platform on a more regular basis. The result is a stronger, healthier, and more engaging offering. 

Tracking an uptrend in MAU is also an effective way of measuring the success of new products added to your platform. For instance, you might launch an access control integration with HID, enabling users to enter their building and office using your tenant experience platform on their smartphone instead of plastic access cards.

Let’s say that product update launched in March: That’s what we call an event, for data purposes. When measuring your change in MAU, as normal, you would signpost the month of March and look out for anomalous rises in the months following (April, May, and so on). This will help you to see if/how the introduction of access control has changed usage behaviour. Has it:

  • Encouraged more users to sign up to the platform (or is the idea of not needing a plastic card not compelling enough?)
  • Encouraged users to do more on the platform, given they are using it more regularly? (Do people read their building news more, now that they open the app reliably at a certain time, each day?)
  • And so on.

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3. Increase in employee productivity

How to set your building target:

Soft: Simply ask your tenants, via regular polls or a survey, whether they are more productive as a result of the introduction of your tenant experience platform and/or associated features. You could conduct this poll quarterly, bi-yearly, or yearly, to track changes in sentiments.

Hard: Measure and adjust CO2 levels in your building using a smart building measurement platform or plug-in.

Going deeper:

If you suspect your e-commerce platform empowers productivity, for instance, you might look at hard adoption metrics first. An analytics dashboard visualisation might tell you that users prefer desk delivery over click and collect, because it is less disruptive. But hard numbers will not always tell you how productivity might be furtherimproved. For that, you need direct feedback from those who use it.

As stated above, for more quantitative evidence, measure CO2. Plentiful is the scientific evidence which states that fresh air is essential for optimal working conditions. Carbon dioxide has been found to cause a 23% impairment to decision making, and an 11% reduction in productivity. By using an air quality monitoring system, you can track all the key areas in your building at once, in real time, and react quickly to increase oxygen levels if needed. Well-managed CO2, therefore, is a well-keyed investment into a high-functioning office building.

4. Interactions Per Visit (IPV)

How to set your building target:

Your mileage may vary based on your MAU rate (among other metrics), but an IPV of 3-7 is a good target.

Going deeper:

MAU is a high-level metric, a useful barometer of general user activity. Your IPV number supplements MAU by adding an additional, more instructive layer of context. For example, in a given month:

Your MAU is 60%, which tells you that 60% of registered users visited the platform at some point that month. At the very minimum, you draw the obvious conclusion: Your platform is, to some degree, attractive to its audience. You might also hypothesize that your inbound EDMs – the newsletters you send to get users to your platform every week – are effective. But you don’t know what users are doing once they arrive, or how long they stay.

So, next, you examine your IPV rate: 3 interactions per visit. Now your insights have compounded. For instance, you now know:

  • My newsletters are effective at getting users to my platform
  • Once they have arrived, usually through a single piece of content, users do not automatically close the platform to do something else
  • My platform design encourages a multi-step user journey, which can be exploited in a number of different ways

From there, you might dive deeper. The analytics dashboards tied to your tenant experience platform should tell you what your most popular site pages and content pieces are, using a cross section of your IPV rate. A common user journey, averaged out, might look like this:

  • User visits platform and logs in, lands on the home page
  • User navigates to the ‘Events’ tab
  • User clicks on the ‘Events’ carousel to advance a week ahead in the calendar
  • User clicks the ‘Quick RSVP’ button on your monthly ‘Community Drinks’ event post
  • User clicks on a news post, recommended at the base of your event post
  • User exits platform

IPV, therefore, channels user behaviour to provide helpful recommendations on improvements to platform design, content, and engagement techniques. Using these insights, you might:

  • Increase the promotional real estate you devote to events (e.g. more on home page, reducing the amount of clicks from site landing to the first meaningful interaction)
  • Compare user interactions with page visits and journey steps (e.g. are users more likely to RSVP to an event at the start of a session, or at the end?)
  • Diagnose drop-offs (e.g. if users are exiting from a page, or abandoning their purchases, at a certain point, you can examine that hurdle for flaws in design or content)

Of course, a poor IPV (2 interactions per visit, or fewer) is in itself a good litmus test for the efficacy of your engagement strategy. If people are bailing on your content, consistently, you may need to re-examine the wants and needs of your audience. Consider the fact that your MAU could still be 60% even with a platform IPV of 1-2 – MAU, quite simply, does not tell the full story.

5. Activity at time of day

How to set your building target: Not applicable – tenant activity will determine your activities and outcomes.

Going deeper: Do you know the time of day at which your tenants most prefer to:

  • Log in to your platform?
  • Read content?
  • Browse your store?
  • Order food?
  • Comment on posts, or have conversations with fellow users?

If you said ‘no’ to any or all of the questions above, you should take a closer look at activity sliced by time of day. By tracking the timing of user behaviour, you can uncover general habits that will help you to optimise your content and engagement strategies.

Let’s look at content, in particular: Scheduling news articles or events during high-traffic periods ensures greater exposure and readership, and provides users a more refined experience. It also better validates the efforts of your content production and marketing teams.

High-traffic periods may not occur when you expect, so it’s a good idea to consult your ‘activity at time of day’ visualisation on a monthly basis.

This analytic can help in other areas of tenant engagement, like e-commerce and retailer promotion. If you know, for instance, that users prefer to browse your store at the hours of 10am and 2pm, you can coordinate your onsite retailers and schedule offers and promotions at those times – or, conversely, you could promote products and services during periods where higher traffic (both physical and digital) is desired.

If you don’t know the daily browsing habits of your users, down to the hour, you are making guesses, and risk running a sub-optimal engagement strategy that will disengage users over the long term.

6. Unique visits per user (VPU)

How to set your building target: As with IPV, your mileage may vary based on your MAU rate (among other metrics). A VPU of 7-10 is healthy.

Going deeper: Let’s say that your MAU (Monthly Active User) rate is 30%, which means that 30% of the registered users on your platform visited at least once in a given month. The higher an MAU is, the better – but MAU alone is not enough to determine whether your online community is healthy and useful.

300 users (out of a possible 1000 total users) may visit your platform at least once in a given month, but how many more times do they visit? You can only know that by assessing the amount of unique visits per user.

An average VPU of 7-10 tells a much different story than a VPU of 3-4. A high VPU indicates that your active users are very active, on average. Most come to your platform, regularly, of their own volition. Maybe they visit to interact with the latest content, to chat with peers, RSVP to events, or use digital amenities.

Of course, a low VPU (around 3-4) tends to indicate the opposite. Dig deeper, and you may find that your cohort of 300 active users is split between active contributors and idle browsers. For instance, a minority of visitors may return 5-6 times, and the majority may visit only once.

What can you do about a low VPU? Investigating your traffic entry points is a good place to start. Weekly email newsletters may be a great tool for reminding users to log in, but if the content impressions you offer are not compelling enough, many will not stay or return for self-directed browsing. They will pop up momentarily, log an MAU datapoint, and then leave until prompted again.

If your VPU is low, and emails are your main generator of traffic, try running a split-test of subject lines with segmented user groups. Consider also that your content headlines may need sprucing up. Or, perhaps you need to inject some novelty: For instance, regular comment-to-win competitions, in which users must regularly check back on a piece of content. Should all else fail, you may need to re-examine the wants and needs of your tenants to formulate a content offering that better encourages organic exploration.

7. Unique email newsletter interactions

Even though it is just one tool in your communication kit, a well-planned and executed email newsletter strategy can maintain and bolster the week-to-week momentum created by your engagement activities. The ultimate goal is for users to visit the platform, daily, without being prompted – but a subtle weekly reminder, in the form of a ‘current events’ wrap-up, can build that behaviour over time, increasing both your MAU and VPU all the while.

Email and content marketers are constantly theorising about what makes a compelling email newsletter. HubSpot, for instance, has a host of design features and messaging suggestions (most of which, by the way, are built into Equiem’s newsletter creation tool). However you choose to communicate with your tenants, there are three time-honoured metrics to track, in order to assess performance and make improvements.‍

7.1. Open rate

The percentage of users that opened your email. If your platform has 100 users, and 10 of those users open your newsletter, you have an open rate of 10%.

A ‘good’ open rate is difficult to benchmark, as it is dependent on many factors (like demographics and send-out times), but anywhere from 20-30% for a weekly newsletter is reasonably healthy.

If possible, create your own benchmark using your first newsletter. Over time, your open rate should either remain steady (as tenant populations and demographics change), or it should grow slowly. If you have weekly or monthly dips, though, don’t despair – the game of newsletter growth is often played over many years.

7.2. Click-through rate (CTR)

Your CTR is the percentage of users who clicked a link in your email. This number is usually reached by dividing total email clicks by the total number of emails delivered. But your analytics dashboards should be able to dive deeper, separating your unique CTR from your total or holistic CTR.

Unique CTR works like this: You deliver 100 emails, and 10 people click on the links in the email. You have a unique CTR of 10%. Unique CTR is the most commonly tracked CTR metric.

Total CTR works like this: You deliver 100 emails, and 10 people click on two links each. Your total CTR would then be 20%.

According to emailout.com, the average CTR is around 4%. Once again, your mileage may vary.‍

7.3. Click-to-open-rate (CTOR)

‍Your CTOR is similar to your CTR, but the fundamental difference is in the denominator. To find your CTOR, you divide the number of newsletter link clicks by the number of users who actually opened the email, not the amount of emails delivered.

So: You send your newsletter to 100 users, and 20 users open the email. Across those 20 users, your newsletter links receive 5 total clicks. That gives you a CTOR of 25%, next to a CTR of 5%.

Why are these metrics important? They help you diagnose problems, and prescribe improvements, based on the relationship between lows and highs. For instance, a low CTR and high CTOR might suggest that your newsletters have compelling content, but that content is ultimately appealing only to a small proportion of your building community. The inverse – a high CTR and low CTOR – might suggest that your newsletter subject lines are attractive, but users aren’t finding anything of value when they click through.

Speaking of subject lines, here’s a bonus tool you can use to optimise the strength of your newsletters (and reach higher CTRs): CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. To use this free tool, simply draft up and place your headline in the bar and click ‘Analyze Now’. You will receive a complete read-out on the power of your chosen headline, based on type, word balance, sentiment, character length, and other parameters. Use it in your mission to craft better content for your tenant community.

Free tenant experience analytics reporting template

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Equiem’s Community Managers use the following reporting template as part of our standard Engage services. We track the key metrics listed above and condense them into an easily digestible format for the purpose of aiding our clients with analysis and high-level performance. This template is designed to supplement our clients’ regular use of our Analytics Dashboards product.
We and our CRE landlord clients are constantly engaged in the process of understanding the tenant of the future, and evolving the standard of tenant experience to suit.

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Go forth and conquer

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Take on the future of CRE backed by usable data

Despite the urgent need and apparent desire for actionable tenant analytics, CRE firms have been slow to adopt solutions. According to Deloitte, “fifty-eight percent of APAC respondents expect their companies to increase investment on data analytics in the next year, compared to only 32% of European respondents and 34% of North American respondents”.

You can still be one of the earlier adopters. Equiem’s Core tenant experience platform solution includes our Analytics Dashboards product, which provides you all of the analytics discussed in this companion guide (plus many, many more). If you want more data, or need ways to optimise your engagement strategy, we can help.

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I want to launch my own platform – what's next?

Glad to hear it! Depending on where you’re at in your discovery journey, we have different pathways to help you progress efficiently to launching your first asset.