What Actually Converts in Self-Storage?

Interview with Michael Dogger

Unwired Logic: Please introduce yourself to the readers. Who are you? What company do you represent, and how did you come to self-storage?

Michael Dogger: Sure. My name is Michael Dogger. I'm the CEO of R6 Automate and R6 Digital. So R6 Automate represents Sitelink, which is the self-storage software. It's the largest software in the world, with about 17,000 locations.

We've represented that for 17 years, and I've been working in storage for about that period. My father was one of the founding members of the Australian Association and I'm just a second generation storage person that's come in and taken over the company and we now have about 60 staff in Brisbane and we build software for storage and do digital marketing for self-storage.

Unwired Logic: Speaking of digital marketing in self-storage, what are some best practices that operators can do? And on the other hand, what are things that operators end up wasting money on?

Michael Dogger: I think probably one of the biggest things that people waste money on is doing things with Meta ads when they haven't maxed out Google ads. Google ads is very high intent. You have people literally trying to buy storage.

A mistake we often see is people trying to spread money across a bunch of those lead areas, and Meta ads just do not convert anywhere near the same kind of rate as Google ads. We're seeing a similar thing with chat. Stick with Google ads until you've maxed out as much of the impression share as you can.

Unwired Logic: What are best practices that operators should be aware of?

Michael Dogger: Probably one of the biggest things that's allowed us to compete against the big guys is really focusing on an individual location. Even if you've got multiple locations, build out separate campaigns per location: different targeting, areas, the types of storage, and offers.

One of the things that I've been talking about online is personalization. So the ability to offer a completely different offer to different people. What I mean by that is, let's say someone's moving house; you don't want to offer them a free box of wine because now they have to store that. Perhaps something better would be 10 free boxes.

Whereas, in business storage, wine is actually a great thing that increases conversion, because often the person doing the booking doesn't pay the bill, yet they get to keep the wine.

Unwired Logic: Speaking of conversions, in your experience, which types of inquiries are more likely to convert?

Michael Dogger: Walk-in is always the highest. Phone is the next highest. I wish it was online, but it really is phone. Online booking, relative to those two, is lower.

That said, the amount of move-ins that come purely online is growing. In the past it used to be a few percent. Now it’s nudging 20%.

Online’s great because someone doesn’t have to deal with a person on the phone. They can sit back and look at a bunch of different options. But phone converts really well, because the person on the other end can just say, “Yeah, okay, we’ll match that price and give you a further 10% off.” So they pretty much always get the sale.

Unwired Logic: So when somebody is actually doing an online booking, what are some of the reasons that they abandon it versus converting?

Michael Dogger: So the biggest thing is they just don't understand the product.

What that means is when we make the process too complicated. Often what happens is the storage operators focus on trying to get all the information they need. A rookie mistake is asking for ID before you even get a credit card.

People are sitting there on the train booking storage at 6 p.m. because they realized they forgot about it. The last thing they do is pull out their ID because no one keeps that on them anymore.

The other one is that because it’s mostly on mobile, it needs to essentially be what we would call a single-page experience. None of this, next step, next step, next step,… It converts really badly because people just get fatigued. Often it can be patchy coverage as well, and there's just another screen, another screen, and then they give up and leave.

When you get it down to one screen, even if it scrolls really long, which is perfectly fine, people are just used to that on mobile, conversion rates improve: Scroll down, scroll down, scroll through terms and conditions, click, I accept, pre-fill that credit card, hit done. Our online booking process is one page, and that was the highest-converting thing we ever did.

The other big one that I've talked about on LinkedIn is the wording of what we're doing. Traditionally, people talk about reservations and move-ins, but no one knows what those mean. What's a move-in? Like, that's not language that anyone understands.

I've popularized the term pay now, pay later, which is the highest converting ones I've seen. Trying different ways, trying to map it back to how people would think about things because using industry terms is just confusing people.

Unwired Logic: Have you observed any kind of difference here between markets that are more mature for self-storage and markets that are less mature for self-storage?

Michael Dogger: Absolutely. That's one of the big things I talk about online. The United States has one of the highest conversion rates.

The penetration rate in the U.S. is around 9-10%. Meaning 9% or 10% of people have used storage. Australia, if I remember, is like 1% or 2%. I think the U.K. is like 0.1%.

What that means is when people see storage online, they actually don't really understand what it is. Whereas in the U.S., people know exactly what it is. They know what that size is. They know what size they need. So they just buy it, done.

But they're the last in online booking. Technologically, the U.S. is among the slowest to adopt. Australia and Asia are slow too. Then the UK is probably the fastest. But in terms of if we look at market maturity, it's reversed. The U.K. is one of the newest markets. Then Australia, Asia, and finally the US.

I think we get two lessons from that:

The more mature a market is, the more stuck in their ways they are. When we built a product called StorApp , which allowed you to have your own branded app for self-storage, the U.K. was one of the fastest markets we grew in. And the U.S. has been one of the slowest.

The other thing that does, I think, actually affect it is the pricing. In the U.S., for the most part, storage is so cheap. You can probably pick up a 100 square feet unit or a 10 square meter unit for 100 bucks or less. Whereas the same thing in Australia is 300 or 400. And the same thing could be 400 or 500 pounds in the U.K. In Asia, you're not even going to find a unit that size. The pricing is so cheap in the U.S., and therefore more people use it.

Unwired Logic: Besides conversion rates, what are other KPIs throughout the entire funnel that operators should be measuring and also should be really understanding what they mean and what impact they have on their business?

Michael Dogger: So probably the biggest one that most people just don't look at is unit availability. I'm not going to say things like page view data and, you know, bounce rate. That's all the standard stuff you can Google about conversion rate.

I talk about trying to limit you down to maybe five or six sizes: extra small, small, medium, large, extra large, or something like that. You can even phrase them in the market that you're in. Like in Japan, they are measured in tatami mat sizes. In Australia, we talk about half garage, garage, single garage, because everyone in Australia has a garage. No one in the UK does, so they don't understand what that means. And then, if you say things like the “size of a small room” - in Australia, rooms are massive, whereas in the UK, less so.

One of the biggest things that I'll see is people come back and say, oh, my conversion rate's dropping. And then I'll go straight to their website they don't have any medium or large units available. Like, what do you think is going to happen, right? We don't need tFo overthink about any of the other numbers for a second. We can actually just look at the fact that you don't have anything to sell.

It's a bit of a different angle, but it's such a common mistake that I see companies making. You can play around with any other conversion rate optimization and all that sort of stuff. But if you have nothing to sell, then no one's going to buy it.

Unwired Logic: Fair enough. Say an operator wants to analyze and then also fix their conversion funnel. How would you recommend that they go on about it?

Michael Dogger: Yeah, so I think a decent proxy to start with is this idea of a cost per move-in. This is something I've been talking about forever. For at least the last decade, I've been talking about measuring the cost per move-in.

People talk about, you know, cost per inquiry, impressions that you get, things like this. I really try to start with cost per move-in. It's just a decent proxy for how the whole funnel is going. Then you work out the average length of stay of your customers, and you can calculate the lifetime value.

For facilities, it's around $1,500 to $2,000 for a customer. So you might be saying, well, I might be willing to pay 5-10% for that. And then you track that number instead of how many inquiries you got. There might be many, but are they junk inquiries?

I find that cost per move-in is a great proxy that brings all the different metrics down to just: what does a move-in cost?

Unwired Logic: Speaking about your LinkedIn posts, what kind of AI tools do you think have a lot of impact in digital marketing for self-storage? Where can one easily automate or save time and money in your experience?

Michael Dogger: Probably the worst way to use it is to take over your own marketing, and that might sound a bit rich, being someone who sells marketing. But AI essentially just amplifies your knowledge. If you know a lot, it's going to amplify that. If you don't know a lot, it's going to amplify that.

We get a lot of emails from customers saying that Claude's telling them that strategy or this. But it's not going to work because Claude doesn't know what it's talking about. Yes, we can implement that strategy, but then conversions will tank. Now, with the right context, a marketing expert can use it perfectly fine.

The overall principle, I would say, is that storage operators should use AI in things that they already know something about, but take too long or are too arduous.

Reporting is a pretty natural one, right? I think pretty much every FMS out there allows you to pull reports and use an AI to generate dashboards. I've sold many custom reporting solutions over the years that I would charge tens of thousands and more for. But these days, we tend to just give a lot of the reporting away for free because just every man and his Claude can pull that up.

Helping you write your letters is common too. But we have an association that already has predefined letter templates. I actually put together an AI guide for storage that has been rolled out here in Australia to all the members in conjunction with the Self Storage Association. And that is where we differ from probably everyone else just saying: just get AI to write everything. There's actually a whole bunch of legal stuff that we have to say and do. So we put together a pack that's free on our website that essentially shows operators how to just use it with the Self Storage Association stuff.

The voice agents that people are trying at the moment are probably the most promising I see at the moment for a bunch of the necessary but less fun calls. Those sort of grunt work functions that you traditionally have someone outside doing: Debtor follow-up, credit cards expired...

It's a pretty standard loop that's just saying: “Hey, we're letting you know your credit card's expired. You can click into your software and update it.” Those are pretty good because they're just single-function. They don't have to do much.

On sales, I would just be nervous. I think people still just want to speak to someone before buying.

Unwired Logic: Were there any things that you experimented with in terms of AI applications that either worked really, really well or showed limitations of the technology?

Michael Dogger: We use AI to build things faster. One of the reasons I'm decently prolific on LinkedIn at the moment is because we've rebuilt some of our tech stack.

I'm an electrical computer systems engineer by trade. We've been writing software for, I don't know, 17 years or so in the industry. The rate, though, at which we can produce new stuff is probably three to five times faster. We use AI because we already know how to write software. It just helps us to write it faster.

We've launched our revenue management product, which I think is more feature-rich than anything else out there. And there's about three or four other products that are going to be released in the next two months because we just can move at such a pace. So probably the biggest thing is playing with that.

Unwired Logic: Do you have any final closing remarks? Any new technological developments that you're excited for or any trends that you're seeing in self-storage?

Michael Dogger: I think the biggest thing at the moment is just testing a bunch of stuff. One of the big things that we spent a bunch of time on was building a full A-B testing engine into our booking system. You've been able to do A-B testing on websites forever. But one of the things that I've noticed is that things that used to work six months ago don't work as much anymore. I think that we're in such a state of flux at the moment.

We need to just be able to test different things, test different offers. Don't just say, well, this discount has always worked really well for us. Why is it not working now? Try something different.

Traditionally, without it being a pitch for any product, it's been a bit painful to go and do that. I hope that we will see, across the industry, more testing, because, you know, we just don't know what works as well anymore. Some stuff still works the same, but the demographics of storage are changing, and also how they use technology is changing.

The standard offers, the standard messaging just doesn't seem to work anymore. It's just not as static as it was.

And so probably that's my biggest kind of takeaway for many people: just try something new.