As an agent, do you use real estate SMS marketing to reach and engage with your leads? If not, you might want to give it a second thought: customers are 4 times more likely to open an SMS than an email. In conjunction with email, website and social media, SMS campaigns help you create stronger multichannel communications with your leads. Here are some of the best ideas on how to incorporate SMS marketing into your sales process and make clients more excited about your follow up.
We are used to thinking that SMS texting is all about coupons and promotions. While this is an essential part of SMS marketing, there’s so much more to it than that. Just like you use email follow up to reach, nurture and convert leads, the same could apply to real estate SMS marketing. Add to this that 30% of real estate traffic comes from mobile and you’ll want to catch up with mobile users more often.
Where to start?
Just pick an SMS software provider and that’s it. A quick online search will show you the market is huge so you’ll definitely find something that works for you. For example, AgentDrive has partnered with the leading SMS developers, Twilio and Plivo, so you can get your SMS campaigns and contacts integrated with our real estate CRM.
Once you’re all set, you need to figure out what, when and to whom send your real estate SMS marketing campaigns. Let’s get into it then!
Setting up your real estate SMS marketing campaigns
1) Text for property information
Let’s say you sell a listing and want to get more inquiries from potential leads. One way to make this process a whole lot easier for prospects is to set up an SMS autoresponder campaign. Here’s how you do it:
- create an SMS autoresponder campaign;
- pick a keyword for the property, for example ‘Home 1’;
- prompt people to text ‘Home 1’ to a particular phone number (which you can set on your own for any of your SMS campaigns);
- once people texted you, they’ll automatically get a message back to their phones with all the details about this house. You can include typical items like a number of bedrooms/bathrooms, square footage, major amenities and price as well as drop links to your site or property video.
P.S. You can also include a click-to-call phone number and if people get really interested, they can contact you with just a single tap.
Another powerful benefit about this outreach is you can set up email notifications. So once someone texts you ‘Home 1’, you get an email with that person’s phone number. This gives you more freedom of action as you can call potential leads on your own instead of hoping they’ll call you back some time.
2) Generate leads with SMS updates
Because people are more likely to open SMS than emails, you can set up a real estate SMS marketing campaign to encourage potential leads to opt-in via SMS.
Again, all you need to do is set up an SMS campaign and pick a keyword like ‘Home123’ which people will be texting to a given number. Next, make sure it’s easy to join you. Post the keyword on your website, property signs, business cards, email signature and social media to let people know about the opportunity.
Once people joined you, you can then text them updates about new listings, open houses, price changes, community events and anything else people are interested in! This is an amazing way to keep them in the loop with your updates and grow your sphere of influence.
If you want to save yourself time and routine work, you can also integrate your SMS campaigns with your real estate CRM. This way people who opted in will be added to your contacts automatically.
Generating leads with SMS updates is a powerful strategy: 65% of smartphone users are open to receiving offers on their mobile phones. Be careful, though: 83% of users prefer receiving SMS updates up to twice a month.
[Related post: How to Generate Leads with a Native Real Estate App].
3) Create your virtual business cards
Another way to promote your services is to text people your contact details upon their request. So let’s say people are driving past your property every now and then and get interested in contacting you directly.
Post a keyword like AgentJohn that customers can text to a given number. Once someone texts you this keyword, they’ll receive an SMS back with your contact details like name, phone number, email, website and any other information you wish to share. You can even post a mobile link to your reviews on any sites like Zillow or Yelp to prove your expertise.
[Related post: 6 Proven Ways Top-Producing Agents Get Real Estate Referrals].
4) Appointment reminders
A clear and straightforward way to deliver more value as an agent is text your client’s reminders of important appointments like showings, open houses, meetings, etc. It’ll take you minutes to set this up in a system but will take additional strain off your daily workload.
Enter all important dates into your SMS campaign, schedule campaigns accordingly and enjoy an easy and organized communication with your clients.
[Related post: 5 Real Estate Contact Management Strategies to Upgrade Your Follow Up].
5) Save your marketing budget
Rather than spend your marketing dollars on print advertising and local classifieds, you can target your audience via mobile. Regardless of your mobile reach, it’s almost always far cheaper than print ads. Bulk messaging lets you reach a huge number of contacts in minutes and still at an amazingly low cost.
This is a great way to secure yourself a bit of attention via mobile devices your potential customers carry in their pockets: 48% never turn their phones off and 64% sleep with a phone by their bedside.
6) Send targeted messages
You probably already segment your database into several categories and adjust your messaging to send the right information to the right people. This is a smart thing to do as your contacts are on different stages of a buyer’s journey: some of them are more sales-ready than the others.
Why not set up real estate SMS marketing campaigns targeted at these segments? For example, you can send out campaigns to new leads, customers, referrals and even other agents. This way your text messages will look less spammy to people who have various interest in your services.
Econsultancy’s survey revealed that SMS is ‘the most effective mobile marketing medium for eliciting consumer response’. Backed up by the right messaging to your target audiences, it does bring you leads each month.
What’s next?
Real estate SMS campaigns carry some great lead generation opportunities that agents can capitalize on. One of the very best ones is they provide a clear and complete focus on your services. Unlike the web, there are no distractions here: your SMS is dedicated entirely to your services and faces no competition with Cat videos.
Make sure you experiment with this marketing channel as mobile trends impact both agents and customers. From both a customer relationship and marketing automation standpoint and combined with other marketing channels, they can give you an unmatched market advantage.
Hi ! This is very informative & interesting article.Nice to read your blog post first time ever. I really appreciate this post. Thanks for sharing this awesome post . Pro Agent Solutions offering helps our clients to generate curbside leads to their phone with SMS text marketing from the phone numbers on their sign riders.