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CRM for Real Estate Agents: 7 Ways to Convert Leads Into Sales

September 6, 2016

A lead is a person who can mean a lot to your real estate business. Leads can do business with you, spread a positive word of mouth about your services and even become your biggest customer. But are you sure you know everything you need to convert leads into opportunities and sales? Without tracking your marketing campaigns and organizing your sales process efficiently, your business performance may not live up to your expectations.

For a busy real estate professional, it may be hard to nurture and convert leads equally, especially if your contact database is growing. Meanwhile, it’s vital to pull the leads into your sphere of influence and consistently keep them in the loop.

You probably already know that a tool such as a CRM for real estate agents is one of the most cost-effective ways to do this. Indeed, the average ROI of a real estate CRM is $8,71 per $1 dollar spent!

It may be confusing to understand what real benefits a CRM system carries for real estate pros if you haven’t used it at your brokerage before. We broke down some of the most outstanding ways a CRM for real estate agent optimizes your sales pipeline so you have a broader overview of the opportunities this tool opens up for your business.

6 ways incorporating a CRM for real estate agents helps you do more business

1) Get excellent lead intelligence

In a nutshell, a real estate CRM provides you with actionable sales knowledge. You know which leads are more qualified, when to call, what to offer and how often to get in touch. You can observe your follow up campaigns as they happen and understand where you fall short.

These are just a few things a CRM for real estate agents does to bring you better lead intelligence:

provides a 360-degree view of each of your contacts, from where the lead came from to how many and which exactly property proposals sent and viewings organized;
lets you set up and track your marketing campaigns;
calculates the ROI of your marketing channels, whether it’s email and SMS marketing or retargeting and social media;
simplifies follow-ups with email scheduling, tracking open and click rates, setting automatic reminders, creating a library of follow up templates and much more;
stores all lead intelligence data in one central place, with accurate data on each record neatly organized and easily accessible;
keeps your team productive and connected at all times so that they don’t have to do lots of manual work.

Now that a real estate agent CRM captures your lead intelligence data for you, you have real feedback on your performance and what to improve next.

2) Integrate your real estate website(s) and CRM

It seems that having multiple tools for building an online presence eats up too much of your time and resources. Running a real estate website is essential to your success but it’s not easy to do everything properly, both from a technical, design, SEO and lead generation standpoint.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage both your current and past contacts and your website from one central platform, without switching between various tools? This is what an advanced real estate CRM can do for you. You can run as many websites as you need all from inside the CRM. You can even create a franchise network of sites all run from a single CRM platform.

Not only it’s incredibly cost-effective, but it’s also very efficient and time-saving too. You can publish any of the properties from your database onto your site, optimize it for SEO and share to your social media in a few clicks.

3) Organize follow-ups better than ever before

As an agent, you’re always looking for some excellent ways to broaden your SOI, get a continuous flow of leads and do more business.

Every day, you follow up with your clients. It’s a recurring activity that will always be there if you are to close more deals. That’s why you need to find a way to follow up effectively, at the same time without spending too much actual time on it.

A CRM for real estate agents opens up amazing follow-up opportunities for you. For example, you can:

segment your database for easier communication;
send targeted and personalized email and SMS campaigns;
track campaign performance, e.g. open, click and response rates and spot the hot leads in your database;
automate follow up reminders so you won’t miss out a potential opportunity;
try and test the frequency of touchpoints and which messages to send.

Lastly, scale what works, refine you messaging and stop basing your sales strategy on guesswork. The rewards will be more deals closed and more happy customers spreading the word about you.

4) Customize and personalize your services

Marketing in real estate is hard. You have to stand out from the competition and break through the noise which is especially hard to do online.

As obvious as it may sound, the key to your success in real estate is personal relationships and the customer service you provide. However, it’s hard to stay personal when you have hundreds of contacts in your database.

There’s an easy way out – use a CRM for real estate agents to:

set up targeted, personalized follow up campaigns;
segment your database to send out relevant messaging to each group;
create drip marketing campaigns which will deliver your content to leads automatically and keep them in the loop;
carefully store all of your conversations for future records to stay informed when the right moment for sales comes;
keep valuable details like birthdays, wedding and moving anniversaries to reach out to clients and maintain warm relationships with them.

5) Stay in touch with past clients to generate more business

Most of the sales in real estate result from customer referrals. It’s a great marketing channel every agent wishes to make the most of.

However, do you know why many agents don’t get customer referrals even if they did a stellar job for their clients? One research discovered the most common reason is they simply don’t ask for a referral in the first place!

If the same applies to you, you might want to reverse the situation asap. Head to your CRM, go through your contact database and set up reminders to follow up with past clients for referrals. We have a big post here on how to build an effective referral process: 6 Ways Top-Producing Agents Get Real Estate Referrals.

6) Create a better advertising process

Naturally, to reach your target audience you need to leverage advertising. This marketing channel has always been costly and, if done wrong, it yields few results while eating up a big part of your budget.

A CRM for real estate agents makes you more independent when it comes to real estate advertising, both online and offline. For example, you can:

create beautiful flyers and adverts right from within your CRM, ready to be distributed both in print and online;
send nicely formatted property proposals which you can automatically create in a few seconds;
set up ad retargeting campaigns to bring people who bounced off back to your site and convert them into leads.

7) Generate marketing and sales reporting automatically

Lastly, a CRM for real estate agents is a perfect tool for generating unlimited reports without taking any of your team’s time. Let them focus on marketing and sales but at the same time have real-time feedback on how things are going on and what you should improve.

What’s next?

A real estate CRM empowers teams with game-changing opportunities. If you think that a 41% sales increase per agent once the CRM is put in place is too much to lose, you might just be ready to give it a try.