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Welcome on Board: Real Estate Agent CRM Best Practices for Lead Nurturing

September 21, 2016

For many agents, the quest for generating new leads takes most of their marketing and sales efforts. Indeed, you need to keep your sales pipeline full of leads all the time, especially so because only about 25 percent of your leads are sales-ready. But if you really want to convert these leads into loyal clients, you will need to improve your customer onboarding experience dramatically.

Not only lead onboarding and nurturing creates the first impression of your real estate business, it also directly affects your bottom line. These leads can never get back to you unless you manage to engage them meaningfully.

Just like with any other aspect of real estate marketing and sales, you’re going to need some great tools to make this happen. A real estate agent CRM is a natural choice and here are some thought-provoking tips on how to use it to welcome and nurture your new leads.

Step up lead nurturing and customer onboarding with a real estate agent CRM

1) Make customer service a priority

The importance of customer service can never be stressed enough – it is a true differentiator for your business. The properties you sell are pretty much the same your competition does so it’s hard to cut through the noise without pouring a great deal of your marketing budget into advertising.

Meanwhile, great customer service is a perfect opportunity to generate plenty of real estate referrals which are probably the most valuable real estate marketing channel. The word about you travels faster at a zero marketing expense. As CRMguru founder Bob Thompson notes in his “Successful CRM: Turning Customer Loyalty into Profitability” white paper, it’s the way your customer feels about your service that can make or break a deal.

Always assume that your #1 priority is to deliver excellent customer service, and start taking things from there. A real estate agent CRM puts your leads and customers into the center of all communications. Now leveling up your customer service is essentially simpler.

2) Welcome new people meaningfully

Why waste each other’s time? Your leads are just as busy as you are so making your first touchpoints quick and to the point is the best strategy. Ultimately, you should aim at finding out as much about what your client needs as possible. When and how your client wants to talk? Any specific questions they have that call for extra research before the meeting? What is their interest in the area and properties? This might seem very obvious but are you sure you ask (and get answers to) these questions every time someone new gets in touch with you? If not, make sure to put this on your list.

3) Automate follow-ups intelligently

Would you believe that 80 percent of leads are lost, just because they’ve never been followed up? You can reverse the situation with a thought-out follow-up plan.

As your contact database grows, it’s hard to follow up personally every time. It’s also crazy to suggest that your agents will remember about each touchpoint when they have so much work to do every day. On the contrary, real estate marketing automation opens up some wonderful opportunities that agents can try and test to generate more business and deliver excellent customer service.

The key to intelligent follow-up is to automate as many follow-ups as you can but make sure they are personalized and tailored to the clients’ requirements. Here are a few things to get started with your real estate agent CRM:

automate reminders about follow up calls and emails;
automatically add new leads;
automate email drip campaigns;
automate reminders about clients’ birthdays, wedding and moving anniversaries, etc.

4) Educate your leads

Your ultimate goal is to make your real estate website a go-to resource which people remember every time they have a question regarding your area of expertise. Obviously, a real estate website offering nothing more than listings won’t help much. It must be bigger than that and it has to be sophisticated.

Your website visitors may pursue different goals when landing on your website but one thing is stable: most of them look for information. Your area, communities, market trends, properties, attractions, schools, hospitals, entertainment and about anything else you can think of. Educating your leads with content marketing is a powerful lead nurturing tactic and if you managed to feature the right info on your website, chances are great people will be much more willing to opt in.

In a nutshell, you need to run a real estate blog and focus tightly on the questions bothering your niche. Put together any buyer and seller advice, frequently asked questions, community posts, etc. that clients will ask you about anyway. Set up email marketing campaigns to send out your content which gives you an excellent excuse to reach out one more time.

Lastly, what’s so great about real estate content marketing, is it gives you permission to build relationships with people over time. Make sure you don’t let this valuable opportunity fall through the cracks.

5) Use multichannel communication

Email, SMS, social media, phone calls, meetings, etc. – there are so many ways to stay in touch with your clients personally. Just pick up the one your client prefers so you do deliver better customer experience. To save yourself some time, make sure various channels are integrated into your real estate agent CRM so you won’t spend the whole day pulling the data from different places (advanced CRMs like AgentDrive integrate email, phone, and SMS for easier communications).

When everything is integrated into a real estate agent CRM system, it’s easier to reach your audience everywhere on the web and on any device they use.

6) Make the most of your marketing intelligence

One of the best real estate agent CRM features is its ability to capture important sales and marketing data and showcase it through simple, yet insightful metrics. You can analyze your business performance from all angles: per agent, property category, activity, franchise office, location, region, time period, etc.

This marketing intelligence is often a game-changing one; you can optimize nearly any aspect of your work and spend less time and budget on things that don’t work for you.

So whenever you need to make an important decision, use your real estate agent CRM reporting and dashboards to automatically generate reports. You no longer need to stumble in the dark every time you need real insights and there’s no need to overwhelm your staff with extra work to compile their reports.

7) Stay in permanent touch with past clients

Like we already mentioned, real estate referrals is an agent’s major source of doing business. They are an anchor for a successful brokerage which is why you’d want to harness this power asap.

Good news is you already have a powerful and exclusive opportunity to get positive and trustworthy referrals. This opportunity is your contacts database.

Probably the best way to stay in touch with past clients is to automate reminders about their birthdays and moving anniversaries. You can also reach out occasionally to make sure they’re ok with their new home and if any help is needed. In other words, keep your past clients delighted and you’ll never find yourself lacking new referrals and leads.

Staying in touch with past clients and designing an effective process for collecting referrals is well enough for an entire post, so you can check this one out for more details: 6 Proven Ways Top-Producing Agents Get Real Estate Referrals.

Final thoughts: it all narrows down to relationships

Real estate is all about personal relationships that you keep with your sphere of influence. You don’t need to be a sales genius to follow the above advice and understand the instant benefits it’s sure to deliver. Customer onboarding and lead nurturing are so important so make sure it’s the next thing you focus on.