One of the golden rules in any real estate playbook is the need to stay on top with leads. But quite often, agents lack the tools and process to intelligently follow up with their prospects in a way that would foster engagement. To see more real estate leads staying in your sphere of influence, try using the following tips.
The real estate industry relies on personal connections heavily. So it’s essential that you start building relationships with your online leads right after the first touchpoint and work your way up. Here are five proven ways to do just that.
Real estate leads: how agents can stay on top
1. Adopt a customer relationship management (CRM) solution
ActiveRain, the largest online community for real estate agents, found out in one of their surveys that “richer” agents were willing to spend 6x more on technology and twice more likely to use customer relationship management (CRM).
The rationale behind these number is simple. It’s hard to effectively follow-up with a growing contact database, and the cost of letting real estate leads slip through the cracks is too high to afford.
On the contrary, a real estate CRM brings all your communications in one central place. Some of the best things it empowers agents to do are:
- making follow-up calls and send emails to new leads who are at the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey;
- setting reminders to follow-up with the sales-ready leads (since they’re closer to the point of signing up with you, you’d want to talk with them personally);
- automatically adding new online leads to your CRM database;
- launching and tracking email drip campaigns;
- setting reminders about client birthdays and move-in anniversaries, etc.
2. Have a good reason to get in touch
A couple of “just checking in” emails is not enough to stay on top with your real estate leads. A much better reason to get in touch is sharing your latest blog post, local market update or neighborhood guide.
Despite this approach already known to work, lots of agents still fill their leads’ inboxes with the same old follow-up emails. However, people expect real value so always include a link to some interesting info in your emails to make them less promotional.
3. Segment your contacts list
If you’re sending follow-up campaigns to your real estate leads, chances are you don’t send the same message to the entire database.
The idea is to engage with people better by sending targeted, personalized messages. To do so, segment your list into groups based on the criteria that are the most important to you, for example:
- status: lead, customer, past client;
- inquiry: buyer, renter, seller, investor;
- location (for example, particular neighborhoods in your city);
- stage in a sales funnel (new, verified, closed), etc.
- tags and groups (pets, special requirements), etc.
4. Retarget
Only 2% of your website visitors convert on the first visit; the remaining 98% go and might never get back. To reverse the situation, launch retargeting campaigns. Here’s how it works:
5. Use engaging content to get real estate leads
People love valuable content that addresses their questions and gives good answers. To stay on top with your real estate leads, try:
- answering frequently asked questions;
- explaining how the market will change in the future and why it’s better to act now;
- sharing your customer testimonials and reviews (a bit of reasonable self-promotion won’t hurt);
- addressing common objections and explaining why they won’t stand up to scrutiny.
What’s next?
Be persistent, use the right content and send it to the right people and you will see more of them staying in your sphere of influence and contacting you for your expertise.
