Home Featured Articles CRM Systems for Real Estate: 11 Ways to Create Winning Marketing Campaigns

CRM Systems for Real Estate: 11 Ways to Create Winning Marketing Campaigns

August 16, 2019

Is your brokerage good at delivering marketing messages to your niche and getting your services found in the real estate landscape? Winning more and better leads is challenging, as is keeping your pipeline full of new contacts all the time. People come into a sale more informed and the competition is strong. You may think your brokerage handles marketing and customer relationships well but a good real estate CRM can only make it better.

What if today’s real estate marketing doesn’t necessarily mean you need a huge database or a big marketing budget? More often than not, it depends on the tools and strategy you use to make your existing database more qualified and sales-ready (and bring in new leads along the way).

In one of our previous posts, we were taking a closer look at how every brokerage can benefit from using CRM systems for real estate (CRM in Real Estate: 10 Reasons Agents Should Use It to Grow Their SOI). Now let’s see how exactly a real estate CRM works for creating outstanding marketing campaigns.

Running your next marketing campaign with CRM systems for real estate

1) Target your real estate niche

While many agents fall into a classic pattern of thinking a real estate niche is all about geographic location, this is not correct. A real estate niche is a fraction of the market that closely matches your profile of an ideal customer and it’s not limited to a geographic area, however small.

So you can say your niche is first-time homebuyers, retirees, condo sellers, vacation-home sellers or investors. If your brokerage is big enough, you may target a few niches at a time. Naturally, you’ll need to communicate different messages to each of your target groups. CRM systems for real estate enable you to do just that.

For example, you can easily segment your contact database into several segments like the ones above and send out targeted email marketing campaigns to them. You can create a library of sales templates to use on every stage of the follow up, track open and click rates and then refine your efforts.

2) Automate email drip campaigns

Once you’ve figured out your real estate niche, you can create your laser-targeted marketing campaign aimed at this group. This works perfectly well for content marketing: you can deliver personalized content to your niche automatically, just by creating some email templates and scheduling content delivery.

You can easily send the messaging people are really interested in, whether they’re buyers, sellers, portal leads, FSBO leads, etc. Again, with CRM systems for real estate, you can segment your database easily and follow up intelligently, rather than send bulk messages few care to read (or not follow up at all).

3) Automate follow ups

Next thing you can do with a real estate CRM is refine and excel your contact management strategy. It’s not an easy job for a busy real estate professional to stay in touch with leads, only if you’re not using marketing automation.

Here are just a few amazing shortcuts you can take thanks to CRM systems for real estate:

segment your database;
automatically add new contacts to your database;
automatically send personalized emails and create a library of templates;
schedule emails;
spot hot leads in your database by tracking open and click rates;
automate your referral process.

The possibilities are really endless. In fact, the ROI of using automated follow-ups is huge:

Agents who use real estate marketing automation see a 451% increase in qualified leads.

4) Win a wealth of positive real estate referrals

Without a doubt, customer referrals are an anchor for a thriving brokerage. They prove your expertise doesn’t exist in a bubble and word about your services travels faster.

75 percent of agent’s business comes from customer referrals.

Everyone wants plenty of referrals, of course, but guess who wins them? First and foremost, the number of referrals you get depends on the customer experience you delivered, but the second most important factor is persistence. You need to follow up consistently and drop gentle reminders every now and then because people simply don’t remember someone asked them for a referral.

Use your real estate CRM and set up reminders to follow up. Save email templates, create personalized messages for every customer and schedule them. Don’t be afraid to send that email a few times, just make sure your messages are warm and personal. Lastly, store the outcomes of conversations in your CRM for future records.

5) Send personalized proposals automatically

Property proposals are one of your most important sales messages. That’s why you’d want to make them presentable and nicely formatted to impress your clients. But you probably have a bulk of clients to talk to every day and you usually send more than one proposal which is why you need to scale this process.

CRM systems for real estate like AgentDrive have this amazing feature of automatically creating property proposals for you. Simply select a property, and a beautifully formatted proposal will be ready at a moment’s notice. You can then add a few lines with updates to the client, hit ‘send’ and forget about the usual hassle with proposals that can eat up half of your day.

6) Educate your leads

It’s natural that not all leads in your contact database are equally sales-ready. Most of them are just ‘looking around’, evaluating their options and trying to learn more about the local area and market opportunities.

Your real estate marketing campaigns pull cold leads into your sphere of influence. The best way to do this is via content marketing and email drip campaigns. Make sure to create great content showcasing your area and helping people to explore the roundabouts. Explain why the market performs well and what benefits it might offer for buyers, sellers or investors. Next, set up a drip campaign and send out your content updates.

The next powerful thing to do to educate your clients and make them more sales-ready is to use your CRM insights. They will help you make content on your site more tailored to your leads’ interests. All you need to do is make notes about all questions potential clients ask at viewings, listing appointments and meetings. Next, create a series of FAQs or blog posts answering those questions and include them into your real estate marketing campaigns.

Doing this not only builds you a reputation of a go-to real estate expert but also makes people better educated in a sales sense. And this means you can close the deal easier and faster.

7) Retarget your marketing campaigns to bring people back

Do you know that just 2 percent of your site visitors convert on the first visit? 98 percent of traffic bounces off, even if they might be really interested in what you have to offer.

After putting so much work to earn traffic to your site, you need to keep those people in the loop somehow. That’s where retargeting for real estate comes in. This visual explains how it works:

So retargeting lets you bring people who once visited your site back to you. It’s a very powerful technique to add to your real estate marketing campaigns, here’ are a few reasons why:

you can create multiple ads targeted at different groups: buyers, sellers, vacation-home seekers, etc.;
you can promote specific listings;
you can leverage CRM data onboarding: simply create a list of your contacts’ emails, set up an ad campaign and your adverts will intelligently follow them up across the web;
you can embrace all of the web – retargeting encompasses 98 percent of websites;
you can retarget on world’s most popular social media, Facebook.

8) Save time on creating your marketing materials and adverts

Of course, to make farming more effective, you’ll need some great marketing outlets to distribute across the most popular venues in your area and during open houses. What if you won’t need to hire a designer to make these for you, but create beautiful and compelling ads on your own quickly and easily?

That’s what CRM systems for real estate like AgentDrive do for you. Simply choose one of the pre-made templates, customize it with your brand , print it out and distribute it. Creating real estate marketing materials doesn’t have to be complicated and in fact, now it’s going to be easier than ever.

9) Use multichannel communications to reach people everywhere

To run brilliant real estate marketing campaigns, you don’t have to rely just on one marketing channel. So far, we’ve been talking a lot about email, referrals, blog and retargeting, but here are another few equally important channels to focus on.

First of all, it’s social media, especially Facebook.

95 percent of people use Facebook to learn more about an agent’s services.

One of the best ways to enhance your Facebook marketing is using custom Facebook tabs. They let you add more useful functionality to your company page. For example, you can use these tabs to showcase client testimonials, create a photo gallery, run contests, collect emails, promote listings and tons more!

Second of all, it’s SMS marketing.

Customers are 4 times more likely to open an SMS than an email.

You can do plenty of stuff with SMS marketing: send targeted campaigns and appointment reminders, create your virtual business cards, let people text you to request property information and much more.

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

10) Enhance your website and manage it easier right within your real estate CRM

Wouldn’t it be great to have a connected ecosystem of tools playing nicely together to help you market online more effectively? CRM systems for real estate let you fully integrate your website and CRM for easier contact and property management.

You can also use a built-in CMS (content management system) to run a blog, optimize your posts and pages for SEO and publish your properties onto your site right from your real estate CRM.

11) Grow your brokerage and power your franchise network with easy-to-use tools

As your brokerage expands, you’ll find it hard to dedicate enough time to each of your branch offices. And because teams might be using different technology, accountability drops and sales aren’t covering your expenses.

Fortunately, you really need just one real estate CRM to run multiple franchise offices under one umbrella. Here are only a few examples of the most powerful things you can do:

manage a network of sites via one central CRM platform;
feed your properties to any property portal in the world;
create your own property portal exclusively available to your franchisees;
hire and retain the best staff offering them excellent technical support with their marketing campaigns,
and much more.

Final thoughts

That’s plenty of techniques to try and test, right? Each of them very powerful. CRM systems for real estate do a stellar job of powering your marketing campaigns with whatever channel you want to use and opening up exciting lead generation and sales opportunities for your team.