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8 Reasons to Enhance Your Team with Real Estate Marketing Automation

March 19, 2017

Daily marketing can be overwhelming for busy real estate professionals. It doesn’t have to be, though, if the right systems are set up and working 24/7. And because keeping competitive positions in this overcrowded industry is challenging, why not use real estate marketing automation to improve follow-ups and deliver better customer service?

According to the 2015 study of the real estate industry’s CEOs conducted by Imprev, marketing automation is the most sought after investment for 2016 and onwards. Real estate brokerage and franchise executives expect marketing automation to solve three crucial tasks faced by their teams:

make sure their agents stay in touch with past clients;
know that maximum effort is put into marketing property listings;
evaluate which marketing tactics work and which don’t.

Here are 8 good reasons why putting real estate marketing automation in place will benefit your brokerage.

8 Reasons to use real estate marketing automation

1. Stop losing leads

80 percent of leads are either lost or never followed up because no records have ever been created for them. Agents may win the first touchpoint but if they don’t create proper sales documentation, those leads are very likely to slip away.

In the meantime, there’s a 70 percent probability of selling to an existing prospect. Once a real estate CRM is put in place, all customer and lead data is redirected to a central dashboard. Someone on a team gets assigned, and the lead is never lost.

2. Improve follow ups

A real estate CRM and marketing automation provides 451% increase in qualified leads! It provides sales intelligence every agent needs: what to say, when, how often and via which channel. Here are just a few ways to rev up your follow up strategy with real estate marketing automation:

automated email campaigns;
email scheduling and tracking;
SMS campaigns;
automatic agent alerts;
automatic tasks and reminders;
library of follow up templates and much more.

3. Send personalized email campaigns

It’s estimated there will be 4.3 billion email accounts by the end of 2016 (source: The Radicati group). Moreover, email is 40 times more effective in generating new leads than social media. This means email is still the best way to reach prospective customers despite all the social media hype we’re seeing today.

With real estate marketing automation put in place, you can:

personalize your subscribers’ first name. I.e., not just ‘Hi’ to everyone on your contact list but ‘Hi John’ or ‘Hi Mary’;
personalize a subject line. This trick is said to secure an average of 5% more opens. For example, not just ‘Hot offers in the most sought after Knoxville neighborhoods’ but ‘John, hot offers in the most sought after Knoxville neighborhoods’;
personalize content. The better your content addresses your readers’ problems, the bigger the odds they’ll open your emails and click to your site. Capitalize on the power of your CRM. Create segmented email lists and send the right content to the right people. Buyers, sellers, investors, vacation home seekers, etc. – deliver the right content to the right niche.

4. Stay in touch with past clients

Referrals are the most valuable marketing channel for realtors. Top-performing agents generate the bulk of their business from the word-of-mouth referrals.

So why not automate reminders about birthdays, wedding or moving anniversaries of your past clients? Or follow up with them occasionally asking how they feel about their new home? 80 percent of people would recommend their agent to friends but they don’t because no one ever asked them.

Head over to your real estate CRM, review past deals and set reminders to follow up with people who helped you to succeed.

5. Integrate your website and real estate CRM

Another way to benefit from real estate marketing automation is to connect the two of your most important tools: your website and CRM. Set up an integration to get your online leads automatically added to your real estate CRM. Someone on the team will be notified to take charge and the leads will be automatically added to your mailing lists.

You can go even further: advanced CRMs enable you to run your websites and blogs from within the CRM to save time and effort.

6. Fully market every listing

More exposure equals more leads. Agents need a good system for marketing their properties online to win the broadest exposure. That’s actually one of the key problems real estate marketing automation successfully addresses.

Real estate CRM and marketing automation help you to:

optimize property listings to get found by people and search engines;
automatically create property proposals;
feed your properties to hundreds of property portals;
set up email follow up campaigns and email newsletters.

7. Take the strain off daily activities

A real estate CRM delivers 41% sales increase per agent

There are so many ways real estate marketing automation takes the daily strain off agents:

automated reminders, notifications, recurring tasks;
automatic email marketing campaigns;
synchronization with your inbox so you don’t have to switch all the time;
scheduling and a full calendar view of the work ahead.

Of course, the immediate effect is that both agents and team managers get more power and flexibility. Now it’s easier to manage multiple franchise locations, follow up with leads, calculate commissions and generate reports.

8. Evaluate what works and what doesn’t

Real estate marketing automation delivers automatic reports explaining what worked best of all and what can be eliminated. Now you can track your sales pipeline and see how qualified your database is. You can also allocate your budget smarter to get higher marketing and advertising ROI.

What’s next?

Here you go – 8 good reasons to use real estate marketing automation to flag market opportunities faster than your competition and accelerate your business growth.