Interent Leads....They Suck!

Of course they do! I know it, you know it, so why even try, right?

Beacause according to all research most home buyers begin their search online and most internet buyers use the first agent they get in touch with.

Maybe because you got some low hanging fruit one time from your website and that became your expectation but not your reality? Meaning you got lucky and an internet buyer that was ready within the next three months bought from you.

For over a year I worked as a personal marketing assistant for group here in San Diego. They paid me $800 a month to generate leads from the internet.

Generating leads is the easy part, I've been doing that for 8 years now. Talking to a wall is the hard part.

What I mean by that is getting the lead to develop into a personal relationship was the back breaking part. You have to do everything you can to get a in front of those emails as a real person. It's easy to give personal attention to say 20 leads you get this month. Now what if you got 30, 40, or 50 leads in month. Then multiply that number by how many months you run a campaign.

Over the course of November 2009 and December 2009 I generated over 100 leads for my group. Over the course of a year 600.

By the end of the year I was spending 95% of my time working leads for my agents and only 5% running marketing. They didn't hire me to be a lead scrubber. Would you pay someone 800 dollars a month just to come in to track, monitor, and personally follow up with every lead that you ever got. Especially, when that persons talents lay in Search Marketing and lead generation? If you are then we definitely need to talk.

I know, I know, there are systems that will do the follow up....I say that's B.S. I was doing what every agent does that drives business from the internet, and no current systems in real estate that monitors buyer behavior and follows up with them as if you were doing it yourself...until now.

Here is what most agents do with Internet Leads.

Step One: Generate the lead.

Step Two: Email or call the lead. (2 minutes)

Step Three: Set up Listing Alerts if it isn't done automatically. (0-3 minutes)

Step Four: Put them in your Drip Email Marketing Campaign.(0-3 mintes)

Step Five: Call or email the lead every other day or so for the next month. (1 minute)

Step Six: Over the next two months monitor and track the activity of that lead. (1 minute)

Step Seven: After about three months hope that sometime in the future they will remember you. (5 seconds)

 

Average Time Spent Per Lead: 10 Minutes

Average Cost Per Lead: $15.00

Average Leads Per Month: 30

I know not every agent does it this way. You probably have some variation of how you generate and follow up on leads.

But what we all can agree on is...personal contact and personal communication to win business is vital.

If you can't get personal with a lead then that lead will remain a lead and not a client or referral source.

That is why getting that personal contact is the most vital part of lead conversion and the most difficult because it takes so much time to accomplish...or you have to hire someone like me that get's bonused on each trasaction my team does from my efforts. Either way it's going to take time and money.

So here is where the system breaks.

By all studies the average home buyer begins their search online. Something to the tune of 94%. Couple that with most home buyers begin their research of the home they want to buy about 8 months from the close of escrow.

So if that is the case wouldn't it make more sense to to put most of your energy into contacting the leads that came in 6 months ago rather than today?

But we become so desensitized to those and chalk them up to a loss unless....Step #7 comes through.

So how does one track, monitor, and maintain a relationship with people whom you have never talked to or communicted with ever?

How do you keep up the personal touch with hundreds or even thousands of leads in your database?

The Answer: No one can.

Actually...I can!

If you are spending money on generating leads then we need to talk. You already spent the money on generating the traffic, there is nothing worse than seeing a lead you worked on generating, to then have them work with someone else...because you or a member of your team dropped the ball in the whole 6-8 month buying process, which is very easy to do.

Don't blame the person, it's the systems fault.