Special offer

The 6 Stages of Nurturing and Converting Your Real Estate Leads Online

Reblogger
Real Estate Agent with Real Estate of Florida specializing in Martin County Residential Homes, Condos and Land Sales 3090099

Here is a great list of things to do to organize and work on converting those leads to active and then closed sales in the future.  We should all work on this and get it down pat:

 

Original content by Juliana Casale

All of your real estate leads are unique, which means your nurture strategy for each and every one of those could-be clients also needs to be unique.

While the structure of your lead nurturing efforts should remain uniform for every home buyer or seller that you do business with, the details of each prospect’s housing situation will be different.

Therefore, it’s important to craft a nurture blueprint that can tailored to fit all of your real estate leads.

If you haven’t built a nurture structure for your agency, or aren’t sure how to make your email, texts and calls more relevant for each contact in your database, Placester’s newest ebook will help you start personalizing your approach.

Below, we’ve pulled together some actionable advice based on the strategies top producers use to nurture their real estate leads.

1st Stage: Cleaning Up Your Database

Roughly three-quarters of CRM users noted in a Software Advice survey that they received “improved access to customer data,” thanks to their lead management systems.

If your real estate marketing mix is doing its job, new leads will consistently enter your contacts database.

Ideally, your lead management system is automatically creating dedicated profiles for those prospects so you can focus on adding photos, housing preferences, a buying/selling timeline, and other notes that will help you close deals.

It’s engagement efforts like this that can help you reorder your lead lists by re-grading prospects after each interaction with your online presence. Grading leads this way can help you decide who requires your (often limited) time, attention, and energy.

ESSENTIAL STEP: Identify your highest- and lowest-quality leads — and delete or deprioritize those who aren’t worth pursuing.

Most REALTORS® are able to discern right off the bat which of their prospects are golden opportunities, and which can be placed at the back of the nurturing line (or eliminated from their CRMs altogether).

Your job is to fine-tune your lead qualification skills by looking at each new lead to enter your contact database and asking yourself some key questions:

  • 1) “Did the lead provide me with accurate contact info?”

  • 2) “Did the lead share details about their housing needs?”

  • 3) “How many site lead capture forms has the lead filled out?”

  • 4) “Does the lead engage with my website pretty regularly?”

If the answer is “yes” to at least a couple of these questions, then you know the prospect is worth your nurturing time and energy. Go ahead and label them as “Ready to Nurture” in your database!

If the answer to the majority of those 4 questions is “no” (including and especially #1), then they can be labeled as “Hold Off for Now” in your CRM.

2nd Stage: Labeling All of Your Leads

The “Ready to Nurture” and “Hold Off For Now” labels mentioned above are meant to be placeholders until you can get a little more insight into just how interested leads are in your real estate services.

For instance, prospects who are engaging with you often online are more likely to have their sights set on you, your agency, or listings featured on your website.

It’s wise to label these as “hot leads” so you can keep track of who should get white glove treatment.

ESSENTIAL STEP: Segment your audience into different buckets based on their quality and buying or selling criteria.

“Top Leads — Highly Engaged”: That’s an excellent bucket name to use for people who are interacting frequently with your online content (such as your website or your social media accounts).

Other quality prospects that may not be visiting your site as often or reading your emails as much can be deemed “Top Leads — Somewhat Engaged.” They can be added to a moderately different drip campaign.

Again, as with a whole host of other REALTOR marketing activities, this is a subjective one. It requires a close analysis of the kinds of folks in your CRM database and, subsequently, an instinctive guess as to the four, five, or six types of buckets you can create for all of them.

3rd Stage: Prioritizing Your Prospects

Not all leads are created equal. Some people may browse your website in the hopes of buying a house someday, while others may be ready to start interviewing real estate agents tomorrow.

As real estate pro and author Steve Jolly says in an episode of Placester’s Marketing Genius podcast, the buyer/seller journey has many stages, and you need to know when the time is right to help them take the next step. He explains:

  • “If they’re just starting to look and find out where they want to live, I’m not taking them to show listings; I’m going to show them areas of town so they can see where they want to live first and we can focus on the detail when they get to that point. If they’re just starting to look, I’m not asking them to sign an agency agreement, because that’s not what’s on their mind at that point in time.”

By taking a deeper dive into your leads’ profiles, you can figure out who appears to be the furthest down in the inbound marketing funnel and who’s most likely to need your services soon.

ESSENTIAL STEP: Figure out who’s just entered your real estate CRM software vs. who’s been there for weeks or months, and pick a few more recent leads to nurture first.

It won’t always be the case that the perceived “top” real estate leads will always convert quicker or before “lesser” leads, but chances are that your more engaged prospects will convert to business more frequently.

4th Stage: Adding Leads to Campaigns

As noted in Placester’s explanatory “Future of Lead Nurturing” webinar, drip email campaigns are your best nurturing “play.”

Manually sent 1:1 emails aren’t going out of style anytime soon. However, automated emails sent to your different lead segments often do the bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to staying top of mind with possible customers.

Before you can reap the rewards of this autopilot strategy, you need to actually create the emails for each campaign — keeping in mind that each lead bucket requires its own flavor of nurture emails.

ESSENTIAL STEP: Assign the initial batch of leads you plan to nurture to the most appropriate email campaigns.

Start with your first-rate real estate leads — those you’ve categorized as ones to nurture ASAP. As mentioned, these prospects have the greatest likelihood of turning into new business.

Assign a campaign to them that starts when they’ve evolved from “mostly solid prospect” to “going-to-convert-soon lead.” In other words, set up an email cadence that looks a little something like this:

  • EMAIL #1: Newsletter (even mix of promoting local listings and sharing area news and business updates)

  • EMAIL #2: Digest (promoting your latest blog posts and home buying or selling resources)

  • EMAIL #3: Multimedia (embed a video, like a brand update or listing tour, or an infographic)

  • EMAIL #4: Offer (explicit call to action offering something like a listing presentation or buying consultation)

Send your recipients these emails in this order over the span of 2-3 weeks.

Over that time, you will gradually increase their interest in your business, and ideally transform them from highly qualified real estate leads to your most cherished clients.

BONUS: Download our free drip templates guide for REALTORS to learn how to structure and schedule your real estate emails.

5th Stage: Monitoring Opens and Clicks

Generally speaking, there are 10 core email marketing metrics to monitor for the emails you send your audience.

Having said that, there are really just a couple you need to watch closely to ensure your nurture campaigns are performing up to your standards and further qualifying your leads:

Email Opens

Let’s face it, if no one opens your emails and you don’t know about it, you could end up wasting a lot of time.

Email Clicks

These are equally important to measure because you need to know the ratio of opens to clicks:

  • If 10 people open an email, but only 1 clicks a link within it, you know your email copy is missing the mark.

  • If 10 people open an email, and seven click a link, something’s working and you ought to reuse that email so you can duplicate your success.

ESSENTIAL STEP: Use your drip marketing software (or another analytics tool) to track who interacts with your emails.

To understand the true effectiveness of your lead nurture emails, you’ll need drip marketing software.

Regardless of which tool you use, it’s essential that you know how to easily access the email open and click data from the software and compile that data into a spreadsheet of some kind (either through an automated reporting function in the software or manually) so you can analyze it over time.

Without proper data analysis, you won’t be able to pinpoint the specific emails and types of emails that need to be:

  • Removed from campaigns (low engagement)

  • Optimized a bit more (moderate engagement)

  • Duplicated (high engagement)

You may not consider yourself a data expert, but you don’t need to be one to keep tabs on these metrics over time. All you need is a document where you keep all of the figures organized.

BONUS: Read our special guide to learn how to increase your real estate email opens and clicks for your campaigns.

6th Stage: Contacting Engaged Leads

Arguably the most enjoyable stage is getting in touch with the real estate leads that you’ve determined are ready to start scanning the market for new and interesting listings, or enlisting an agent to help them market and sell their home.

All this work teeing up leads will be wasted without an understanding of how you can sell yourself to your potential client. Practicing your sales script and general pitch can make the difference between winning a lead over and sending them back into the nurture campaign.

ESSENTIAL STEP: Practice makes perfect with lead-to-client conversion, so rehearse your sales pitch. A lot.

Most successful real estate agents thrive because they’re good at connecting with people and really listening to what they’re looking for.

Don’t make the rookie mistake of wasting nurture opportunities by overselling, selling too early, or neglecting your “hottest” leads.

Only you will know when the right time is to make the ask of a prospect, so practice your sales pitch, refine your scripts, and use multimedia and print collateral (videos, graphics, charts) to make your case to fully nurtured leads.

Want to learn more on this topic? Download our ebook to learn how to better nurture your real estate leads and make the most of your REALTOR CRM system.



Comments (8)

Sally K. & David L. Hanson
EXP Realty 414-525-0563 - Brookfield, WI
WI Real Estate Agents - Luxury - Divorce

I am sure this deserves a bookmark and will be done by many !

Nov 21, 2017 02:59 AM
Gita Bantwal
RE/MAX Centre Realtors - Warwick, PA
REALTOR,ABR,CRS,SRES,GRI - Bucks County & Philadel

Thank you for reblogging the post. I missed reading the original one.

Nov 21, 2017 05:19 AM
Joan Cox
House to Home, Inc. - Denver Real Estate - 720-231-6373 - Denver, CO
Denver Real Estate - Selling One Home at a Time

Gabe, I have people that hit my web site 3 to 4 years ago, and still looking for homes.  

Nov 21, 2017 07:02 AM
Grant Schneider
Performance Development Strategies - Armonk, NY
Your Coach Helping You Create Successful Outcomes

Hi Gabe - I am glad you re posted this because it is relevant to what I am doing with my new CRM.  Good information.

Nov 21, 2017 09:27 AM
Roy Kelley
Retired - Gaithersburg, MD

This is an excellent selection for a reblog and great advice to share.

Nov 21, 2017 12:03 PM
Lou Ludwig
Ludwig & Associates - Boca Raton, FL
Designations Earned CRB, CRS, CIPS, GRI, SRES, TRC

Gabe

Great information on managing a lead data base.

Good luck and success.

Lou Ludwig

 

Nov 21, 2017 07:42 PM
Gabe Sanders
Real Estate of Florida specializing in Martin County Residential Homes, Condos and Land Sales - Stuart, FL
Stuart Florida Real Estate

Thank you for stopping by and taking the time to read my re-blog.

Dec 07, 2017 05:40 AM
Gabe Sanders
Real Estate of Florida specializing in Martin County Residential Homes, Condos and Land Sales - Stuart, FL
Stuart Florida Real Estate

Thanks for your comments. It’s always good to hear from you.

Dec 07, 2017 05:41 AM