Marketing automation for real estate is a savvy way to save time and increase productivity. It can automate what agents normally do manually, freeing-up time to talk to qualified leads.
The best way for real estate professionals to leverage marketing automation is to build strategic marketing funnels to nurture prospects into qualified leads, and ultimately, sales.
Blog Subscribers
It's important to create a content marketing strategy and consistently publish content. If your content is good and you promote it properly, people will take notice and some will subscribe to your blog. Tools such as ActiveCampaign, can automatically send your newly published blog posts to subscribers. This is a good way to:
- Stay to of mind
- Position yourself as an expert
- Get your brand in front of prospects
- Attract people to your marketing funnel
Prospect Nurturing
It's important to have content offers such as eBooks, guides, checklists etc. that you can put behind a landing page and generate prospects. If you're successful with your content marketing strategy, you'll have new, qualified visitors to your website. Add calls-to-action to your blog and other areas of your website to promote your content offer. A percentage of your website visitors will convert to prospects. This is where you can create a strategic email drip automation to nurture prospects into qualified leads.
You can segment your prospect list by what their interests are. For example, are they potential buyers or sellers, relocating, first time home buyer etc. Let your marketing automation learn your prospects interest and segment them appropriately. This will enable you to ensure you're sending the right content to the right people, helping them in their buyers journey and nurture them to qualified leads.
Lead Nurturing
You probably already have "leads" that you're generating. However, are they all qualified? What about the people that aren't looking to buy or sell for 6-12 months or longer? This is where you can put an email automation in place to stay in contact and provide them the information they need to move through the buyers journey on their own. Their behavior in your marketing automation can let you know when the appropriate time is to personally reach back out and begin the sales process.
Use data to segment your leads and maximize your marketing automation campaigns. For example, you can segment your list and have marketing automation campaigns for:
- Cold leads
- Long term follow-up
- Buyers
- Sellers
- Relocation
- Luxury
- Second home
- Warm leads
- Clients
- And more!
Segmenting your list will make your marketing automation campaigns more effective as the content and messaging in your emails will resonate better.
Old Leads
Assuming you've been generating leads for a while, you likely have a database of older leads you talked with months or years ago that are just sitting there collecting dust. At some point, you either spent time or money generating these leads, so why not put something in place to stay in touch? You can build a long term follow-up campaign to stay top of mind and deliver value. When someone from your old list is ready to buy or sell, you'll be one of the front runners for them to reach out to. How nice would it be if an old lead actually reached out to YOU!
Past Clients
This should be obvious, but it's surprising how many real estate professionals don't have automations setup to stay in touch with past clients. Of course, you should do some of this manually, but little things like birthday and anniversary communications can be automated. You can also send strategic communications a couple years after their transaction. You likely have statistics of how long people generally stay in there homes in your market. Use that information to send automatic messages when they could be more likely to be in the market again.
These are just a few examples of the real estate marketing automations you can create to move more people into the "qualified lead" category without having to spend hours doing it yourself. Once you start automating many of the things you're currently doing manually, you'll notice you have more qualified leads to follow-up with. You'll also be able to spend more of your time following-up with qualified leads and less time reaching out to people who simply aren't interested. Time is money, so make sure you're working smarter and maximizing the hours in your day for sales!
Real Estate Marketing Automation Software
There are many software options available and each comes with slightly different featuresets and pricing. For example, if you wanted to setup a very basic automation, MailChimp could do just fine. If you wanted needed a CRM that functions with the automation software, then you could explore options such as ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft. If you wanted a full-blown solution that incorporates a CRM, analytics and other marketing tools, HubSpot and BoomTown are excellent options. It all comes down to your needs, goals and budget.
Consider this when shopping for real estate marketing automation software:
- Do you need a CRM?
- What is your budget?
- How many contacts do you have now and anticipate in the future?
- Do you need advanced segmentation and logic based actions?
- Would you like other marketing tools to be included such as analytics, landing pages, forms and keyword tracking?
- Are you already running marketing campaigns to continue to build your list?
- Will you set-up the automations or do you have or need help creating campaigns?
There are a lot of options out there, and many will do the job just fine. It comes down to the feature set you're looking for, how advanced you want your marketing to be and what your budget is.
Need help improving your marketing? Learn more about our real estate marketing services or download our free eBook below to find out how you can begin creating a more strategic marketing funnel.
updated 7/20/18
