Lead nurturing is one of the most important keys to your real estate marketing success. To avoid leads going cold and potentially losing out on a future sole mandate, sale or rental you have to nurture your leads by keeping in regular contact with all your prospective clients and cultivate a personal relationship with each and every one of them.
Lead nurturing is simply the process of developing relationships with potential clients at every stage of the property buying, selling or renting process. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on satisfying the needs of prospect clients at various stages of the buying, selling or renting journey by providing the information and answers they need, as and when they need it.
For example, you should nurture a prospective buyer lead by providing information on what listings are currently on the market when they are actively looking to buy a new property and then provide them with information on property finance and the conveyancing process - once they have signed an offer to purchase. By doing so, you will add enormous value to your prospective clients’ property sale or rental journey, greatly improve your brand awareness, position yourself as the property expert and ultimately increase your chances of converting those leads into future sole mandates, sales or rentals.
Whilst face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, post box drops and personalised emails are some the most effective methods of nurturing leads and building long-term relationships with prospective clients - they are also the most time consuming. Therefore, automated email marketing should be employed as a cost-effective solution to nurturing your leads. Not only do automated emails help you reach your prospective clients directly in their inbox, but they also enable you to keep in regular contact with your clients by automatically mass communicating information to your database in a highly targeted and personalised way.
However, before you can start nurturing leads through automated email marketing, you first need to build a high-quality database of prospective clients. The size and quality of your database is directly related to the success of your automated email marketing campaigns. Therefore, nurture starts with capture and it is vital that every single lead generated through all your past and current marketing and advertising efforts are accurately captured into a Leads Management System. Not only will this help you better build, manage and analyse all your leads data, but it will also help you segment your database based on their property needs, type and geographic location.
Segmentation is the practice of dividing your client database into specific groups that are similar in specific ways. By categorising your leads by type (i.e. buyers, sellers, landlords, tenants etc.) and then again by their property requirements and geographic location, you are able to better customise your email communication to be more relevant to particular segments of your database. Therefore, instead of blasting out “spammy” emails with the same generic content to your entire database, segmentation allows you to send out specific content to one specific segments of your database and then communicate other content to another segment. By doing so, you will better engage your audience and improve your chances of converting those lead into a sale or rental.
There have been several advancements in the area of automated email marketing in recent years and there are several tools currently available to help you nurture leads through email marketing:
Property Email Alerts
Prospective buyers or tenants are able to register their property requirements on your website and sign up to receive property email alerts. Alternatively, you can manually capture a lead’s property requirements directly into the Leads Management System and build a profile on every prospective buyer or tenant. The system then automatically sends an email notification to the buyer or tenant as soon as a property matching his or her requirements is listed on your website. The email is sent from the agent’s email address, is professionally designed and custom branded in your corporate identity, includes a personalised salutation to the buyer or tenant, a summary of the new property listing, as well as the agent’s photo and contact details. Property email alerts are a great way to nurture buyer or tenant leads, as they help you keep in regular contact with prospective clients and provide relevant information on new listings whilst the lead is actively looking to buy or rent a property.
Custom Alerts
Custom designed email alerts can also be setup to send regular communication to specific segments of your database in a particular geographic area. For example, you can automatically send show-house email alerts to all your buyers in a specific area on a weekly basis. Alternatively, you can publish seller guides on your website and then automatically email these advice articles to all your sellers in all geographic areas on a regular basis. The options are endless.
Monthly Email Newsletters
Automated monthly email newsletters are another effective way to nurture leads and stay in touch with prospective clients on a regular basis. Email newsletters are automatically generated and distributed to your database, or a segment of your database, on a monthly basis. They can be custom designed and personalised, with geographically specific and relevant content such as; featured listings, property news and advice articles, latest listings and upcoming show-houses. This ensures that buyers or tenants, interested in buying or renting property in a particular area or suburb, will only receive an email newsletter with content that is relevant to the specific area or suburb they’re interested in. This will better engage the prospective client and offer enormous value to the buyer or tenant’s property seeking journey.
By employing automated email marketing solutions, to help develop relationships with your potential clients - at every stage of their property buying, selling or renting process - you will add immense value to your prospective clients’ property sale or rental journey, greatly improve your brand awareness, position yourself as a property expert and ultimately increase your chances of converting more leads into future sole mandates, sales or rentals.