There are few guarantees in life, and when it comes to real estate lead generation it is much the same situation. You’re rarely if ever going to be guaranteed of a lead being converted into a client, and it’s also true that a cold lead may eventually convert to one while a hotter lead goes nowhere. It is for this reason that real estate lead nurturing is so important, and the smart move is to give every lead the same level of care and attention. Rather than just putting the bulk of it on leads you assume have a higher chance of converting. Because quite often the assumption is incorrect, and ‘cooler’ leads may not be so cool after all.
This is something that most real estate agents come to learn over time as they progress in their careers, and it’s why you’ll find that more experienced agents who’ve been in real estate for a long time take a more even-spread approach to nurturing real estate leads. And by that we mean they put the same level of focus on each of them, provided those leads meet certain criteria for staying valid. But the important takeaway for you here as you read through this blog entry is that you shouldn’t be so quick to regard any lead less highly.
Adapting to this mindset may not mean you approach lead generation for real estate differently, and if you’re already drumming up a good number of leads with your current approaches then you shouldn’t do that to begin with. But you will probably be revising the way you stay in touch with leads and keep that line of communication open. With the hope that the lead will eventually buy a home or list a home with you as their realtor. So how can you increase the chances of greater numbers of them doing that?
It may not even change the way you approach real estate email marketing, but you can start by better nurturing every contact in your real estate database and that’s what we’re going look at here with this blog entry. Will it require more of your time and effort? Yes, it will but if that means you need to manage both more effectively then so be it. We’re assuming you are working as a realtor to earn a good living from it, and this is a competitive business. It really comes down to that, and if that’s agreeable to you then you can proceed to discover our proven lead nurturing strategies here.
Command Central
Each real estate agent is going to greatly value their client database, and especially considering that satisfied clients are the ones who are more likely to become repeat clients. The database is going to act as a central command center for better organization and engagement with both new leads and existing clients. We can start this look at real estate lead nurturing by saying that it is best to know yours like the back of your hand.
Failing to do so is the most common stumbling point for veteran agents. Ones who have had the time to put into real estate lead generation but missed out on converting some leads into clients because they haven’t been on top of their database like they should have been. If they have a lapse in sales, it is likely because they’re not in their database to the extent they need to be. They will benefit greatly if they learn how to build dynamic lead touch plans and use engagement tools to nurture every relationship in their database.
That’s the ideal segue into what we’re going to talk about here, and so without going on any further lets get right to our 6 most effective approaches to nurturing real estate leads.
Segment with a Simple A- to D-List Framework
The most prominent new trends with real estate lead conversion is to use an A- to D-List framework. They make it much more simple and straightforward for realtors to prioritize contacts based on that individual’s relationship to the team and timeline. The determination process for which ones qualify as A, B, C, or D is going to need some explanation though.
Here’s a brief overview of this qualification criteria:
- A-list: The team’s top referrers, with an exclusive touchpoint system just for these contacts.
- B-list: Existing clients who have already contributed to the success of the team. For obvious reasons it’s important to have a strong relationship with this list.
- C-list: Clients here will be active buyers and active sellers who are actively looking for a home to put an offer on or listing a home. C list clients aren’t necessarily any less of a priority than A or B-list ones, but there is a different type of emphasis for them.
- D-list: These individuals can be considered hot prospects and ones who are looking to make a move in the local real estate market. This should be necessitating a consistent value-led follow up every three days.
You’ll also want to be suitably timely with the how frequently you contact your leads and this should involve more than just real estate email marketing. You can take a more uniform approach to all your different types of leads here, and this is what is recommended:
- 30 – 90 Days Out: Here you can be categorizing contacts based on timeline. Those who are seen to be 30 to 90 days out from actively buying or selling chould contacted 1x a week.
- 90 – 180 Days Out: Leads who you envision being between 90 to 180 days away from working with a realtor should be contacted once a month.
Your perspective as an agent is important here too, and it is best to see every lead as an opportunity that has yet to be sorted. This framework is a great place to start with the aim to have more success with real estate lead conversion, and it’s easy to see how the A-List, B-List, C-List and D-List categorization is different than your standard A leads are hot, Bs are warm, Cs and Ds are cooler sort of thing.
All of this is even more effective if this sort of categorization can be tied into a realtor’s SOI, which is their Sphere of Influence. Leads of any category that have been generated from your sphere should score lower in the database compared to, say, a lead generated from an open house and this will be true even if you seem them on the same home-buying timeline.
Over the years, Taylor’s coached plenty of agents who were afraid to pick up the phone and call their sphere of influence (SOI). For them, SOI leads would score lower in their database compared to an open house lead, even in cases where they had the same buying timeline. It is the strength of the existing relationship with SOI leads that means you don’t need to be putting the same level of effort into nurturing them.
When an agent is able to segment their database according to the strength of the relationship first and the buying timeline is a secondary consideration it tends to work out much better. So with that understand we’re able to now move on to the next recommended approach for real estate lead nurturing.
Establish an 11-7-4 Formula to Engage Leads Consistently
The 11-7-5 formula was first conceptualized by a realtor in the US named Preston Guyton. He was able to generate 35,000 leads for his team using a largely organic strategy and all of it founded around the idea of lead sources not mattering nearly as much as what happens after a lead comes in. Let’s get right to laying out the 7-11-4 formula, and here’s how it works
The realtor does what it takes to have 11 different interactions with potential clients existing as leads now. For those 11 potential clients there will be 7 hours of consumption, meaning the sending of relevant information and drip content to them. The last number in the equation – 4 – is to indicate the 4 different means you have to choose from with regards to contacting the lead. That will be by either text, email, phone, or an in-person meeting.
There is beauty in the simplicity of this approach, and if you incorporate it your real estate lead nurturing it is best to do with an overarching principle perspective. Yet, Preston still sees agents taking a copy/paste approach to nurturing their database. If you will be sending content by text or email it is a good idea to be constantly tweaking subject lines, testing content, and experimenting to find the best assets for clients and prospects.
Create an Annual SOI Touch Plan
What does it involve if a realtor has an annual touch plan, and what will be touching what exactly here? For starters, realtors will be tailoring this plan based on the understanding that it will provide best results when used with your existing client base and SOI. Here’s an example of an annual sphere of influence touch plan:
- 3-4 phone calls per year
- 4 handwritten cards per year – 2 random surprise notes, 1 birthday card, 1 holiday card
- 12 emails – neighborhood monthly update, with active, pending and sold listings
- 12+ mailings / postcards -, just listed / sold, sports calendars / local schools, colleges info/schedule, neighborhood events etc.
- 2-3 visit notes – hand delivered
- 2 customer appreciation events
The last part of this approach to nurturing real estate leads is to ensure that all your collateral ties back into your social media for real estate presence. Realtors 100% need to be active on social media if they want to have maximum visibility with potential clients, and this is a trend that’s only going to grow more pronounced in the future. A social media coordinator for realtors is something that many agents could really use.
Focus on Your Priority Leads
The focus here is based around the idea that personalization isn’t just about using the prospect’s name in the subject line. Instead it should be more of a multi-layered experience that becomes progressively higher-touch as a prospect moves along your sales funnel and ideally inches closer to becoming a client who will buy or sell a home. There are plenty of good automations available to you to make this one of the ways even more doable, and these are a few of the ones that have ended up being really popular with realtors:
- Hot Leads to Lender – Add your lender to leads just as soon as a would-be homebuyer lets the agent know of their readiness
- Stage to Contact – Start putting less focus on leads that have shown themselves to be less likely to convert over time as new information presents itself
- Bad Number – Automatically trigger a bad number drip
- Past Client Saved Home – Determine when past clients become active again
- Callingly – this very helpful automation for realtors uses smart recognition technology to be able to call you when a lead does something that is noteworthy for their status in your sales funnel
While these automations are good choices for staying in touch with leads and doing it in a better way, it’s also good to have your own secondary qualification system for leads that come out of any of them with a different status as compared to before. What that looks like will depend on the lead, the realtors, and the market where the lead is looking to either buy or sell a home with the help of a realtor.
Say the Right Things
What an agent says to leads and prospects is just as important as how and when you say it, and this is something to always be aware of as you discover our proven lead nurturing strategies here. This leads to the need for structured call scripts when you are contact leads as you aim to stay in touch and hope they eventually buy or sell a home through you as their realtor.
The best scripts are made up of questions primarily, with the agent making very few statements or anything else of the sort. Agents should understand WHY they are asking questions, and which questions are the best ones to be asking for that type of lead. It’s fair to say here that the best questions are the ones that start the prospect talking and keeps them talking. More drawn-out talking and relating means that they’ll be more likely to work with you in the future.
You can tailor the later part of your script to try to promote that type of talking, but in the initial stages of it there is definitely a formula you want to be following. And it revolves around what the lead wants / doesn’t want, what they will do / won’t do, what that action or inaction may gain for them, and how they may be revisiting their planned real estate market moves once they see results from courses of action already taken. Keep in mind with all of this that you need to make sure they stay with you the entire time so do yourself a favor and relax. Speak like a real person and try to be using jargon as little as possible.
Use Numbers to Coach your Agents
We’ll conclude this look by saying that in some instances the decision maker is going to be the leader of a real estate team. In any changing market the person’s database is going to be their foremost key to consistency. The best approach here is to centralize leads so that the numbers that come from them can be translated most accurately as they relate to whether or not a lead is ready for conversion into a client.
What’s done in most instances is that the lead and their numbers are entered into the realtor’s CRM (customer relationship management) software on their computer and then agents can access them and aim to convert a minimum of 15% of them. It’s not necessary to be a mega team with a presence across multiple cities or even Provinces to know your numbers. With the right reporting tools and features, you can make sure you and every agent working with the team is collecting leads and converting them with some measure of reliability.
Our specialty may be paid real estate leads here, but after many years in the business we’ve soaked up a lot of knowledge related to it, and this is why you’re encouraged to discover our proven lead nurturing strategies. If it means you are building your client base more quickly then we imagine you won’t need a whole of convincing with this.
