Archive for Real Estate Web Site Tips
One of the tools you have available to you for incubating Internet real estate website prospects is drip email.
What is Drip Email?
If you’re not familiar with drip email, it’s a capability offered by some websites (like Point2 Agent) and other tools with prospect database management capability. Using drip email, you can compose a series of emails on specific topics of interest to a particular target group. Then, you can assign prospects to participate in a particular drip email campaign, and the email series will be sent to those prospects at pre-defined intervals.
The objective is to stay top-of-mind with prospects who aren’t ready to make a move or work with a professional. And, as we all know, the Internet is full of those independent, “I want to do it myself” types.
When Should You Use Drip Email Campaigns?
In my view, there are only two ways in which drip email campaigns should be used:
- To stay in touch with prospects you have had contact with, in between regularly scheduled personal telephone calls and emails.
- To stay in touch with prospects who refuse to interact with you in any way.
When Should You NOT Use Drip Email?
So, what does that leave out? That leaves out using drip email as a method for contacting prospects when you first get their contact information.
Let me say that another way. If someone registers on your IDX search, or requests a report from your site, and leaves a telephone number and email address, you wouldn’t use drip email as the only way to contact them.
The first thing you need to do in order to convert that prospect into a lead is to contact them personally. If they leave a telephone number, call them. If they leave only an email address, send them an email.
How Do YOU Make “First Contact”?
Let’s talk about converting prospects to leads. How do you respond to a new prospect from your website? How’s it working for you?
How Time Blocks Will Increase Your Sales
· CommentsIf you’re familiar with time management concepts, you’ve probably heard of “time blocks” or setting aside specific times for specific activities. It has been proven to work to make people more productive.
In fact, you need to work on a task uninterrupted for 45 minutes in order to make headway. Any less than that amount of uninterrupted time, and you will continue to take one step forward and two steps back (I used to teach time management in another life 
.
Setting aside time to do specific tasks can make you more productive. But, incorporating that concept with the results of the MIT Lead Response Management Study can also increase your sales!
The MIT study was focused on answering one central question. Simply stated, it was: When should you call web-generated leads for maximum results?
Non-Time Block Results from the MIT Study
While this article is about using time blocks, there are some very important results that should be reviewed before diving into that topic.
When it comes to responding to leads from your website, time is critical. The MIT study found that:
- The odds of reaching a lead via telephone decrease by over 10 times in the first hour
- After 20 hours, every call you make actually hurts your ability to make contact.
Therefore, the most important thing you can do to convert real estate website leads is contact them immediately after you receive notification. And, that has implications for connecting your website to your cell phone via text messaging, and a whole host of other issues. For now, suffice it to say that you need to contact Internet leads quickly. And, you might as well save your time if you’re past the 20 hour mark.
Time Blocking Opportunities
Where do you follow up with leads? If you’re trying to contact them at work: When do you follow up with leads or prospects? Do you set aside a certain block of time in your schedule? Do you do it when you can grab 5 minutes – maybe while you’re grabbing some lunch?
If you’re not blocking time for that important task, you’re undoubtedly losing business.
The MIT study came up with some interesting results that can help you determine when you should be blocking time for lead follow-up. Here’s what they found:
- Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call since you’ll be most likely end up actually talking to a lead or prospect. Thursday turned out to be almost 50% better than the worst day, which was Tuesday.
- 8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to make contact with a lead and to qualify a lead. The worst time to call is – you guessed it – 11am-2pm, or right around lunch.
The Summary
So, what do all these great statistics mean to you?
- Set up a system so that you are notified as soon as someone contacts you from your website.
- Call leads as quickly as humanly possible after they’ve made contact – within the first hour is the goal.
- Don’t spend a lot of time trying to reach a lead if you’re calling 20 hours or more after they contacted you.
- Set aside a block of time on Wednesdays and Thursdays to follow up with prospects between the hours of 8-9am and 4-5pm.
Time blocking – such a simple concept – who knew?
Colors Can Drive You Crazy
· CommentsIf you’ve ever tried to coordinate the colors on your real estate web site, your business cards and letterhead, and your yard signs, you know what I’m talking about.
I’ve been working with a client who has just established his own brokerage. We designed a logo for him, and we’ll design his brokerage web site to utilize the colors from the logo. He also needs yard signs, business cards and letterhead.
You’d think doing those tasks should be fairly simple. But, you’d be wrong. If you find yourself in the same situation, here’s a brief primer on colors.
Website Colors
When you’re identifying colors on websites, you use six-digit HEX numbers. For example, 000000 is the HEX equivalent of black. Each pair of numbers represents combinations of Red, Green and Blue. The HEX numbers are used in HTML to identify colors.
HEX colors translate well into a color model known as RGB. Black can be identified in RGB as 0-0-0. That indicates a lack of any color, of course. Equipment like monitors and television sets display colors using RGB. So, it’s fairly easy to display the color you want on a monitor because it uses somewhat the same method to identify the color.
However, you know that sometimes you see different colors on different monitors. In the same way, you can really mess up your television if you adjust the color settings to be too green or red, and so on.
Printing Colors
A printer who is producing your business cards and letterhead uses another color model, CMYK. Unfortunately, the conversion from HEX or RGB to CMYK is not very direct. Therefore, if you like the website color you see on your monitor, you’ll have to work with your printer to choose CMYK colors that are consistent.
Sign Printing
If you’re having signs prepared, unless you’re using cut vinyl, you’ll probably run into yet another color model, Pantone colors. Pantone colors do not directly translate into any other type of color model. So, if you want your sign colors to match your website and business cards, you’ll have to work with the sign vendor to pick a color that is consistent.
As you can imagine, coordinating production of all of these real estate marketing materials can drive you crazy. And, we don’t want to even think about what happens if you want to get some coffee mugs printed.
The important thing to remember is that you want to maintain a consistent “feeling” with your marketing materials. If the colors are slightly different (and they probably will be), no one will notice but you.
If you saw a McDonald’s sign that used a slightly different shade of yellow, you’d still know it’s McDonald’s.
What’s On Your About Page?
· CommentsAre You Lost in the Crowd?
Have you taken a look at your About page on your website lately? What about your introduction on your marketing material? When you read about yourself as you are presented to the world, does it sound familiar? Does it sound like every other agent’s description of themselves, with only the names changed to protect the innocent?
Anytime you write about yourself, you should really be writing about your business. Many “About” pages are written like a biography, something like this:
- “Joan has been with ABC Realty for four years, and was a member of the Millionaire Club in 2003. She has been a licensed realtor for ten years. Joan is a member of the Podunk Association of Realtors and the National Association of Realtors. With her husband Harold, she has lived in XTown for 15 years and has a son and daughter. Joan loves people and does her best to help her clients achieve their dreams.”
OK, So What’s Wrong with That?
Well, for one thing, you’d think a REALTOR® would know how to display that designation. For another thing, most people think if you are a member of the Millionaire Club that you make a million dollars a year. That can be pretty intimidating; besides that, it’s an industry award and doesn’t necessarily mean anything to someone who isn’t a real estate professional. Finally, citing an award you received 5 years ago and never again since doesn’t really help your cause.
The biggest problem is that there is not one benefit identified. A prospect reading that description might think Joan sounds like a nice person, but they have been provided no compelling reason to work with her.
Get Benefit-Oriented!
Long ago I took a sales course that emphasized three ways people describe things. I’m not sure if they’re still teaching this approach, but it’s always worked for me. The idea is that you describe a product (or a real estate consulting practice) in three steps: Feature, Function, Benefit.
Basically, you work through those three steps until you reach the benefit, and that’s how you sell something. Here’s an example – let’s say we were selling a 6-slice toaster:
- Feature: Six toasting areas.
- Function: Lets you toast a lot of bread at one time.
- Benefit: No one has to wait for a piece of toast while their eggs are getting cold.
The closest thing to a marketing message in the agent’s bio above is this: Joan loves people and does her best to help her clients achieve their dreams.
So what do you think? Is that a feature or function? It sure isn’t a benefit!
Get a Brand
The purpose of developing a brand for your real estate consulting business is so that you can identify your niche, and come up with a list of benefit statements that you can use on your website and in your marketing material.
If you don’t have a brand, at least take a hard look at your marketing message and make sure it’s full of benefits!
Web-Centric Real Estate Marketing
· CommentsIf you visit www.BuildRealEstateResults.com, you’ll notice that the header includes the phrase Web-Centric Real Estate Marketing. So, what’s that, you ask?
I did a presentation recently for the local chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP), and prepared a Powerpoint presentation for the visuals.
I talked about the things that are critical to real estate professionals now. First, a brand and USP (Unique Selling Proposition) to differentiate each agent from all the others. Second, a logo to represent that brand. And, third, a lead-generating real estate website.
This graphic was used to illustrate the idea of web-centric marketing:
I was rather pleased with myself, so thought I’d share the image. If you use direct-response marketing in your direct mail and print ads, you’ll drive prospects to your website. If you do SEO so that your site ranks for effective keywords, you’ll drive prospects to your website. And, finally, if you use the Internet to promote listings, you’ll drive prospects to your website.
Besides the fact that if you don’t have a real estate website you’re in deep trouble, you can use a website as the central component for just about all of your marketing.
