Tips for building Client Retention and Referrals

Published June 30, 2015 by Real Estate Leads

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Cold calling is really something of the past. In real estate, a prospect is just a rare find and agents can make much better use of their time.

This focus of this article is about the important art of customer retention and the generation of future referrals.

So how can you receive ongoing leads from former clients? Prospects who only want to buy or sell real estate through you?

Naturally the answer to that is turning clients into raving fans who are delighted to recommend you to their family, friends, and anyone in need of a professional real estate agent

It is recommended to develop a solid client retention plan. Research studies about this determined for real estate agents that it costs 4-6 times more money, time, effort to develop new prospects compared to retaining a customer; so in any case it is certainly worth the effort to maintain such a relationship with your clients. It also is just common sense.

Let’s look at why agents often fumble the ball after the sale, and don’t keep a lasting connection with past clients?

Here are some ideas to creating a fan base:

1. Survey and feedback. According to a Harris Interactive study about 90% of unsatisfied customers leave without complaining to the agent and they are more likely to tell a dozen others about their experience. So to accommodate their needs more, agents who immediately inquire if their client was satisfied, after their buying or selling event, will gain a competitive edge. Ask for their verbal or written feedback, and in any case be grateful and authentic for their feedback. It will help you work on any deficits in your style that you may have. Clients do want to be listened to, and when you show gratitude for the feedback it will help them alleviate any negative feelings they might have had during the process and will help you to get more referral business. After all, they will be curious if you actually listened to them and made their suggested change and they can only find out by sending you a referral.

2. What is the plan to maintain the relationship? Successful agents know that when a client has a good experience, they will want to ensure their family & friends enjoy the same degree of service and comfort. Some ways to keep relationships alive could be a yearly group event of some type; effectively turning some of your clients into friends. Attending their block parties, organizing a charity drive, to at least sending out a Christmas card – anything which would help nurture lasting relationships will more than likely be good for future business. Let them know that you would like to remain friends and let them know you’d like to visit with them again. Don’t let your clientele forever leave because they think you don’t care about them…so start caring.

3. Customer Relationship Management Software: Agent CRM software, is key to managing lasting relationships. CRM Expert. Agents should use some specific system to make it easier to organize and manage new and ongoing relationships.

4. Adding in the personal touch. Tiny personal touches can make a big positive difference. With the many free social network and communication methods that we can utilize, just remaining friendly is the highest ROI. Also no need to be afraid to call. The call can be a short contact call where you just say hello again. Maybe just mention you were recently driving through their neighborhood and wondered how they were doing; even a voicemail, you made the contact. Follow up with a short personal note. This is a soft and personal approach to retention (and prospecting for referrals) and effective in keeping you remembered in their minds.

When you treat your past clients as lasting friends, or buy real estate leads, then you are on your way to extra profits.

4 Tips for timely responses to prospect and client emails

Published June 17, 2015 by Real Estate Leads

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Our email inbox never sleeps, email potentially comes in at any hour of the day, it just keeps piling up. Aside from sorting through important messages and spam, we could all use an idea or two more on how to increase efficiency, response time, & productivity.

To make your workday easier and potentially your paycheck bigger, here are some proven ideas:

One: Sign up with a web host that comes with a Spam Filtering service

Keeping spam out of your inbox is the first key to saving you time. We recommend 4GoodHosting web hosting and they use a dedicated spam filtering server, that is what we use; and for us it has been working great. All non-spam emails come in, except most every spam message. They are partnered with SpamExperts, which maintain a global database of known spam messages, and moves them to another folder where you can review them later if you wish.

Two: Filter and sort email automatically with your email client software (Outlook/Live/Gmail)

You can also set filtering on your email client, such as Outlook, to filter all email that is not sent to you directly, for instance. Also, you can have your email software automatically sort email from friends or family into folders – so you can keep the focus of your inbox mostly on new prospects and existing customers.

Three: Create some macros / auto-responses for faster responses

One of the ways real estate prospects and clients, and even former clients, appreciate and bond to you is through how fast you respond to their email inquiries. It doesn’t work against you to try to be an agent that regularly responds quickly or at least consistently in a reasonable amount of time.

So we suggest producing a handful of standard replies or even one-liners that you can easily insert (depending on your email software) or copy and paste; this also cuts down on the chance you would be at a loss for words, or would be otherwise proofreading.

Most of us get the same type of emails rather repetitiously, general inquiries, event invitations, you-name-it, etc. So by writing responses that sound as sincere as possible, create a dozen or so auto-responses. A great place for inspiration for this task is your own sent folder. You’ll be happier armed with the ability to write back instead of perhaps pulling over in parking lots to type messages on your mobile-size screen.

The advantages of Single Property Websites

Published June 9, 2015 by Real Estate Leads

One tried and true marketing method that you might be already aware of is the concept of acquiring a domain such as 2051MapleleafStreet.com and then create a rather simple website for a particular property listing.

By doing so, more perceived value is given to a property — after all the address of the house then has its own address on the internet too. So, for the investment of the cost of a domain name and about a $5/month website hosting account – doing so might just grease the skids of a deal and perhaps at a slightly higher valuation as well. The investment of the $20-$30 and an hour or two of your or your assistantﾕs time to create the website would be well worth it if it helps facilitate a new deal, right?

The seller themselves might like to spearhead this as well, as it is a perfect way to showcase their home. However, it is best if you do this as a service for your client; you just need to do a good enough job. Using a “website builder” from a hosting company that offers a selection of per-defined templates can be helpful to quickly add a professional touch to the design.

In general, the website will show all the great photos, amenity details, and neighborhood information in detail. Other listing formats usually have to be made into a much more condensed format in order to save ad-space. With a full blown website, dozens of pictures can be included – even a 3D virtual tour perhaps (if you hire the services for that). Buyers will surely be enamored by the extra attention to detail.

Most importantly, it could save you a lot of time and gas too… as buyers will be able to make a better and more informed decision about whether they want to view the listing or not.

Also sellers will surely want to share the website domain with all their contacts, friends and family, of course. This extra marketing reach is worth the cost of the domain and hosting account. You can also add social media buttons or a side-bar on the website so website visitors can easily share it out with their friends for their opinions too perhaps, although that can be considered a bit unlikely or over the top.

How do you get a single property website?

We do recommend using a hosting company that offers a website builder application – unless you are a design and coding jockey. We recommend that you stay away from services such as Weebly and Wix or company’s that offer flash-based website templates. These type of sites are notorious for achieving low website search engine rankings. Although having the property website easily discoverable by web searches is important as well, this type of real estate website should be mostly promoted by traditional marketing techniques as well.

Who should you send the new property website domain to?

* The first place to place the new single property websites link is on your personal real estate agent website and your social media profiles. You’ll want to tweet them out and post them on your facebook pages. On those tweets and posts, make sure you say something unique and interesting about the property or location on each one. By doing these things you will also show your clients what a good/hard-working agent that you are!

* You will also want to write it on the yard sign. Drive-by prospects can then take a peek inside the home right on their smartphone from the curb. Imagine that, increasing the chance for an on-the-spot sale.

* Also your newsletter is a perfect place to list single property website domains.

In conclusion, this marketing tip is really golden advice. For the small investment, less than the cost of a bouquet of flowers for a open-house, rather instead fully open the house to the world of the 24/7 open internet instead.

One service we recommend that has a easy to use website builder and a low price hosting package is 4GoodHosting.com

Tips on producing your Social Networking Personal Profile

Published June 3, 2015 by Real Estate Leads

When it comes to online personal or business branding, the creation of your social media profile is absolutely essential; social networking profiles are of great benefit as they will rank highly in google and other search engines when people search for your name.

Consider each social media profile you create as a landing page for your brand. Your page is possibly the first encounter that someone is going to have with you. You will want that first impression to be golden and entice the prospective client to want to know more about you.

That said, in Canada’s socialy-savvy world of real estate; you are going to need at least 1 social media profile, but 2 would be better if you plan on connecting with colleagues and prospects online.

Here are the some techniques you can implement to create an attractive social media profile:

Write something special about you

What kind of people do you help? What is your particular niche? Why do you enjoy being a real estate agent? Show your prospect that you are an expert at something you do and it helps if it is somehow related to real estate. By doing this, you can gain respect and capture the imagination of people, and they will be more inclined to contact you.

But go easy on the buzzwords: A recent study found that 200,000 people on twitter refer to themselves in their biographies as social media “ninjas”, “gurus,”, “mavens”; although these titles sound cool – they also sound informal/unprofessional. If you have an official title, by all means type it out in your profile.

Share a personal story

Tell a short anecdotal story that your visitors most likely would enjoy reading. People enjoy feeling a connection with other people they discover online. Do you like a certain sport, hobby, or ambition? It could be anything really, something in your past, or even something you plan to do in the future; something you’re passionate about. It might help your visitors to want to strike up a conversation with you.

Your profile picture

Since Real Estate is a personal face-to-face profession, your personal picture is much better than a logo. People are more likely to want to engage with a recognizable person than just a brand logo.

Once you have selected your best photo, you can use the same picture as your default photo on all social networks, but variety can help form a better picture of you to your prospective clients.

On a side-note, there is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value in naming your photo file to include your name before uploading it. Be sure you have named it YourName.jpg or YourBusiness.jpg instead of IMG1234.jpg.

Make sure your name (and full business name) is visible in your profile.

If you have a twitter name add it in too, such as @Agent007. If you’re using your personal account to post real estate information and listings, remember to include the name of your company or brokerage somewhere in your profile.

If possible, add a nice background image to your social profile page(s)

Although this one is limited to select networks, such as your Twitter and YouTube channel profiles, this is one to invest in for those networks that allow it. A customized background will allow you to share additional information that may not fit in the fields of your profile.

Remember to include the link to you website!

This is the most important suggestion of all; it is quite mandatory. If people are interested in you and your business, they will want to learn more. Add your real estate website address, so they can link to it—and hopefully fall right into your lap!

Be consistent across networks

Personal branding has become a key component of social media success and consistency of your image is an important factor for building that personal brand. When your presence branches across many networks, you’ll want to make sure that people will recognize you on all those channels. You don’t have to keep the wording of your bios exactly the same, but include enough of the same phrases and the same tone that your name will ring a bell on any network.

If you can, it is helpful to add something funny

With humor on your social profile, always approach with caution. We can’t all be funny and we don’t all share the same sense of humor. But if you’re genuinely a comedian, adding something harmless (like a pun) can’t hurt!

We wish you the greatest success in real estate.

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All posts for the month June, 2015

Tips for building Client Retention and Referrals

4 Tips for timely responses to prospect and client emails

The advantages of Single Property Websites