Your job is to close deals — help people buy or sell homes. But sometimes it feels like all your energy goes into updating your contact list and following up on conversations.
Keeping track and writing follow up emails for a few leads is easy, but doing this for 20 or so different clients with different property needs and interest levels is hard. More so, if you add keeping in touch with past clients and other sources of new leads.
So how can you save time without sacrificing your lead nurturing campaign efforts?
Option 1: you can hire an assistant for a few thousand dollars per month.
Option 2: sign-up for real estate marketing tools and services. Get email marketing or CRM services to send drip campaigns, then find a calendar or booking appointment software to handle your meeting schedules. You can also get an auto SMS sender to handle the frequent conversations for you.
That’s three pieces of software to download, learn, and pay for! If one goes down or has a glitch, the other one may get affected too because they all rely on each other.
Expect to pay about $25 to $100 a month ($300 to $1200 a year) on a real estate CRM, depending on the features you’re looking for, and about $20+ a month ($120+ a year) for a booking software. An auto sender is usually priced per message, the more SMS you send, the more $$$ you’ll pay.
Price wise, this doesn’t sound as expensive as an assistant, unless you account for the time you’ll need to spend learning and adapting the software to your business.
Option 3: find a real estate automating software to handle everything, like NurtureFlow.
Automated real estate marketing comes in many forms. Email marketing and CRM software, for instance, can reduce the time you spend manually sending promotional emails or updating a contact’s status.
Our new NurtureFlow automation software doesn’t just do emails, we can automate your calendar appointments, SMS texts, and even send personalized postcards, too. This way, they’re all in one dashboard.
With a marketing automation software, you can create sequences for leads nurturing that will be sent to the appropriate leads at selected intervals. The sequence can be customized, ranging anywhere from a list of homes you’re trying to sell, to buyer’s guides, open house invites, or simply an invitation for coffee so you can answer their questions.
How is this different from a typical CRM or marketing app?
Our automated real estate marketing platform is built specifically for real estate agents, with triggers and customization fields tailored to your day to day tasks.
Check out this guide to see how else you can save time by automating your tasks:
8 Ways to Save Time with a Real Estate Marketing Automation
1. Engage Past Prospects for Repeat Business
Don’t lose contact with your past clients. Send automated follow up emails on important dates, such as birthdays, transaction anniversaries, and holidays.
Stay top of mind with a relevant but not so promotional message about their purchase anniversary, or use the opportunity to ask for a referral.
Feel free not to stick to the typical emails though, get creative with postcards and SMS too:
- Transaction anniversary
- Closing dates
- Postcards with the printed play off schedule of your local sports teams
- Thanks for the referral
- Start of school or summer greetings
Related: Check out this blog post to get follow-up emails to use on your email marketing for real estate.
2. Expired Listing Messages and Postcards
It’s a typical strategy to send an email or SMS to an expired listing, especially if it’s an FSBO. You don’t have to do this manually per email though. An auto SMS sender or email lead nurturing campaign can take care of this while you go on about your day.
An SMS or email providing a couple of suggestions on what they could’ve done to get offers, or a market report of the neighborhood, will build your credibility with these sellers.
But if that doesn’t do the trick—or the email is incorrect— go a step further and send the owner a postcard about their expired listing.
A short message like, “Having trouble with your (Zillow/Trulia) listing at (XXX Address)?” with pictures of similar homes you sold—and for how much, should get you some attention.
3. Nurture Long-term Prospects
When a buyer tells you they’re starting to look around, sometimes it’s hard to gauge whether that’s two months of looking, or more of a soft discussion that will take a year to finalize.
Whatever the case, don’t let those would-be buyers forget about you! Use real estate marketing tools to put them on a lead nurturing campaign that will send them weekly information, such as:
- What to expect when buying in your neighborhood
- Available properties and hot neighborhoods, or new developments
- Credit repair services, or loan approval or referral
- A guide to your city or neighborhood, with information on schools if they have a family, or restaurants and nightlife if they’re single
Pro Tip: Did you know that you can schedule a series of emails to go off at predetermined times? You can even set the exact times they’re sent, so they don’t appear like scheduled promos to the recipient.
Even if a prospect comes through as a lead, it’s also possible that they have a property to sell. Put them on a seller-specific lead follow up system with information to show you’re a knowledgeable agent:
- Featured client case study: A short story of a past client that recently sold a house. Tell them what the house was listed for, how you prepared them in showings, and the offers you got.
- Seller’s guide: information on staging and what to expect from offers based on the current market
4. Pre-Showing and Open House Reminders in Times of COVID-19
Send a day-before email and hour-before SMS to confirmed house showing attendees with an automated workflow setup. You can even include an option to reschedule in these messages.
Here’s what it looks like to create an SMS email template using NurtureFlow. As you can see, there are many ways you can personalize the text with our +CustomTags.
You can save tons of time, as you build up your library of SMS templates that you can use to automatically send different messages to your prospects.
As for open houses, I know successful agents who invite potential buyers interested in the property and prospects looking into the same neighborhood. With an automated real estate marketing software handling your leads nurturing campaign, you can email and SMS both groups a few days before your open house.
Now before COVID-19, open houses didn’t require attendance and were pretty much a come as you please event. I know this may have changed for some of you, now that some local regulations came in place and instilled best practices, such as limiting the number of people in an open house.
Instead of wasting time manually setting back and forth appointment emails, and managing your calendar, an all-in-one real estate follow up system can handle all these for you. All you have to do is make sure the interested parties are tagged with the right settings.
5. Post Open House Follow-ups with an Auto SMS Sender
Send an SMS or email to everyone who attended your open house. Give them a quick survey about the house to get a feel of what they think about it. This way, you can get a better idea of what potential buyers are looking for, and in turn send them more relevant listings.
Send a follow-up postcard to those that don’t reply within a week. Include key information about the property, such as the number of bedrooms, main selling amenities or key points, and the listing price. It could be that they’re not interested in the property, or they’ve just been too busy to respond to your initial email/SMS. Either way, following up with leads using another channel won’t hurt.
Pro tip: Ever served cake or cookies that were a crowd favorite at an open house? Send a postcard with a recipe of said goodies, or a postcard with a gift card to the bakeshop where you got it. This is a unique leads nurturing idea your recipients will appreciate.
6. Send Hyper-Personalized Emails to Buyers
About 51% of home buyers found their homes online and about 7% found them through yard and open house signs.
But without the guidance of an agent, this statistic also confirms that people will look at multiple houses— and therefore inquire with multiple agents— online.
How does this help you?
When someone inquires with you, whether through a marketplace or your site, you’ll stand out from the competition with an easy real estate marketing automation that sends them similar properties.
With an automated follow-up workflow, people that inquire for a 1BR in Kingston can be enrolled to receive similar properties. These emails can even be further personalized with specific requirements they tagged on your website, such as locality, pool or garden, neighborhood, or transportation options. It all depends on the fields available in your CRM form and IDX property listings on your site.
This way, they don’t have to search online and wait to fear from multiple agents. As soon as they inquire with you, they can receive a follow-up with similar properties in less than 10 minutes. And you don’t even have to lift a finger.
7. Activity-based Follow up Emails
Automated messages aren’t just for new lead messages. Show your clients and prospects that you’re always on the lookout for them by sending messages related to their journey:
- Price reduction notice for buyers that showed interest to a property
- Sale notification, for when a property is sold in the same neighborhood as some prospective sellers
- Loan pre-approval information or referral for would-be buyers
- Tips for prepping a house prior to a viewing (especially safe practices because of COVID-19)
- Offer notifications: There’s nothing more exciting than news that someone made an offer—unless a better one comes along, that is. Send a template message with a summary of an offer to your seller, along with pertinent details that you’ll discuss further when you next meet with them. This way, your seller knows about every offer as it comes along, and it’ll be easier for them to compare offers as they come.
8. Keep Transactions Moving with SMS and Email Reminders on Crucial Dates
Keep clients on track using an auto SMS sender and follow up emails of critical dates, such as showings, offer meetings, inspections, appraisals, closing docs review, etc.
If they want to re-schedule, you can automate that too. Just put an option to reschedule on your ‘day before’ reminder emails, with a link to your calendar.
This way, they can re-schedule based on your availability, and get confirmation from your Google calendar or appointment setting software after selecting a new time slot.
Here’s how to add a calendar appointment via NurtureFlow. This sample workflow will send a calendar reminder for yourself, and an SMS to your contact, one day before a meeting or showing, for instance.
The Secret to Closing 20+ Transactions a Year
It’s almost impossible for agents to consistently send follow-up emails with every potential prospect they come into. Sometimes, it becomes a choice between digging through your database and answering the new leads that’s right in front of you.
Of course, the choice there is easy. But at what cost? An average real estate agent closes six to eight transactions a year, a top agent can close 15 or even 20+ transactions.
You don’t have to make that choice with real estate marketing automation.
Who knows how many opportunities have passed you by because you didn’t go beyond the second follow-up?
