What do you think is your #1 biggest existing business asset for driving real estate leads?
- Is it your brand?
- Is it your inventory?
- Is it your office?
- Is it your experience?
- Is it your systems?
Not so fast.
Your #1 real estate leads driver is the database of all the people you know!
A database is a list of individuals who could buy or sell with you and refer you to others.
The stronger the database, the stronger the business.
Definition of a database
Your database is a list of clients, past clients, prospects, referral partners and anyone else who could refer you, list with you, buy with you, or help you grow your business.
Think of all those people – all those email addresses – sitting in your email accounts, CRM, and social media accounts.
How many contacts do you have in your cell phone?
That’s a database, too.
A database by itself isn’t valuable; it’s the relationship with your database that’s the most valuable asset you own.
You need to consistently communicate with your database in a valuable way to keep your relationship alive and healthy.
And that’s where most agents and brokers fall short.
The Challenge
If you don’t commit to building a database as an agent or broker, you get trapped in the new lead, next deal treadmill.
You also become chained to buying leads or cold calling to generate new prospects.
Every brand, franchise and real estate coach will tell you that nurturing a database will help you to take control of your business so you can predict your sales pipeline.
Database Health Check
How healthy is your database today?
- Does everyone you know, understand what you do?
- Does everyone you know, understand how you help buyers and sellers?
- Do your past clients come back to you again and again?
- Do your past clients consistently refer you?
- Do your prospects often choose to work with someone else?
- Are your long term leads converting into appointments?
- Do you get a steady stream of testimonials
- Do your friends and family consistently refer you?
Reasons Agents Fail
The reasons most agents fail to build a strong database fall into 2 camps:
- They haven’t taken the time to export all their contacts into one database
- Or, their communication was inconsistent and possibly non-existent – people stopped hearing from them, so they forgot about the agent or some other agent showed up to add more value.
This is a competitive business and there’s a battle going on for the attention of your clients, prospects, family and friends.
Relationship Marketing Vs. Transactional Marketing
You essentially have two options for emailing your contacts:
Transactional Marketing
Contacts you’ve just added to your database can be sent a series of automated “drip” emails (like a newsletter or a roundup of content that you have written for your website). The goal is to learn whether your leads are in the buying or selling process, and stay top of mind if they aren’t at the moment.
Relationship Marketing
Leads who engage with you online — like those who open and click links in your previous drip emails, or request a home valuation on your website — should be sent more targeted email blasts with specific “offers” (e.g. “Check out my open house this Saturday!”). Responses to these emails will help you better determine whether someone has buying or selling intentions.
To sum it up:
While both are effective strategies, relationship marketing has higher Return on Investment (ROI), lower Cost Per Action (CPA) and is the foundation for any effective growth strategy.
Are you in this camp?
1. You’ve been neglecting your database and you want to fix and build it
2. Your database(s) are scattered around many different CRMs or systems
3. You need a plan to reconnect and communicate consistently going forward
4. You’ve been reluctant to send emails to you database because you don’t know what to send
If this is you
Getting Started
Step #1: Gather all your contacts
Our guide will walk you through setting up a database that contains all your pre-existing relationships. There will be a lot of duplicates across systems and that’s okay.
You’ll have friends, family, customers, prospects, referral partners, and acquaintances in those lists – literally everyone you’ve ever communicated with or have possibly known.
That’s okay, too. We’re going to adjust our communication strategy for this. Don’t worry about the segmentation.
If you have your databases segmented, great. Make sure to include that in your export so you can reference it in the future, but it’s not necessary.
We want to communicate with everyone – and yes, while “everyone” is not your target market, everyone could potentially refer you to your target market.
Step #2: Load your contacts into a CRM
Getting all those emails uploaded into professional email marketing software is essential, because it means we can send them all CAN-SPAM compliant email.
You can use any online email marketing service you like.
When you upload your lists, Placester will automatically de-duplicate so if you have several people across many different lists, they will only get one email.
And of course, if there is anyone who you absolutely do not want to email under any circumstances, you can manually “unsubscribe” them from your real estate leads list at this point.
Congratulations! Now you have a fully loaded email-marketing program, with all your contacts ready to receive your reconnect message.
Step #3: Send a helpful re-connect email message
The last step is to send an email to your entire list so everyone knows what you do, that you’re looking to help more people, and that you want to educate them by answering questions commonly asked by your customers.
The point is – you’re not selling anything in your messages. This is content marketing where you’re helping, not selling.
It attracts customers to you and positions you as the trusted authority and expert.
Looking for examples of how to message your email list of real estate leads?
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