Key 1.5 Send weekly emails using web-links
John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008)
We have developed a pro-active marketing system using web links to cater to your potential clients in large numbers. This process will build your credibility with potential buyers and sellers and keep them informed about your market. In addition you can add your own market commentary in these emails so your contacts feel they are getting to know you on a personal level.
Many offices have competing approaches which reinforce our view that this is an effective aspect of pro-active marketing. Watch out for cumbersome systems that require office support to maintain. Your messaging and presentation should be geared towards a mobile first audience. In other words consider the bandwidth and screen size limits of your recipient's devices before including fancy designs and graphics.
Here's how it works. After your office caravan of new listings, you upload a property selection to your SalesPartner webpage then email or text the link to your contacts. Your clients receive a simple email in which you can discuss the market and include reminders of tenders closing, price changes, or any other useful information together with the web link to your selection of the latest listings (including not just your own but any office listings). You don't have to wait for photos and adverts for all the listings as you can provide summary information on very new listings in the email without needing to have them in the web-link.
These emails are quick for your contacts to download, (the primary email is usually less than 40kb in size) do not need to include attachments, and can be sent to hundreds of clients every week.
They provide an easy path back to you for contacts whose motivation has changed, who are interested in one of the properties you are marketing, or who want to stay in touch with your market place. They can simply click reply and respond in their own time.
We do not automatically include excessive details in the information about the listings as we do not want potential buyers using these weekly emails to rule out properties without discussing their changing needs and motivation with you, their salesperson. You can however include URLs for links to detailed property information where you choose to.
It is important that you include as many people as are willing to receive the web link emails in the weekly mail out list, even if you haven’t heard from them for some time. It is not a process designed to be the primary contact for your “A” buyers, although they can be included. In addition you should telephone and send personal emails and invitations to previews to the buyers who you know with some confidence could be interested in a particular property.
You should also strive to include your appraised vendors, missed appraisals and “foreign listing” owners, (listings marketed by other firms), in your weekly web link email, as it gives them excellent insight into the market place and will provide them continuous contact from you as they review their own situation.
You can also embed the latest listings webpage within a personal web site. We design web sites for salespeople with pre-listing kits in mind so that clients, interested in the market, who explore your website or weblink, learn all the benefits of listing with you at the earliest possible stage in your interaction with them.
A salesperson from Dunedin with more than eight years of experience when she started this weblink based proactive marketing process found her income doubled in the following twelve months and increased another 50% in the second year. When she retired her database had over 700 email clients receiving weekly email updates on her market. She also included appraised property owners on the list. She had encouraged other members of her office’s sales team to get their own SalesPartner systems going and on retiring held an auction of her own among her colleagues to take over her database. We understand the selling price was $20,000 which of course more than recovered her investment in the software. We have heard of other sales over $4,000 but this is the highest we know about.
A significant benefit of using SalesPartner for these emails is that the client database can be transferred to another salesperson if you leave the area or the profession. And your database can go with you if you move to another agency.
There are other not so obvious benefits from pro-active marketing. Services like weblinks distinguish you from other salespeople so when listing a property you are not competing on the basis of your fees alone. It ensures your potential vendors and buyers are educated about your market. It demonstrates technical expertise and mastery of push marketing. It allows you to get on with interacting with interested clients without worrying if there might be someone you forgot to contact. It gives you enhanced negotiating power with both vendors and buyers.
Enhanced negotiating power is an interesting benefit from proactive marketing. In any situation where emotions are involved, as they often are in the negotiations to buy or sell a house, dispassionate credible advice from the salesperson is a huge advantage. The expression: “there is always another buyer – there is always another house” encompasses two sides of the coin for vendors and buyers. Your proactive marketing makes it evident to both vendors and buyers that you are dealing with lots of people currently in the market place. This gives extra credibility to your advice as to how readily a similar (or better) house or another (or better) buyer can be found in any given situation.
If your advice is credible it makes it easier for the negotiations to be successful. An added benefit is that the impression is also created that you are not dependent on any particular sale for your livelihood. This conveys extra weight to your opinions and advice. This negotiating power is one reason successful agents get more sales concluded with seemingly less effort than the salespeople who deal with fewer buyers and sellers.
Emailing details of properties reduces the need for phone tag. With an “A” buyer who is not available when you call, you can leave a message and send an email of the property that has just been listed. If they are interested they know to call you back.
To sum up; weekly weblinks and preview invitations by email enable you to provide more people with information they are interested in, directed to their needs. It is remarkably less expensive than other forms of business building. It enables you to demonstrate your knowledge of property in your market place and enables your contacts to perceive you as a real estate resource before they know they need one. It provides potential buyers and vendors with simple paths, including phoning from flyers, letters, DL cards, or clicking reply from an email, through which to contact you when their motivation changes and they need to make a real estate decision.
RSS Feed
