RealtySoft.com Blog

We wade in, spend huge amounts of time and significant amounts of money to stand out from the Web crowd and get that visitor to our website.  We practice the best current SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and maybe even do PPC, Pay Per Click marketing, to get that elusive searcher to come to one of our web pages.  When we stand out – it works!

Web leads SUCK!  Or so some real estate professionals think.

• Will some site visitors just be lookie-loos? {Are some walk-ins just lookie-loos?}
• Are some site visitors just dreaming – not ready? {Do you get floor duty calls from people who aren’t ready or aren’t willing to commit?}
• Will some site visitors have credit so bad they couldn’t get a mortgage with a 90% down payment? {Have you ever shown houses to someone just to find out that they’ve already been turned away by every mortgage broker in town?}

Website visitors are the same people we deal with in offline business.  It’s one thing to have someone sitting trapped in your office.  If you're aggressive, you might stand up, lean against the door, and keep them in your office until you "qualify" them.  But, that only works if you're bigger and intimidating.  It’s quite another thing to know absolutely nothing about them except maybe their IP address, and to have no way to keep them from evaporating into thin air.  It's like having them in your office, but before they tell you who they are, they're whisked away, along with your future commission.  

So, the dilemma is about what to do to convert website visitors to prospects, and prospects to clients. What too many do is to send them fleeing in droves from their website.  Everything you learned about pre-qualifying leads before the Internet is useless to you UNTIL after they give up their contact information!

Besides, why were we so busy pre-qualifying prospects in the past?  It was to save time and money meeting with and hauling around people who weren't ready, willing and able to buy or sell real estate.  With the Web, auto-responders, and drip email, who's wasting any time?

Certainly it isn't the well-prepared real estate professional with a system to lure the site visitor into giving up their contact information, then following-up carefully with information and emails of value to that visitor.  Pulling them into your system, your automated follow-up marketing activities will simply allow them to qualify themselves.

With the right system, you build it once and use it over and over again.  You don't care if they're ready or not.  You simply want them to be in your system when they are ready.  You don't care if their credit sucks either.  You have the chance to be the hero and the expert by offering information and resources to help them to improve their credit scores and come to you ready to get that mortgage.  The Internet, email and technology have all combined to relieve us of this antiquated idea of "pre-qualification" before someone is worthy of our attention.  Since our attention at this early stage of Web interaction can be totally automated, why should we be so picky?

What's the right system?

It's a website backend that allows us to create special added value content, offer it with lead capture forms on our site, automatically take in the form information, automatically deliver the content, and then maintain a planned follow-up system that automatically keeps in touch and moves our prospect from cold, through warm, to hot.  RealtySoft's backend contact management system makes it easy for us to set up, does all of the early work of prospect retention and nurturing, and keeps us informed about responses they make to our marketing follow-up.

If you're going to send out a market statistics email every quarter, do you really care if it goes to 100 or 10,000 recipients?  You're not using an inkwell, quill pen and parchment here.  You're writing it once, and you're clicking one time.  And, if you're going to keep doing that every quarter because it works, should you really care if 200 of the people who receive it couldn't pull together a down payment without robbing a bank?  Guess what, things change!  Those 200 people may have that 20% down two years from now, and they'll still be getting your emails.  Using a backend system for CRM, Customer Relationship Managment, integrated with a RealtySoft website, you're not worried about qualified/unqualified, just keeping them until their status is where you want it.

The whole marketing game has turned over on us.  We're not qualifying them -- they're qualifying us.  Repeatedly, studies and surveys tell us that:

• 90+% of real estate buyers and sellers start their research on the Web.
• they start their research much earlier than in the past because they can stay anonymous on the Web.
• they WANT to stay anonymous on the Web for a while.
• a high percentage will end up working with the FIRST agent who responds to their direct request for information or assistance.
• even if they liked what they found on their first visit, they will usually forget about you unless you get them into a marketing system and follow up.
• you can't follow up unless they tell you who they are, so you MUST offer added value items that they want enough to give you their information.