We all know that real estate is not a one-click business. Buyers are saving for a year or longer for their down payment, and sellers are waiting for just the right time to put their home on the market.

People don’t impulse-buy or impulse-sell a house; they need time to be nurtured through the lead process before they even become clients and are ready to close a deal. The best way to accomplish this is through email marketing.

The role of real estate email marketing for your business

In The Download, our free guide to real estate marketing, we lay out five key elements for a real estate business’s online marketing mix: A website, an email marketing tool, a way to create content, a social media channel, and online reviews.

We mentioned in our last post the importance of creating a real estate website. Today we’re going to show you how to actually generate and then activate your online leads through email communication that will keep your prospects engaged, involved, and coming back for more.

Your website is only as good as the leads it’s generating for your business. Let’s start by looking at ways you can use your real estate website to collect email addresses from your prospects, then dig into strategies you can use to keep those contacts reading. 

5 easy ways to collect email addresses through your website

1. Home valuation page

One of the big questions home sellers want answered as early as possible is how much their home is worth. Though only a real comparative market analysis is going to give sellers a specific market value, you can get them started with an estimate from an instant valuation page like this one from Redfin. 

You’ll need to partner with a landing page provider in order to have access to this sort of service, but great lead generation platforms like BoldLeads or RealGeeks provide these options for real estate agents. 

In order to get their instant home valuation, property owners will need to provide a name and email address. When a lead comes in, you’ll know they are at least curious about their value. That’s a great place to start a conversation! 

2. Property-specific landing page 

A property-specific landing page is basically a miniature website inside your existing website and is designed for one thing: to communicate the details of a single property to interested readers and to capture all their information. 

These sorts of landing pages are easy to set up with the right website builder. Major website builders offer dozens of templates you can customize for your property. Constant Contact’s own free website builder uses artificial intelligence to provide you with design and layout options, so you only need to pick what works best for you. You could also choose to go with a real estate specific provider like Placester. 

When someone completes a contact form on a page like this, you know they are a lead with a very specific home in mind; This allows you to create followup communication perfectly tailored to their needs.

3. Contact form 

Contact forms are the bread and butter of your website lead generation strategy and should be on every page of your website. A great place to put these is in the footer of your site, that way they appear no matter what your visitors are doing. 

Try personalizing your language here, like you see above. Instead of a button that generically says “submit”, try humanizing it with something like, “Get in Touch Today”.

4. Save property searches 

If your website is IDX enabled, you can set up options allowing your visitors to create saved searches so they can return to them later. 

Visitors who are using this option are usually a little higher up in your funnel, but are also valuable leads to get. By creating a saved search on your website, these leads have signaled to you that they’ll be back and want to continue this search later, thus establishing some loyalty and giving you some authority. 

In order to save a search, users need to give their name and email address, contact information you can then use to market to them later. 

5. Gated/exclusive content (neighborhood guide) 

A great way to demonstrate value to real estate prospects is to provide them with premium content. eBooks, area guides, and home buyer or seller resources are great examples of things you can create once and then use as a carrot to drive contact information collection on your website. 

Start by creating a fantastic piece of content, something like, “The 10 Most Important Things People in XXX City Need to Know Before Moving in 2020”. Then, offer it as a free download on your website in exchange for an email address. Anyone who grabs that content has demonstrated their interest in moving, a perfect lead for a real estate pro!

How to Follow Up With Your New Leads

Congrats on securing your new leads! Now it’s up to you to follow-up with your leads, get to know them, and persuade them that you’re the agent they want to do business with. 

Step 1: Follow up immediately 

According to a study done by Adobe, Millennial and younger home buyers have high expectations for a speedy follow-up. Thanks to companies like Amazon that provide customers with real-time feedback on all their needs, real estate agents need to be on the ball, providing automated feedback as soon as a lead comes in. 

You can accomplish this by triggering a new lead automated email drip campaign the moment someone enters your funnel. 

Step 2: Give your new lead a call 

If you collected a phone number with your lead’s name and email address, don’t be shy — pick up the phone. We all know that success in real estate is based on relationships. You’ll jump your relationship forward a dozen steps if you can get your new contact on the phone and actually establish some personal rapport. 

Step 3: Invite them to connect with you

If you didn’t get a phone number as a part of their initial lead form, build a request to connect into your automated email welcome series. This message should be personal and sincere, but also professional. Remember, you’ve got value to provide to your prospects, and you can better do that with a closer personal relationship with them. 

An invitation to connect on the phone is often perfectly placed in the second or third email in a drip campaign. 

Bringing it all together

These are the basics when it comes to email acquisition and followup. To take it to the next level, you can personalize your messages even further. 

Read our online real estate marketing guide to learn about how to create a foolproof email marketing strategy, as well as bring in the power of social media to make 2020 your best year yet. 

The post Real Estate Email Marketing: Turn More Prospects into Clients appeared first on Constant Contact.