You’ve probably read a lot of case studies explaining why a real estate CRM is all about intelligent automation, smarter time management, and more efficient lead generation and nurturing. Indeed, real estate marketing automation opens up some wonderful opportunities that agents can try and test to generate more business and deliver excellent customer service. If the whole idea is new to you and you’re not sure what exactly to automate, look no further – this post recaps it all.
You know all too well that a regular day in the life of a real estate professional is busy, turning hectic as the evening approaches. You need to squeeze lead prospecting and email outreach between commutes, viewings, and listing appointments while clearing documentation and handling referrals – and all of this nearly every day!
In the meantime, real estate marketing automation is one of the most user-friendly marketing channels. It delivers personalized customer experiences, enriches them, and wraps up your sales messaging in an appealing, easy-to-consume format.
If you are to do more business and grow your client base, some marketing tasks just cry out to be automated. Especially if you’re growing and need to scale your marketing activities.
So one way to make your work less stressful and more organized is to automate some key real estate marketing tasks. Not only does this takes off additional strain off your workload, it also helps you consistently stay in touch with prospects and leads with virtually zero effort on your part.
Your real estate marketing automation blueprint
1) Automating reminders about follow-up calls and emails
Your team might deliver terrific customer service but it’d be crazy to suggest they’ll remember about all calls to make and all emails to send.
Head on to your real estate CRM, create reminders for your follow-up tasks, and enjoy seamless communications with your SOI, without missing out on important touchpoints. If you haven’t picked your CRM yet, some marketing-focused favorites are CINC, AgentFire, and BoomTown.
Automating reminders about phone calls and emails only applies to the hot leads in your database. Naturally, you’d like to stay in touch with them personally. They’re really close to the purchase so you need to monitor things carefully. So you only have to automate a reminder to follow up with them, not the follow-up message itself like with drip campaigns (more on the mechanics of that in #3).
This way you’ll never miss the next important touchpoint that might finally get that deal closed.
2) Automatically adding new leads
Real estate marketing automation can make your work essentially easier when adding new contacts to your database too. Inquiries via contact forms on your site, newsletter signups, featured content downloads – all of this creates a wealth of new contacts which traditionally you’d have to manually add to your database.
Take the easy way out and let your CRM handle this. A good CRM will capture your online leads and automatically add them to your contacts database. You can keep an eye on things by setting up email notifications. So when a new lead arrives, the CRM will send the word to you and you’ll be able to start communication immediately.
3) Automate email drip campaigns
In some way or another, you may already use this brilliant marketing technique. You’re probably sending your market updates, blog posts, new/featured/sold listings, etc. to your email database to keep them in the loop.
The next step could be segmenting your database into several groups depending on the contact type and how qualified the leads are. For example, you probably have buyer leads, seller leads, FSBO leads, portal leads, past clients, referrers, renters, etc. in your CRM. Each of them will need a different message, right?
Instead of writing a new email to each one of them every time, why not to craft some really good emails, save them as templates in your CRM and set up a drip campaign? You can figure out the best intervals between each email for a more powerful effect. This way your outreach will be more targeted and you’ll never spam people with stuff they’re not interested in.
4) Automating reminders about client birthdays, weddings, and move-in anniversaries
A very nice and natural way to keep in touch with your past clients is to wish them well on their birthdays and anniversaries. Of course, real estate marketing automation simplifies this for you too.
Dropping just a few simple lines like these:
“Hi James and Mary! Can you imagine it’s been 5 years since you bought your house? Remember all those homes we were going through, trying to find the perfect one? We did, eventually! Hope you’re enjoying your lovely home!”
… is an excellent way to show you’re genuinely interested and value the relationships with your past clients.
Make sure to set up reminders for your clients’ important dates and always keep communication lines open. It’s a simple and rewarding way to stay in touch with people who matter most to your business, it also is one of many ways you can build your reputation in your community.
What’s next?
There you have it, 4 easy ways to get started with real estate marketing automation. Together, they help you meet many of your goals all in one go, from keeping people in your sphere of influence and enhancing your brand, to consistently driving more traffic to your site and closing more deals. Either way, real estate marketing automation goes far beyond sales – it’s a long-term, valuable relationship that you can build with the niche you carved out for yourself.
