The New Age of Real Estate Follow Up

It's easier, cheaper and creates more referrals, repeat business and higher conversions.

Wesley Rocha

CEO of LinkU & Online Marketing Expert

The Real Estate Industry is Under Attack!

Does it feel like the real estate industry is under attack? First Zillow, then Redfin and now Amazon?!

With all the big corporations getting into the real estate game, aiming to disrupt the industry, how can you build your real estate business so that you can still compete?

You need a preemptive strategy to ensure that your business is impenetrable by competitors (even if they offer discounts or rebates).

This means you would have to ultimately maintain your value as a real estate expert! Their trusted advisor to your past clients and SOI. In fact, you build a bond so strong that they would feel like they were betraying you if they were to use anyone else.

But how the heck do you do that?

Are You Following Up the Old-Fashioned Way?
Or Not at All?

One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen so many of our real estate clients have is maintaining a proper and consistent follow up strategy with their past clients.

We surveyed approx 4,500 agents over the past 12-months and found that their follow up strategies fall into 1 of 3 categories. And this goes for follow up for both past clients and new prospects or leads. 

Category #1 - Little to No Follow Up

Most agents fall into this category, where they perform few follow up tasks (if time allows), or have no real follow up strategy in place.

Category #2 - Some Follow Up

Agents in this category have a basic follow up system, maybe a drip email system, CRM or contact management database, and make calls here and there.

Category #3 - Follow Up Master

These are usually top producers, they have complete systems with multi-point touch systems and the whole works and are looking for more ways to increase follow up efforts.

Which category would you put yourself in?

"Over 85% of Buyers and Sellers would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others."

NAR 2018 PROFILE OF HOME BUYERS AND SELLERS

Traditional Follow Up Methods Require More Time & Money

People have short memories and you end up the victim of the cool-off factor. Everything seems great during the transaction or initial interactions, then a few short days later they've all but forgotten your name.

Not only that, but with social media and shorter tension spans, it takes more touches than ever to ensure your prospects and past clients remember you!

To counter this, you must follow up more often and with more consistency... the problem is very few agents have the time or budget to keep up, plus so many of them get sucked into the now, trying to generate new leads, dealing with transactions, showing homes, you name it, and end up kicking that follow-up can down the road. Sound familiar?

How do you stay in front of your past clients and prospects? 

Do you send postcards? Texts? Cards? E-mails? Call? Something else?

How often do you follow up?

What other ways do you stay in front of past clients and prospects?

How do you stay in front of and top of mind of prospects, past clients, family, friends, etc.?

Do you do it daily? Weekly? Monthly?

To do any of this properly, you either need technology, systems, or an assistant... and of course time! But the costs of all of these are increasing every year making it difficult, even impossible to actually implement.

E-mail is Really Starting to Suck!

Are you using e-mail as your primary method of follow up?

If you're like most others, this is the most common, and sometimes the only way agents actually follow up with their prospects and past clients. Otherwise known as automated e-mail or "drip e-mail".

Nowadays e-mail is out of control, with most people receiving hundreds of e-mails per day... and SPAM filters, or G-Mail like "Promotion" folders ensuring your e-mails are almost never read.

Let's do the math! Doesn't matter if you send to 100 contacts in a month, maybe 18% will actually open your message (for some it may be higher or lower), but regardless the majority of people are never seeing your message!

How do you get in front of these people if they are not reading your e-mails?

Calls? Text Messages? Postcards? Letters? Cards? 

Sure! But how often can you send those out?

If you send too often you risk coming off creepy... but not only that, the costs start to really add up!

"Only about 18% of people will ever open your e-mail"

WESLEY ROCHA - LINKU DIGITAL MARKETING FOUNDER

A "Secret" Way to Follow Up for a Fraction of the Cost

What if you could stay in front of your prospects, contacts, family, friends, past clients when they are using Facebook, like watching a video, or reading a blog?

That would be pretty cool right?!

You can do this by using a little-known advertising strategy called: re-targeting, also known as re-marketing.

Re-targeting allows you to target your marketing to people who have already interacted with you or your brand in some way, such as website visitors, people in your database or CRM, past customer lists, Facebook engagements, and more.

Have you ever been shopping for something, maybe some shoes and then later, you started to see ads for that thing following you around? That's re-targeting!

Basically you can take your existing contact lists, of past clients, leads, e.t.c and upload them into Facebook Custom Audiences (Google offers this option too, but there are restrictions on the types of ads you can do, so I'm only covering Facebook in this article).

All you need is an e-mail address or phone number at the minimum to use custom audiences, with a list of at least 100 or so.

To use this strategy, you only need to have a Facebook Account, Facebook Business page and Facebook Ad Account w/Business Manager. 

Anyone can sign up for these Facebook services from their existing Facebook account.

Use Technology to Automate Your Daily Follow Up Tasks

Most times when it comes to automated follow up, a lot of agents tend to avoid it, because they feel like an automated system can’t do what a personal call, or personal e-mail can do, so they will try to do it all themselves.

Unfortunately, what happens is as you get more clients, and more prospects over time, it becomes nearly impossible to follow up with everyone with the consistency required to really make a difference. 

Then you are forced to start choosing who you will follow up with and who you don’t, letting perfectly good prospects, or even past clients, or other people in your sphere fall through the cracks.

You simply stop following up with them, because you don’t have enough time in a day to do that and keep up with your day to day tasks.

Is there something more you can be doing? Something you're missing? 

Automation That Feels & Acts Personal

The solution to this is to ensure that your automated follow up feels personal, where it would be difficult for the person to tell the difference between something automated vs. personally written. This is where most agents go wrong.

Most automated messages are articles, or listing alerts, newsletters, or simply written in a way that you would NEVER actually interact with someone in real life conversation.

These interactions, texts, emails, etc, should be written as conversation starters, designed to get engagement... designed to get a reply!

Here's an example of an automated text to a recent buyer client:

Hi Susan, it's Wesley (your real estate agent)! I was in the neighborhood and thought of you and your family. I'd love to see what you've done with the place one of these days... how' are you and the family?

Here's an example of an automated text to a new buyer lead:

Hi Sam, I just got your message! I'm about to wrap up what I'm doing in a few, can I call you when I finish up?

As you can see, these types of e-mails or text messages are more likely to elicit a reply from the recipient, because they feel like they were personally written.

"63% percent of sellers found their agent through a referral from a friend, neighbor, or relative or used an agent they had worked with before to buy or sell a home"

NAR 2018 PROFILE OF HOME BUYERS AND SELLERS

Get Way More Exposure for a Lot Less Money

With the New Age of Follow Up, you can actually save time, get way more exposure and save money at the same time.

For example, you can use re-targeting to keep your brand top of mind to your potential prospects and past clients for less than you'd ever imagine!

Let's review the stats from the retargeting ad strategies we teach.

In this campaign you can see that the cost per 1,000 impressions (the number of times our ad was seen), was only $2.52 per 1,000 impressions. That's only .002 cents... (basically fractions of a penny) to be seen.

The ad reached over 1,300 people and was seen an avg. of 5 times per person in one month. All for a cost of $16.38! That's less than $200/yr., which makes it really easy to ROI.

And That's Not All... There's Even More!

There are a lot of options when it comes to the New Age of Follow Up, something I like to call "Digital Follow Up" and I've covered just a few here in this article. 

I believe by building bonds, keeping top of mind and maintaining real relationships with your "database", will help ensure a long prosperous future. If not, then little by little your client base and opportunities will be chipped away by rebates and discounters until it's too late.

If you'd like to learn more about The New Age of Follow Up and how you can ensure you can compete in this ever changing industry, then keep an eye out for our upcoming “Sell A Home A Week” Challenge. Where we will be teaching you all the things you need to take your real estate business to the next level.

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