One of the harshest impacts of COVID-19 on the Real Estate sector has been on personal lead interactions due to the prevalent restrictions on travel and transport. This has made Real Estate agents look into online ways to acquire and cultivate leads, as both buyers and sellers are focusing on communicating through digital channels. This makes it essential for them to design marketing campaigns that give optimal customer engagement through social media, emails, phone, and video calls.
Drip Marketing Campaigns, in association with lead segmentation, can be a vital tool in creating a communication workflow that would keep your leads engaged in all stages of the sales funnel. Let’s take a look at ways to segment leads by creating lead groups and assign them a custom Drip Marketing campaign that would automatically keep the communication going.
1) Tips for Real Estate Lead grouping or segmentation
If you are a Real Estate professional maintaining a standalone database of your leads or have a Real Estate CRM to help you better manage the tasks of lead acquisition, nurturing and engagement, you can certainly group leads sharing a common characteristic. By creating a lead group, you essentially have a set of leads that you can communicate and engage similarly and can also analyze the impact of the lead engagement exercise in driving them to do business with you. We present a few ways in which you can group leads, which would form the starting stage of your automated Drip Marketing Campaign.
2) Lead Segmentation by Activity:
This method of segmentation takes into account the lead activity; be it the initial registration on your website, or through an analysis of search behavior or website visits, recent property visits, open-houses, and many more. As an example, you can group all leads that have registered on your website during the past week, and send them a welcome email offering your services and asking more information on their property requirements. Else, you can group all buyer leads that have attended an open-house and seek their feedback and interest in the property.
3) Lead Segmentation by Interest and Intent:
Do you have a set of leads that have an interest in short sales or foreclosures? You could also have a set of leads that have no immediate interest in purchasing or selling but are just looking at available options to plan for the future. You can surely group such leads by analyzing their property interests and their intent in closing the deals. An example of such a campaign would be sending a communication to all interested leads on an upcoming Real Estate property auction.
4) Lead Segmentation by Geography:
This form of grouping is based on the geographic location that your leads are from, or are showing a preference for. By creating location–based groups, you can easily share listings and updates to the group, and also easily keep a track of their property preferences.
5) Lead Segmentation by Property Type:
Grouping leads that have a similar property preference would make it easy for you to share listings and updates, as you can easily segregate your listings to match their requirements. An example would be creating a group that has leads having an interest in condos, or maybe in vacation homes.
6) Lead Segmentation by Budget:
This form of lead grouping is one of the most commonly used, where you can identify leads who are interested in properties that are within a certain budget and can use it to send appropriate listings through bulk emails or texts.
The above are a few examples of how best you can segment Real Estate leads for better lead engagement. Also, you can also segment based on demographics, key personal events, and neighborhood preferences. Creating a lead group would be your first step in creating a Real Estate Drip Marketing plan that can effectively execute an automated communication workflow that would keep your leads consistently engaged.
Creating an Efficient Real Estate Drip Marketing Campaign
A Real Estate Drip Marketing Campaign is usually created and assigned to leads through an CRM software that can help you define the steps to assign leads and create automatic communication workflows through emails, calls, and text reminders. You can research for software firms that specialize in such campaigns for Real Estate marketing and can subscribe for their CRM packages that help you easily create and execute Drip Marketing campaigns.
Though Real Estate CRM’s help you create automated communication workflow that can set periodic reminders for calling or texting a lead at a certain point of time, or set frequency, the most common method would be using emails as the mode of communication.
Here are a few essentials that you must keep in mind while creating effective email–based Real Estate Drip Marketing Campaigns.
1. Focus on clarity and consistency; it’s the quality of the email that matters rather than its frequency.
2. Make sure that your email has compelling content, right from a perfect subject line that catches the user’s attention to the body of the email, and lastly to the call-of-action that you would like your lead to take after seeing your email.
Your first focus would be on writing a perfect subject line that would be engaging and prompts the lead to view your email. Having a personalized subject line is a feature that many Real Estate CRM’s offer and your subject line should crisp, clear, compelling, and concise. Do keep in mind that 90% of users judge an email by its subject, so you would want to write the perfect subject line that ensures that your email doesn’t go unread.
Also, users have limited attention span while coming to viewing the email contents. Do include images and short pieces of content to effectively drive your point across, and refrain from using long content passages that act as an immediate deterrent to reading.
4. Focus on the right set of fonts, colors, and images to include in your email. Videos are a great idea too! Your email should perfectly reflect your brand and should not be too subtle, and neither too loud.
5. Creating an effective call-to-action in the email helps you guide the lead to take the desired step, which could be replying or confirming an appointment, or visiting your website or a social media link to follow on a property. You can easily prompt users to take the desired action by creating a call-to-action that gives them a definite advantage and direction.
6. Lastly, do analyze the success of your campaign by factors such as the number of emails opened for viewing and response rates-which are metrics your Real Estate CRM can easily fetch for you. You can use the data to refine your campaign strategy and fine-tune it to make it more effective.
We hope that you have found our tips on creating effective Real Estate Drip Marketing Campaigns with lead segmentation useful enough to give them an actionable thought. Such campaigns are quite useful in the current times where you have limited personal interactions and require consistent efforts to say in touch with your leads. If your existing Real Estate Marketing strategy does not quite include them, maybe now it’s time you can explore these options to stay ahead in the race.