In order to maximize the ROI of your marketing campaigns you need to master the art of following up with your leads, both new and old. In fact, it’s the single biggest difference between agents who find success with real estate lead generation and those who don’t.
Written by Andrew Hendry, Co-Founder at REALQualified Inc.
Published October 20, 2021
Without an effective follow up strategy you are leaving your conversion up to chance, passively hoping that the people who are coming through your lead generation campaigns will call YOU when the time comes and not someone else.
The problem with that approach is that real estate transactions require a longer customer journey. Buying or selling a home is a big decision and people start the process months before they are ready to pull the trigger. This means if you are not following up with leads properly, you are missing out on people who said they might be interested in buying or selling but are not ready to do so just yet.
In this guide we will teach you the best follow up strategies and systems that you should implement in order to convert more leads into customers.
Different Leads Require Different Strategies
Before we jump right into the exact follow up tactics and strategies, it’s important to outline the kind of leads with which you will be interacting in the follow-up process. This is the first and often most overlooked step in a proper follow up strategy.
- New incoming leads from your paid campaigns – These may be leads that are coming from PPC campaigns, Facebook Ads or any other paid placement. They can be home seller leads, buyer leads for a property in the market, open house inquiries and more.
- New leads from organic efforts – These are inbound inquiries that are coming from organic efforts like social media outreach, keyword ranking as well as video marketing.
- Existing buyer and seller leads in your database – The buyer and seller leads that are sitting in your database that may have come through the above avenues.
- Existing clients & referrals – These are people with whom you have an existing relationship.
The Follow Up Spectrum For Different Types Of Leads
As you know, most of the leads that come in are not ready to transact. Moreover, different leads are at different points in their buying cycle by the time they get to you. Sure, you can be lucky enough to find leads who are ready to sell right now if you play the volume game. However, when you run inbound marketing funnels, rest assured you’ll need a few months of personal follow-up to convert these leads into clients.
We call this the follow up spectrum and you should have a personalized outreach strategy depending on which area of the follow up spectrum they fall under.
Cold Leads – There are leads that need multiple touch points over a long period of time to turn them into warm leads. The biggest indication that a cold lead may be ready to convert is their responsiveness to your follow-up efforts.
Warm Leads – The next stage of the spectrum is your warm leads, these are leads that you have engaged with at some stage, but you now need to keep engaging in order to convert them. Warm leads are usually within the 0 to 90 day range of transacting. The best way to capture warm leads is to have a consistent phone-based follow up system which we will share in one of our strategies.
Hot Leads – Usually leads that reach out to you because of your follow up strategies and are ready to transact within 0 to 30 days.
As you can see from the spectrum that in order to convert cold and warm leads into hot ones, you need to use an effective follow-up strategy.
Centralized CRM To Sequence Your Follow Up Strategy is Key
Now let’s talk about the second most important thing when it comes to building the ultimate follow up system for your real estate business.
It’s your CRM. Make no mistake – your business is your CRM. Your CRM is your sphere of people you know and with whom you’d like to transact.
Without proper segmentation of leads and clients in the CRM, the follow up strategy can get messy very quickly.
Setting up a CRM deserves it’s own article. However, we will share a few key points that will make your follow up strategies effortless in the long run.
- Always tag your clients and direct referrals properly inside the CRM. Make sure they are excluded for any type of cold and warm outreach campaigns, whether you are calling them or sending out an email. Your clients should be followed-up less frequently than your leads. Yes, you heard that right.
- For your leads make sure that when your marketing team is capturing the lead, they are capturing the lead source for you. This gives your team context on how to target them and make it more personalized. For example, if they saw a particular ad online, you can reference your ad when you call them.
- Setup email marketing drips and SMS drips through your CRM or marketing software that updates fields in your CRM. This is essential when you get an engagement because you don’t want to keep doing outreach to those prospects. Similarly, if someone tells you to stop calling, you want to make sure you aren’t hounding them.
Now that we understand the importance of CRM in managing your lead follow up strategy, let’s dive deep into the actual follow up strategies to generate more clients from your database.
Best Follow Up Strategy: Personalized Phone Call Follow Up
Nothing beats a personalized phone call to all your prospects. Note how we use the phrase “personalized call”. This is because the opener you use when you connect with your leads will be different depending on the lead types.
>> Bonus: Download Our Proven Scripts That Turn Follow Up Calls Into Booked Appointments<<
Calling someone enables you to have that human connection that your prospects deserve when dealing with a high ticket decision like buying or selling their home.
The golden rule is to call your real estate leads at least once every month after they have gone cold. Once you start doing this for 90 days you will see a percentage of leads who identify themselves as warm and hot.
Pros
- Best method to follow up with all prospects.
- Direct human communication ensures you can personalize this type of outreach.
- It enables you to build a relationship with your prospects.
Cons
- Time consuming
- You need to have a script and play the numbers game
- You need to be okay with high levels of rejection.
Solution
Hire an experienced Real Estate ISA (Inside Sales) company like us 🙂 who can call and qualify your leads on your behalf.
Most Scalable Follow Up Strategy: Email Marketing
Although the quality of follow up won’t be as good as talking to prospects on the phone, email marketing is a great way to keep your brand top of mind while building authority.
When it comes to an email marketing strategy the main goal is to provide a bunch of value so that your authority score goes up over time with the leads that came into the system.
In fact some of the best lead generation funnels often involve email as the first touch point. For example an opt-in funnel for a home sellers guide would involve you sending them the PDF with some more value based follow up drip emails.
Some of the email marketing drips that work:
- Neighborhood data + case studies of other properties you sold in a drip series.
- Guides and white papers with a follow up drip series of value + book a consultation.
- Sharing your blog posts on market update, should you buy or sell etc. as separate email drips.
Pros
- You can target lists in bulk from your database.
- You can track and see who opened and interacted with your emails and then reach out to them via text or phone calls or assign those leads to your ISA team.
Cons
- You need the skills to setup the emails
- Need content writers to write all of the email drips
- Need to monitor the campaigns closely and improve
Solution
Start with an email marketing tool like AutopilotHQ or hire an email specialist to create the drip follow ups on your behalf.
Most Unique Outreach Strategy: SMS Outreach + Calls
The final follow up strategy we’ll discuss involves your clients with whom you have already done business. Remember, once you sell a home or help someone buy, you need to keep in touch with them because it’s part of the broader real estate lifecycle that begins the day they move to their new home.
Most successful agents get their business from their sphere of influence and they are always making sure that they keep in touch with them.
One of the most effective strategies is to send them a text or even a call on the day of their home-anniversary. You can set an auto reminder in your CRM for this task to pop up.
Other important dates include their birthday.
In order to scalable deliver this for all your clients, send out an email or ask them next time for the dates. Once you know them input them in the CRM and set the reminders.
Although SMS works fine, but nothing beats a personalized call on this special day.
Pros
- Not all agents do it so it will help you differentiate from the rest of the competition
Cons
- You need to collect the data and setup the CRM
Solution
Use a good CRM that syncs with your calendar to trigger the reminders.
Remember The Money Is In The Follow Up
These follow up strategies will ensure that you are doing everything possible to:
- Stay on top of their mind when they are ready to transact
- Build authority with your lead list in your database
- Reach out in a personalized fashion consistently which is the key to closing more deals from your database.