Have you ever tried growing a vegetable garden? For several summers I’ve attempted to grow tomatoes, but between long weekends, summertime travel, and my own forgetfulness, my poor tomato plants have never flourished. I haven’t done a good job of nurturing the plants consistently enough to reap the benefits of fresh tomatoes.
For plants to thrive, they need the right mix of sunshine, water, and regular care. It’s surprisingly similar to your real estate leads! To see your leads really “blossom” into clients, they need the right mix of contact, content, and approach. Let me explain what I mean.
Lead nurturing is the process of keeping in touch regularly with your leads and prospects over time, offering them relevant and timely information. It means building a relationship with them until they’re ready to use your services. When you communicate regularly with your leads you ensure that they remember your name and know exactly how to get in touch with you when the time comes to list or buy a home.
The key to successful lead nurturing is consistently sending material people will find useful. People are more likely to read and keep this information than just a straight up sales pitch. Email marketing is one of the simplest, non-confrontational, and least expensive ways to nurture real estate leads.
Your long term prospects require more nurturing than your short term prospects. Remember that timing does not equal quality! Some long term prospects have the potential to become excellent clients, provided you nurture them effectively. The old expression “you reap what you sow” applies perfectly to lead nurturing.
How to cultivate real estate leads more effectively
Lead nurturing (also known as drip marketing) is a communication strategy where you communicate with your contacts on a regular basis. This is done through a combination of regular keep in touch phone calls along with sending relevant pre-written email messages to your contacts on a regular basis.
Much like watering your garden, communicating regularly with your real estate leads is an effective way of nurturing them. Cultivating leads can be done by sending emails that are designed to educate the prospect on the topics and issues that are relevant to them, and to position you as the expert in all things real estate related. You can guide a lead who is still not sure about selling their home, or which Agent to work with when they do, through a series of emails until they finally warm up and are ready to make a move with you as their Agent.
With nurture email campaigns (also known as Marketing Activity Plans) in place, you’ll automatically send emails and correspondence to your contacts, making it easy to follow up with new leads and current contacts. You’ll also be reminded when it’s time to reach out to your contacts with a friendly phone call.
You can use several different real estate nurture campaigns depending on what kind of message you’d like to communicate to your contact. The messages you send should vary depending on whether you’re communicating with buyer leads, seller leads, renters, FSBOs, and more.
Are you cultivating your real estate leads over time and watching them grow into happy repeat clients?
How IXACT Contact can help
While I keep failing to nurture my tomato plants, you don’t want to make this mistake with your real estate leads. Using a powerful real estate CRM like IXACT Contact will turn you into a lead nurturing pro!
IXACT Contact comes loaded with keep in touch call reminders and pre-written nurture emails for your different types of leads including longer term email campaigns that are specific to your prospects needs. The emails are professionally written to convey the right message to your leads. Use them as they are, or customize them to suit your own preferences. Best of all, the emails are sent automatically, so you can set it and forget it. You’ll be regularly sending relevant emails to your leads without having to constantly type them out manually.
Nurturing your leads means building meaningful relationships. Just like the relationships you have in your personal life, building rapport is a powerful way to connect with your leads. As you learn more about your leads, their families, their needs, likes and dislikes, keep track of this important information in the Contact Profile in IXACT Contact. The more leads you have, the more difficult it is to remember specific details about each of them. By keeping good notes in your CRM, you’ll be able to review the information you have about your lead and your conversations will flow with ease.
Most Agents don’t have the memory of an elephant, so let IXACT Contact do the remembering for you, making you look like a star when you remember the details your lead shared with you.
Get started now
Start nurturing your real estate prospects now with the help of IXACT Contact. You’ll love the keep in touch call reminders, targeted pre-written email nurture campaigns, and the monthly e-Newsletter! Best of all, you can try it FREE for 5 weeks. Start your 5 week free trial now!
