When you hear the term Marketing Automation for real estate agents, you immediately think of drip emails or nurture campaigns. Or, you imagine that you would be able to improve your response time because you thought of the next best auto-responder.
Both are good examples of how you can use marketing automation to run your business but neither of those examples will help you SCALE your business.
What is Marketing Automation for real estate?
Real estate agents are using Marketing Automation platforms like Infusionsoft to automate various marketing strategies. Marketing Automation allows you to use software to automate the process of sending emails, direct mail, social media posts, voice broadcasting and SMS strategies. The value of a platform like Infusionsoft is that you can have one system take care of all these things for you.
Marketing Automation may sound like a system only a large company or mega team could use, yet the process is much easier than it sounds and single agents and teams are using it now to get ahead of their competition.
Here are a few examples of how we are using Infusionsoft to dominate our local market:
4 Ways to use Infusionsoft to SCALE your real estate business…
1) The FSBO:
I am sure there is a lot of competition for FSBO listings in your market.
In order to scale your FSBO business, you need to take a multi-channel approach to reach out to potential sellers. After the initial conversation with a FSBO, we will place them in the Infusionsoft database and run a FSBO Campaign on them. This campaign can consist of emails, text messages, social media posting and video marketing.
The emails are structured to take the FSBO on a journey. While other agents are harassing them on the phone, we are sending them valuable information about the process of selling, how we market properties if they ever need an agent, commission structures, sample Craigslist ads they can use and more.
For example, on day 1 we call them and send them an email. On day 2 we may actually send them a sample Craigslist ad that they can post on their own. On day 3, we will text them to make sure they got the sample ad and to call us if they need help putting it on CL. On day 5 we can call them and ask if they have it sold. On day 6 we run a Facebook ad with a video about how we help a FSBO get more money for their property. This will go on as long as it takes to get the listing.
As you are reading this, you are probably thinking, “that is a lot of work”.
The truth….it is ALL automated through our Infusionsoft real estate campaigns.
This is how you SCALE your real estate business. If you are running a system like this in your market, you will be the top agent soon.
2) The Expired
The system to automate the process of gaining expired listings is very similar to the FSBO domination strategy above.
Marketing Automation does not replace the phone call. It does soften up the potential seller so your conversion from contact to close will improve significantly.
Imagine this…you call the expired on day 1. You email them after the day 1 call and then later on in that day you deliver them your marketing package. On day 2, you call them to see if they had a chance to look at your marketing plan. On day 3, they get a text. Day 4, they see you on their social media channel.
I think you get the point. Marketing Automation allows you to take a multi-channel approach in a very effective and efficient manner. Without automation, you would not have the time to do all of these things. Doing all of these things are creating Top Producing agents around the country.
3) COI/Past Clients
I think you understand the process now. We have written campaigns for COI, Past Clients, Buyers, Sellers, Expired’s, FSBO’s and many more lead sources. The key is to keep in touch with them often, deliver a connection that has value and communicate with them through various channels. (Do not send recipes – I am referring to content that has value.)
4) Community Domination ‘Gaining Market Share One Community at a Time”
Automating your marketing efforts has become critical if you are looking to dominate a particular community. We use Infusionsoft to deliver a monthly report to the communities we most want to dominate in our local market. We can automate the process of delivering neighborhood stats to all of the property owners via a neighborhood newsletter template that is prebuilt in our system.
What is even better, we could have 20+ communities that we want to dominate, loaded into our software and consistently deliver email, text, and direct mail messages as frequently as we choose.
Once this is programmed, it is then on auto pilot.
We believe that you can dominate the market if you focus on one neighborhood at a time. Check out www.communitydomination.com
The above strategies are ways to SCALE your real estate business. The following ideas are a few additional ways you can use Infusionsoft that will improve your business.
4 Ways to use Infusionsoft to improve your real estate business…
1) Deliver training articles, videos or other materials to your team. You can automate your training or automate a daily message to be sent via text or email. Again, it should not replace human touch but it sure can help you be in communication more than you can without automation.
2) Buyer Lead Scoring – We are monitoring everything our buyer leads are doing. It is important to watch what they search on, but even more important is to monitor what content they are consuming beyond property searches. For example, are they watching a video on getting pre-approved or negotiating a low price? Our system is programmed to alert us when a lead is diving deep into that type of content. Buyers don’t waste time with that stuff unless it is important to them.
When we get an alert…we call right away and we typically convert that lead.
3) Seller Lead Generation – We place all of our ‘documented property owner’ emails into our database and run campaigns on them. It is amazing to see their click patterns and based on their engagement, the system will alert us to give them a call.
This strategy is called a ‘PULL Strategy’. Meaning, they are engaging on their own and alerting us when we should call them. If they do not engage, we do not call. When they do engage, we call. It is a simple process.
4) Communicate with your active sellers and schedule important dates and tasks.
Our customer satisfaction has risen since we started using automation to communicate and to remind us of important dates and tasks.
One example is an email that we send 25 days prior to the expiration date.
Or, an email we send on day 21 talking about the significance of pricing and the fact that we should re-evaluate the price each month. We are not going to ask them to reduce in that email but it softens them up so when we do call, we convert.
Summary:
I have given you 4 ways to SCALE your production and another 4 ways to improve your business. The truth, I use automation in over 100 ways in my business.
My intention is to expose you to the strategies that really work. Everything that I have shared is a strategy that I am currently using today in my business. If I don’t use it and I don’t prove the concept than I do not talk about it.
I urge you to get involved with our Infusionsoft real estate program. There are more than 200 agents across the country using the system with great success.
The real estate market is very competitive and technology is taking over. I believe that agents need to get involved with marketing automation now or they could find themselves losing market share.
I hope this article sheds some light on real estate marketing and the Infusionsoft system. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. I would love for you to be our next success story.
Written by Greg Harrelson
