Effective use of prospect data is essential for real estate agencies. Your database can serve as a powerful tool for organising, scheduling and streamlining communication. When used effectively, it can vastly improve your real estate marketing strategy.
Many real estate agencies are wasting this resource by just sending out weekly listings to every email address they’ve collected. Whether you’re a high income investor or a student looking for a rental, you see the same email with a list of properties ranging from $400pw rentals to $1.5 million properties. Clearly, this is not the best use of your data.
Using Your Database for Targeted Email Marketing
According to a 2016 report by Litmus and Fluent, consumers are getting less tolerant of unsolicited emails that are not in their interest or relevant to them. As a result, emails from businesses are either ignored or marked as spam. The real estate industry has an average open rate of 18 per cent, which isn’t great.
By spamming your email database with unsegmented listings, you’re driving prospects away and creating negative associations with your real estate brand. A targeted strategy means you can use your database to create real value for both your recipients and your agency. This means prospects are more likely to respond to and engage with your marketing.
For example, rather than sending the same bunch of listings to both low income students in one suburb and high income property investors in another, you would put together a specific selection of properties based on what those audiences are actually looking for. This is based on income, location, age, lifestyle and other specific demographical information.
How to Build an Effective Database
The first step to effectively using a database is to establish one properly in the first place. You should be keeping track of all the potential customers you meet during your day to day activities as a real estate agent. Open homes, for example, are a valuable source for prospect data.
Countless agencies simply fail to fully capture client information during interactions. For example, only getting a first name from open home attendees. Other times, client information is captured inaccurately, rendering it useless. This data is essential to collect in good faith, as continuously adding prospects to the top of your sales funnel is key to your agency flourishing.
