Ray Wood, CEO of real estate marketing group Bestagents, shares how Aaron Shiner built his list of 2,500 contacts and how you can too.
EVEN THOUGH the open rates are not as good as they were, email is still an awesome and very cost-effective way to connect with future buyers and sellers. The trick is to keep building and keep engaging.
Here’s a real estate success clue that should get you pumped and motivated to build a big email list of potential buyers and sellers: The more ‘warm’ contacts you have in your database, the more sales you will make each month.
Let’s look at an example I’m very familiar with. Sydney agent Aaron Shiner makes about $100,000 each month in real estate commission. He carefully manages a database of roughly 2,500 people.
But he didn’t always have that many contacts. In fact, he was ‘stuck’ for quite some time on about 1,000 contacts. Guess what? His income was pretty much half what it is today. Can you see the direct correlation?
So Aaron has a few things in place.
- He uses a lead generation website that automatically keeps in touch with his new contacts and builds rapport. He drives traffic to his site with cool Facebook ads.
- He also uses his Facebook business page to engage and attract new contacts. But it doesn’t look like a real estate site and he never posts listings in there, no matter how good they might be.
- He uses an opt-in function on his website so visitors have the opportunity to download a report and a digital copy of my book, How to Sell Your Home for More.
- Then he works on a solid plan to make contact with the names on his list more than 20 times each year.
- He uses email, real mail, text messages, the telephone (remember that?) and meetings in person.
He never relies solely on email, which is what most agents do.
So this article is about attracting a big email list of potential buyers and sellers. How are you going to do it?
Allow me to offer some ideas that have worked very well for me, and also for many Bestagents members whom I’ve worked with. I call it give-to-get marketing.
Take a look around at what your competitor agents are offering.
They mostly offer the old ‘Free Appraisal’ letter or certificate with their face and company logo plastered all over the flyer. But if effective marketing is about offering a point of difference, why would you offer the same as everyone else?
Put yourself in the seller’s shoes for a moment. What could you offer that is of interest to them?
The process works like this:
- You put your attractive offer out there
- A potential client wants your offer and contacts you
- You nurture the new relationship with even more information
- You keep in touch with your new contacts on a regular basis
- Your pipeline is constantly full of potential leads.
The really great news is that most agents don’t think like this. It makes it all the easier for you to stand out from the crowd.
Most agents wake up in the morning and look for that instant fix of a new listing. They have no monthly or even weekly marketing plan and no systems in place to generate leads and build their email list.
There is so much business out there in real-estate-land. All we need to do is package our offer attractively to engage potential clients on a regular basis and then build our relationships.
