A mistake even the most experienced real estate sales reps make is assuming (not knowing) today’s information needs of its target audience. So use your Welcome email sent to people joining your mailing list for asking your prospects about the types of information they want to receive from you. If you provide a few basic categories you could help them with they’re more likely to answer than if you leave the question wide open with no suggestions. If you don’t use opportunities like your Welcome email for asking people what information they want to receive, you’ll run the great risk of spending lots of time and money creating newsletter and website content that isn’t of much interest to your target prospects. The result: people will be steadily unsubscribing from your mailing list in large numbers. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 5
Your Welcome Email
When someone signs up for your mailing list, the subscriber often expects that they’ll receive a Welcome email from you. First, the new subscriber wants to confirm they were actually added to your mailing list, and the welcome email does this. Second, they’ll anticipate a thank you for signing up and want an introduction to the services you offer.
In fact, it’s been proven that a welcome email (if sent) has a much higher open rate than virtually any subsequent email you’ll ever send to your subscribers! The open rate for emails is normally 15%-20%, and it’s been reported that welcome emails generate 4 times the number of opens and five times the number of clicks as any subsequent emails! Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 4
Utilizing Facebook For Acquiring New Mailing List Signups
You can utilize Facebook for members who are currently signed into their Facebook account for getting new subscribers and more information on each person than you’d normally get from them. When people are logged into Facebook, certain basic bits of biographical information from their Facebook profile are instantly available to other applications on your computer. For instance, if visitors to your website are also signed into Facebook, your site (with the visitor’s permission first) can grab the basic contact information from the Facebook profile for your subscription form and automatically populate the form with the correct data in the correct spots so that they don’t have to type it out themselves. Having this in place ensures you can get lots of contact info for each new subscriber and not risk having them abandon filling out the form because too much and/or too personal information was asked. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 3
Here are a few Call To Action phrases you could use for getting more people joining your real estate mailing list:
“See New Listings Before The General Public”
“Get Updates On How Much Homes In Your Area Sold For”
“Get Notified First About Upcoming Local Open Houses”
Ebay is a classic example of a company using mailing lists for improving customer retention. Whenever you do a search on eBay using either Basic Or Advanced criteria, if you’re unable to find what you’re looking for, you can use eBay’s Saved Search option. This means your search criteria is saved by eBay and then eBay does daily searches automatically for what you’re seeking and then sends you an email if anything matches your search criteria is found. You can have dozens of these Saved Searches happening simultaneously and each lasts as long as you want. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 2
So why do some websites have huge, ever growing mailing lists, while other websites struggle to get new signups to their email database?
In the scenario we visited in the past article we used the example of you looking online for a rare book. The one rare book site whose mailing list you signed up for likely had on the landing page a very clear call to action: very prominent positioning of words suggesting you sign up for their mailing list. They may also have included persuasive reasons for joining their list such as “Can’t Find It Today? We’ll Keep Looking For You! Sign Up For Our Mailing List To Receive Our Inventory Updates Including The Books You Couldn’t Find Today”. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 1
There’s a saying: “All roads lead to Rome”. It refers to the fact that in ancient times Rome, the capital city of the vast Roman Empire, created an excellent road system for the entire Empire with all roads radiating outward from Rome to the furthest reaches of the empire, much like the spokes of a wheel all radiate out from the wheel’s hub.
In the same way, all your online and offline marketing efforts should have one common goal: building your email database of prospective clients. Everything you do in your business should in some way support that central goal. Continue reading
Don’t Forget Email Marketing! Part 3
Email is constantly and changing and so you need to take into consideration a few key things when doing your email marketing nowdays: Continue reading
Don’t Forget Email Marketing! Part 2
Any talk of email being “out” or “old school” is total nonsense. Just take a look around. Nowadays, wherever you go, practically everyone is using a Smart Phone. If they’re not talking on it they’re either texting or (if more appropriate) sending and receiving emails on it. When people get new messages from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, they get notified via email. If they are using these sites regularly, and get notified by their phone of each new message arrival, that means they’re looking at their email accounts more frequently than before Social Media became popular. If anything, recent advances in technology have made email usage even more pervasive than ever! Continue reading
Don’t Forget Email Marketing! Part 1
With all the hype about Social Media in recent years, it was perhaps inevitable that older forms of online communication such as email would take a drubbing in the media and be declared “has beens”, kind of like the Mac’s increasing popularity vs. the PC: the new, cool thing replacing something only business people, nerds or your parents use. Continue reading
Adding Current Neighborhood Content To Your Real Estate Website For Getting High Google Ranking Part 3
Helping Them Decide
As mentioned earlier, an important factor in how Google assesses a site’s ranking is the average amount of time spent on the site’s pages by users. The more time spent on pages, the higher the sites ranking will tend to be.
One of the ways you can get visitors staying on your site longer is by helping them answer the key questions they have, whether they be buyers or sellers. For instance, Mortgage related information is always good to have on your website. Help them answer key questions such as:
- How much can I afford to spend on a home?
- How much down payment will I need to put down?
- What will be my monthly payments?
- I have damaged credit. How does that change my buying situation?
Just answer the basic questions. If you’ve got time, by all means create pages where you answer some of the other questions a buyer might have about financing (eg. Fixed vs. Variable interest rates). If you don’t have the time for this, provide a link on your webiste to a trusted local mortgage broker’s website where these questions can be answered, and ask this mortgage broker to do the same for you in return.
Condo Info
Most people don’t know that the word condominium refers to a legal structure for property, not a type of property. In the end, all high rise “condos” are still apartments! Consequently, many prospective condo buyers have the following questions:
- What does the word condominum mean?
- Can different types of structures be classified as condominiums?
- What is a Freehold Condominium?
- How much are monthly maintenance fees?
- Should I buy a new condo or a resale condo?
If you want to attract investor buyers, be sure to have lots of information on condos as pre-construction high rise buildings are almost 100% purchased by investors, not end users.
Adding Current Neighborhood Content To Your Real Estate Website For Getting High Google Ranking Part 2
Video Content
Today, in ranking websites Google is now taking into account how useful people are finding these websites, taking particular notice of how long visitors are staying on each page. The longer someone stays on a page, the more Google interprets that lengthy stay as being due to the quantity and quality of information on that page, and hence the higher the ranking that page gets with Google. Continue reading
Adding Current Neighborhood Content To Your Real Estate Website For Getting High Google Ranking Part 1
I decided it was time once again to do a survey of the real estate websites that have the highest Google ranking and understand how they achieved that status. This time, I’m focusing ONLY on the sites that have achieved #1 ranking for major keyword searches simply because (as I demonstrated in an earlier article series) having the #1 spot is EVER so valuable. So here’s what I found: Continue reading
