In days past a real estate professionals  first contact with prospects was usually over the phone. People responded to print ads and called the listing agent seeking more information. Sales Professionals loved it because they could communicate with prospects by a means of communicating they’d been using all their lives: speaking. Real Estate sales people used their strong conversation skills for persuading prospects to do what they wanted them to do.

Then along came the Internet. Soon after, email became a daily part of most of our lives.  Sales professionals  now found themselves communicating with prospects in a very different way: through writing.

As the Internet grew, email became the preferred means for most people’s initial contact with a real estate person. But everyone has spent far more time in their life using speech for communicating than writing. So email caught many sales people flatfooted. Few sales professionals’ writing skills were anywhere near their conversation skills. So most find converting email prospects into clients very challenging.

A real estate person once declared to me all email inquiries on her listings were garbage. She’d received over 2000 emails on her listings but hadn’t sold a single property to those people. The problem wasn’t email inquiries. The problem was she didn’t know how to effectively communicate with prospects in writing.  Remember the First goal with every email message your receive is to get the sender to RESPOND to your reply.

Here are a few tips for turning email inquiries into customers:

Ask Questions: the biggest mistake real estate sales people make with email inquiries is immediately trying to qualify the email prospect. With this initial first email from a prospect, the real estate person’s first response needs to be helpful not PROBING.  People nowadays get sold to all day long, and no one likes being sold to. Do you like telemarketers pushing things on you? Of course not. So many people deliberately contact real estate salespeople via email and not by telephone because it gives them control over the engagement. They don’t want to be sold to. They just want information so they can make up their own minds on what to do.

Here are some email tips I know will help your conversion strategies:

1. Keep your email messages short–email was meant to be brief
2. Make your email message easy to read, easy on the eyes
3. Double space between email paragraph
4. do not use more than 2 sentences per paragraph
5. Ask one question in every reply
6. Put the question on a line by itself and bold it so it stands out.
7. Remember do not immediately try to qualify the client
8. Goal is to slowly build an online relationship.

So give them what they want. Answer their questions, immediately in the first line response to them. Keep your email short but be sure to ask them questions too. Get them talking. Ask them specific questions about what they’re looking for. Listen, listen, listen. Get a conversation going, just like you would on the phone. The more you ask them about what they want, the more they’ll think you’re interested in helping them find what they want, and the more they’ll respond to you. That’s the key to engaging a prospect in any medium.

Don’t Immediately Ask For A Phone Number: one of the biggest mistakes real estate sales professionals make with email prospects is asking for a phone number right away. In emailing you the prospect is implicitly saying email is their preferred way of communicating, at least initially. If the prospect wanted the initial contact to be over the phone they would have called you. No one likes to be sold to, and that may be why they contacted you by email. If you ask for a phone number right away you’re already not giving the prospect what they want; you’re trying to give them what you want. They’ll interpret that as being pushy and maybe even desperate. They may even think you’ll try persuading them to buy a house that isn’t really what they want. So keep the initial communication to email. When the prospect becomes more familiar and comfortable with you they’ll naturally want to speak with you.

Fall Out Of Love With Yourself!: Dale Carnegie once said “you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” This applies to sales too. Another huge mistake too many sales people make is selling too much and not listening enough. Sales people often fall in love with what they sell and think it’s the greatest thing ever. They seem to think all they have to do is tell the prospect about it and the prospect will just see the light immediately and inevitably fall in love with it too. They forget the prospect doesn’t really care at all about what you’re offering and probably has absolutely no emotional attachment to it whatsoever initially.

So your task is to find out what the prospect wants, and, as I wrote above, the best way of doing that is asking questions. This keeps the conversation rolling and tells the prospect “This real estate professional is genuinely interested in helping me find the home I want.” People love to be understood, and when you understand your prospects, not only will you know what to offer them, you’ll have gone a long way toward gaining their trust and winning the sale.

No Spelling or Grammar Mistakes!: all too often I see emails with spelling and grammar mistakes. It looks very bad. Your prospect will think you’re sloppy, unprofessional and maybe even incompetent if you can’t take a few seconds and ensure your spelling and grammar are correct. So always double (even triple) check what you’ve written before sending it. On the phone you can get away with “umm” and “ahhh” and “uhhh”, but not in email.

Don’t Allow For Misinterpretation: Always remember email is an impersonal way of communicating. It’s much more difficult to convey emotion through email than through speech. It’s easy to come off as cold and uncaring if you send very brief replies via your Blackberry. So before sending a reply, re-read it and make sure it can’t be misinterpreted.

I teach a lot more about email communication and generating email inquiries in my RECO approved course The Awesome Power of Email.