Even if you have your website optimized in search engines for your farm areas, you still must make your website and what you can offer buyers compelling enough so they’ll want to keep in contact with you and sign up for your email mailing list. If they don’t sign up, these people are simply cars zooming by on the information super highway. You’ll probably never see them again! So getting them to sign up for your mailing list is critical. It gives you the chance to begin building a relationship with them. Saved property searches offer a great way of getting a lot more sign ups for your mailing list.
Saved Searches
The more your prospects can customize their information requests and receive updates on what they want listing wise and when they want it, the more likely they’ll sign up for your mailing list. eBay is exemplary in this way and it’s probably one of the main reasons they’re the world’s largest e-commerce website. They have a fantastic way of motivating their clients to sign up for email updates: Saved Searches.
Built into eBay’s search functionality is their Saved Search function. When you do a basic or advanced search in eBay, you have the option of adding that search and all your specific search criteria to your own custom list of Saved Searches. You’ll then receive updates on matches to your searches via email on an ongoing basis. You can have upto 75 saved searches at once and you can even specify how long you’ll receive updates for: 7 days, 14 days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.
As soon as an auction is listed matching your search criteria, you’ll get an email from eBay on the same day notifying you of it. You can then use the Watch feature and eBay will notify you via email when the auction is about to end. When one of your Saved Searches is about to expire, eBay notifies you via email of this, giving you the option to renew the search with a single click. Saved searches have helped me find very rare items on eBay I couldn’t find locally, and often at ridiculously low prices.
Saved searches can be extremely valuable for building your mailing list. In a buyer’s market like today’s, many buyers would be interested in being notified via email on homes soon to expire on MLS with the hope of negotiating a lower price. Many buyers also want to know about new homes for sale in an area the same day they’re listed so they can find great deals and make an offer and get it accepted before anyone else can. So having Saved Search type functionality on your website can give your prospects an exceptional level of service while taking the burden off you to administrate these info updates.
