Gabrielle Jeans’s Weblog

Keep in mind that the more personal the contact a prospect makes with you, the more they move up in the rating system.  The more personal the contact they have with you, the more chance you have for developing a relationship with them.

A person who is in the very early stages of home selling/buying will exhibit distinctive behavior in how they engage your emails, and it will be different than people who are closer to buying.  Someone in the early stages will probably open or click your links only occasionally because at this stage they’re in research mode.  They may have absolutely no interest in speaking to a real estate professional at this point because they haven’t made their minds up about what they want, and the internet has more than ample resources for allowing them to do that without your help.  These people will probably also not be interested in your webinars yet.

Keep watching the reports on your campaigns, even for campaigns you sent months ago, as they get continually updated. The more you observe your prospects open and click your emails, the more likely it is they’re getting close to wanting to sell their home.  You should start inviting such people to your webinars.  Webinars are a great and inexpensive and go a long way toward developing your relationships with prospects.  I’ve written many articles in my blog on everything you need to know about running webinars for your prospects.

With email, you can often identify prospects who have forwarded your email to others.  In your email campaign reports you’ll sometimes see an usually high number of opens for a single email attributed to a single person (eg. more than 10 opens).  What this usually means is they’ve forwarded this email to people they know.  Every time someone opens that email, the counter will go up by one.  So if your email has 15 opens (and this is not unusual), it’s possible this recipient has forwarded it to 14 other people, each of whom has opened it once!  So you can see why it’s important to send information that appeals to your target audience only.  Even if your recipient doesn’t fit that description, they will sometimes forward the info to a prospect suitable for you.  Don’t be shy about asking these people who forward for referrals to these people they’ve forwarded your email to!

When a person registers for one of your webinars, it’s an excellent sign because a) they’re likely getting closer to moving because they want to get even more information than you’ve already given them and b) by registering for your webinar they’re looking to you for expert advice on the local real estate market.  Getting someone to register for and attend your webinar is almost as good as getting a listing appointment with them!  So don’t be surprised when some of your webinar attendees request listing appointments.

You can learn more about the amazing power of email for developing relationships with prospects and maintaining relationships with existing clients by taking my course The Awesome Power Of Email.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 for 4 continuing education credits.