(Photo Source: Realtor.org)

Many of us are intently focused on building our prospect databases and implementing effective consumer marketing programs to sell our homes, and rightly so. But we must not overlook another import customer, the outside real estate agent. Studies show that between 63 and 90 percent of new homes sales involve an outside agent. In my own experience as a new home marketing manager, I’ve seen REALTORS® bring as much as 85% of the business. They certainly deserve our attention.

The major difference between marketing to consumers and real estate agents is that with agents, you are not only selling a lifestyle, you are also paying their bills. Agents want to do business with someone they trust and can rely on to be fair. It’s important to establish a strong rapport with the top agents in your area if you want them to be your champions and keep bringing buyers.

Here are some tips to staying top-of-mind with REALTORS®:

• Establish and grow your REALTOR® database. Use your home builder CRM tools to segment your lists, keeping REALTORS® separate from prospects with a different Sales Rating. You can even group them according to who has brought repeat buyers, who specializes in relocation, who is a neighborhood expert, etc.

• Implement a separate email marketing campaign. Email REALTORS® regularly, keeping them abreast of the latest releases, pricing, availability, successes and bonuses or commissions. (For tips on how to create an awesome marketing email, download Lasso’s latest white paper.)

• Connect on social media. REALTORS® use Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Pinterest and other social channels to network, gain referrals and market their services. Find them, follow them, occasionally like a status or post a comment, and share meaningful information in order to make a connection. (Be careful not to over-sell. People connect on social networks to be social, not to be sold to.)

• Develop personal relationships. Reach out to the agents you know with a personal email, letting them know news and updates, and asking them to keep you in mind when they have a buyer. Keep notes in your CRM system, just as you would for a prospect, to remember birthdays, favorite sports teams, and other preferences.

• Foster a sense of exclusivity. Since REALTORS® can bring up to 90 percent of your business, show them the red carpet! Hold special preview events or regular luncheons just for the brokerage community. This will generate a buzz among them that will spread to their buyers.

• Say “Thank You.” Once a deal has closed, thank them for their business with a phone call, email, personal note, or thank you gift. Your actions will stand out and reinforce your appreciation, encouraging them to bring more buyers.

Cut Through the Clutter, the newly-published whitepaper from Lasso CRM, guides readers step-by-step through the process for planning, creating, and analyzing a successful marketing email in the new home sales industry.

This document demonstrates the value in planning your email campaign just as you would any major marketing initiative, and shares very specific pointers for creating emails that get opened and read.

Learn about HTML programming, concept and content, and designing for mobility. Understand what to look for in reporting metrics to achieve even greater engagement, and how your home builder CRM is key to your email marketing success.

To get started, download the whitepaper here.

In this age of media overload, it’s more important than ever to create meaningful marketing pieces that are able to cut through the clutter, particularly with email marketing. The average corporate user sends and receives 112 emails a day, and in the real estate industry, roughly 80 percent of emails are never opened. Of those opened, about 35 percent are not even read. The challenges are apparent; the goal is to create email that gets opened AND read. Along with appealing design and thoughtful content, personalization is a great way to encourage prospects to engage with your email content.

Here are 10 ways home builders can personalize communication to prospective buyers.

1.     Segment Your Lists – By segmenting your database, you are able to send groups of people information that is most relevant to them. Studies have shown that marketers who segment their lists experience higher open rates. For example: Prospects with pets would be interested in features of the nearby dog park.

2.     Create Buyer Personas – By creating 2-3 personas of members of your target audience, you are able to craft marketing messages that are specifically in line with their interests. For example, information for an investor may be presented in a different way than information for a couple seeking to downsize.

3.     Ask the Right Questions on Your Web Forms – And in your sales presentations. Make sure the answers are populating to your CRM system and use that information to match email content to the prospect.

4.     Use Merge Fields – This may be the simplest way to personalize a marketing email. Start off your emails with “Dear Allison” rather than no salutation at all.

5.     Send from a Person, Not a Company – Pay careful attention to which name is in the “From” field. Consumers are more likely to open an email from someone they recognize – like a sales agent or manager they’ve worked with.

6.     Include Personal Information – Use the fields provided in your CRM system to segment lists by last visit date, then begin a follow-up email with, “Thanks for visiting the sales center last week.” The same applies for event attendees: “Thanks for attending our grand opening last week!” This is a memory trigger for the prospect and gets him or her thinking about your community.

7.     Communicate between Departments – Be sure your marketing team communicates to the sales team all marketing pieces that are going out. If a prospect calls a sales agent and references a recent email, the sales agent should not be caught off guard! (With email marketing, simply add the sales team to your list.)

8.     Resend Email – Closely monitor the open rates through your CRM system and resend an email to those who did not open it. Perhaps change the subject to give the email a different tone.

9.     Don’t Forget to Write – Nothing screams “personal” like a hand-written note that someone has taken the time to write, stamp and mail. It may be “old school” but people really do appreciate it.

10.    Engage and Interact – This one applies to social media. Don’t be afraid to interact! If someone posts a comment on your community’s Facebook page, engage with them, even if it’s as simple as a “Like.” Show that human beings are behind your social media efforts and you’re not just posting statuses because marketing experts say you should. This is your opportunity to foster a sense of community, albeit online.

Take a moment and think about the types of emails and marketing pieces you respond best to. It’s usually something that strikes a cord with you, or connects with your interests. It seems genuine and true. That is the goal when creating your own marketing content. Personalization may take a bit more time, but it pays off (literally!) in the long run.

As we learned last month in The 2012 Online Lead Follow-Up Survey, there is a huge opportunity for home builders to stand apart from the crowd when it comes to online lead follow-up. Of 200 new home communities surveyed in 2012, 30 percent did not respond even once to an online inquiry. It’s a shocking statistic, given that with a proper follow-up program in place, 20-25 percent of all online leads can be converted to appointments.

So what’s the secret formula? Together with Mike Lyon of DoYouConvert.com, we have identified five core elements that will help you convert more online leads to appointments.

1. Speed - The best time to contact a lead once they’ve registered on your site is as soon as possible.

1. The Follow-Up Process - A defined follow-up process is core to achieving more conversions to onsite appointments.

1. Persistence - Those sales professionals who are patient, meticulous and never give up are the successful ones.

1. The Online Sales Counselor - An OSC is perhaps the single most important marketing investment to achieve your online marketing strategy.

1. Customer Relationship Management - The right CRM system will capture online leads directly from your website or online lead directories, and takes the scheduling and guesswork out of follow-up and communication.

To find out more about these five core elements and the follow-up statistics mentioned above, download The 2012 Online Lead Follow-Up Survey here. Also, be sure to join Lasso and Mike Lyon on February 26, 2013 for the webinar – “Follow Up. Stand Out. Sell More Homes in 2013″ – when Mike will discuss how to create an online follow-up program that works. Register for the webinar here.

We all know that social media is a powerful tool.  Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin can all amplify your message

and create awareness of your new home communities and projects far beyond your circle of fans and followers.  Many websites and blogs are built with the ability to using social media tools to share information – for example, if you like a blog post, you can tweet it or like it or post it on your wall.

The following is a way that you can incorporate a request to “tweet” right in your email.  Let’s use the example where you want to send a thank you email to everyone who attended a Realtor event.  Include in that email a request to Tweet about the project.  But instead of just asking them to follow you, or asking them to tweet about you, you make it easy for them: you write the tweet, and include the link directly to twitter.

Here’s a Lasso example where we included the “tweet this” for an upcoming webinar featuring Meredith Oliver.  On the webpage and in the email, we have a “Tweet This Webinar” link: Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I was creating an email for a mass mail.  After testing the template and doing some final tweaking it was ready to go; but I wasn’t ready to send it.   I wanted it to be sent as two mailings over the following two days.  I could have set a reminder for myself to send it manually but instead I used the campaign feature in Lasso.  I created a campaign, added the template, selected the recipient group and clicked save.  I was done; I was able to move onto the next task at hand and didn’t have to think about the email again.  Two days later, when the mailings were complete, I was able to review the mass mail report to see the stats of that campaign.  This was simple to do and saved some time. Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody likes a failure but it’s amazing how many don’t get cleaned up!

I’m referring to email failures. When a mass mail is sent Lasso attempts to send to all the email addresses in the list or group. Some of these email addresses fail . . . it’s inevitable. But the key is to minimize these failures. After you send out a mass email through Lasso, the Mass Mail Details report will show all the email failures. I encourage you to review this list and take action! Not only will cleaning up your database help with deliver-ability, it could help you re-engage with prospects. By reducing some of these failures, your mass mail reporting statistics will be more meaningful as you go forward.

Below is a list of example failure notifications and their explanations. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been said that an email recipient will first look at the sender to determine whether an email gets deleted and then look at the subject line to determine whether it gets opened.

Using a familiar from name when sending an email is your first step to success and your carefully crafted subject line is next in line for importance. The following are a few tips: Read the rest of this entry »

Designing emails that look great regardless of the viewing mechanism is a challenge these days – many people are

reading email on mobile devices as well as their desktop. How do you design for different devices and screen sizes?

Here are a few tips to improve the readability of your email:

• Stick to the “Keep it Simple” rule – the design of your email as well as the message should be kept simple. Try to avoid too much clutter and stick to a single column design as it’s easier to read. Read the rest of this entry »

Hotmail is one of the largest (if not the largest) email providers in the world. Windows Live Hotmail has over 355 million active email users. It’s no wonder they are continuously looking at ways to reduce spam and help their users reduce unwanted email.

Here are a couple of interesting facts from Hotmail:

1. Microsoft gets about 8 billion messages every day, delivering about 2.5 billion messages into the inboxes of customers. That means they are filtering out about 5.5 billion messages.
2. Of the 2.5 billion messages that get delivered, they know that about 110 million messages are spam. So roughly 5% of delivered mail is spam. They want to improve these numbers!

It’s no wonder it has become harder and harder to reach the inbox. Read the rest of this entry »