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24
Put It On Automatic
You're working too hard. But then, I don't have to tell you that, do I? What you might appreciate me telling you is that you don't have to.
Automation is taking over the world. You can use smart home products to turn on your coffee maker in the morning and turn on your bedroom lights when your alarm goes off. You can use your phone to wait on hold for you and have it ring when the other party picks up. Complaining about your phone bill has never been easier. So why not use that technology to help you maintain relationships with your customers too? Of course, there will always be the need for your personal touch here and there, but when it comes to informing your customers of new listings when they come on the market, keeping them up to date on market stats, and just generally staying in touch with relevant information and articles, save yourself the time and let the machine do it for you.
If you're just diving into the world of automating some of your marketing and customer communications, there are several features I can suggest that make it easy to get started. First, go turn on the Market Watch Report automation. It basically amounts to flipping a switch. Once activated, every customer that asks for information or a showing on your website will automatically have a Market Watch Report created based on the listing they made the request on. The system will then send them an email once a month with data related to that market.
E-card automations are equally simple. You can turn them on independently for new listings, open houses, and listings that have just sold. When you list a new property, schedule an open house, or sell a property, respectively, an e-card will be sent to whatever group of customers you choose. That means you can focus on that actual property listing while the system handles telling your customer database that it's on the market.
In addition to sending e-cards automatically when something happens with one of your listings, you can trigger e-cards on holidays or even customer-specific dates as well. We all love getting birthday and Christmas cards, but not everybody loves sending them. Even if you do, time is our most precious commodity, so free up as much as you can by having the DeltaNET® remember those dates and send them for you. The DeltaNET will remember, and can work with, some less obvious dates, too, as long as you enter them into your customers' accounts. Purchase anniversary? Sure, that one's easy. How about a wedding anniversary? It can handle that. Pet birthday? Now that's the fun one. You can bet that I'm going to remember the name of any real estate agent that sends me an e-card on my dog's birthday. I don't even know what day that is, so I'm impressed if you do (actually, you could probably just make up a date, and I'd believe you). Just being the name that pops into a person's head when they think about real estate is most of the battle, after all.
Another easy one is social posting automation. You can now have the DeltaNET automatically post your new listings, blog articles, customer reviews, market watches, recently sold listings, and about a half dozen other things to your social media accounts on your behalf. We're not just talking about Facebook, either. It can now post to LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter too. It's not always easy to maintain a social media presence, so the more of your posting that happens automatically, the better.
Some of the less obvious but equally easy to set up automations are the Behavioral Alerts. When activated, these will send an email or SMS message to your customers when they perform certain actions on your website. For example, if they visit your website for the first time in a couple of weeks, it can welcome them back. If they view enough properties on your website in a day, it can ask them if they need help. If they view the same property more than once, it can ask them if they'd like to get a showing scheduled.
The My Customer For Life system is another one that essentially just needs to be turned on with very little additional configuration. Just switch it on, set it to work on all new and existing customers, and let it run. It will send emails to your customers as frequently as weekly, though it can be configured to go out much less often, and the best part is that you don't even have to write the content for the articles it sends. We take care of all of that. It's even smart enough to keep track of which articles your customers click on when they get the email so that it can send them more similar articles each time it emails them. The result over time is that every customer receiving messages from your MCFL system gets a message that is uniquely catered to them. Simply getting your name in front of them is beneficial, but then associating your name with content they're really interested in, that isn't purely informational, like a saved search email, is that much more powerful when it comes to customer retention.
Those are just the automations that can be turned on with little to no actual configuration. They only scratch the surface of the automation tools available. You can also save searches for your customers (or they can save them on your website themselves) so that they're automatically notified when new listings they might like come on the market. It takes a little configuration to define precisely what your customer is looking for, but what's a prospective buyer more likely to respond to than an email telling them their dream house just came on the market?
Campaigns are another powerful tool to stay in touch, not only through email but via text message as well. Our prebuilt campaigns are often all you need, but if you want to go down the road of creating custom campaigns, you can really tailor the messaging in a way that speaks to customers based on how they came to know you or what they're looking for. You can segment customers into groups based on the general area they're interested in buying in, then add them to a campaign populated with messaging specific to that area. You can have a campaign pick up on the fact that the customer came into your database from a request they made on Zillow (it's a dirty word, I know, I'm sorry) and send them messages that are sensitive to that fact. You can even have a campaign that automatically sends only to customers that were added to your database because they signed on using Open House Connector at an open house you were hosting. It's not quite the same as a personal message sent directly to a prospect, but it's pretty close and, once you complete the initial configuration, you don't have to spend any time on it.
If you haven't gathered it yet, we're all about automation around here. The most important thing you can do in the name of customer retention is to make sure those you've worked with in the past don't forget about you. Sometimes, however, that can occasionally create a bit of a roadblock for growth. If you spend all your time trying to stay in touch with past clients, when will you prospect new ones? When will you pick up new listings, let alone market those listing and get them sold so that the current clients remain happy clients? The answer is automation. Not just form letters either, but real, intelligent automation. Form letters drive people to the 'unsubscribe' button. Automations that provide valuable, relevant, and even just interesting information drive people to become repeat customers.
