I really love the holiday season. I always have. When I was a kid (my wife might argue that I've yet to pass beyond that stage of development) the season was full of excitement. The snow starts falling, lots of interesting things are going on, you're getting together with family, you're getting time off school, and let's not forget about presents. As an adult, my priorities have changed, but the excitement is still there. That's not to say I don't still enjoy many of those elements of the holidays that I enjoyed as a kid, but the thing I'm most excited about now is that the business side of things slows down enough that I can get in that "catch-up time" that I've been in desperate need of since about May. I've been saying "that's on my list for when I have time" to projects for months and now I can finally mark some of those things off. If you're a real estate sales associate and you're anything like me, getting your CRM automations working for you probably made that list. The time has finally come.  

Automations are a truly amazing thing. When it comes to a CRM and email marketing platform, automation can drastically cut down the time you spend prospecting and nurturing relationships with your clients. The system can send out a wide variety of emails and text messages, ranging from those informing potential buyers of new listings or market statistics to informational messages with suggestions for how to best paint your house. They can touch base with customers when they visit your website or look at the same property more than once. They can even notify you of the best customers to reach out to and when to do it. This is all without any interaction from you beyond the initial setup. Running a real estate business without automating these things is not just doing things the hard way, but also handicapping yourself. After all, there are only so many people you can personally reach out to in a day.  

Most automations require at least some kind of configuration to get started. Some are as simple as flipping a switch to turn them on, while others take a little effort to make sure they're doing what you need them to. Below, I'll run through some suggestions to make the most out of your "catch-up time" this year by setting up some automations that will continue to work for you as long as you need them to.  

Before getting into any specific automations, it's worth talking a little about organizing your client database. Some automated communications with customers are done on an individual basis based on that customer's activity. How you've organized your database doesn't really factor in on those communications. However, many automations are designed to send communications to customers en masse. As we know that marketing materials are the most effective when they're sent to a subset of customers that are likely to be interested in them, a properly-organized customer database is very important. 

There are a variety of ways to go about this, and what's right for you depends on your business and even your key markets. Keep in mind that, in DeltaNET a customer can be in more than one group at once. Therefore, categorizing them in one way doesn't mean that they can't also be categorized in other ways depending on what makes sense.  

A good starting point is to organize your customers by relationship. The idea is that you'll want to communicate with buyer leads differently than seller leads, and past clients differently than current clients. If you group your customers accordingly, you can then target them based on those parameters when building out drip marketing campaigns or sending ecards or email blasts. You can then narrow those lists down further by also grouping your buyer leads and current buyer clients based on their areas of interest. For example, everyone with young children can go into a group that you can then target with emails containing information about choosing the right school district. Getting your customers organized into groups in this way takes some time initially, but getting it right and sending people the information they want increases their engagement with you and benefits your relationship with them so much that it's worth the time. Just make sure to start small. Group up your current clients and past clients first and go from there. Nothing turns you off to a big project more than trying to bite off too much at once.  

With your customer database organized into useful groups, you can get more mileage from any drip marketing campaigns and mass communications you send out by building out campaigns specific to your groups and then targeting only those groups when sending. However, even without an organized database, you can set several automations up in ways that will get them working for you in meaningful ways.  

Email campaigns can also be set to target customers that came into your database in different ways. For example, you can create a campaign for customers that came to you by making a request through Zillow, targeting all customers with a request source of Zillow ZTC (Zillow Tech Connect). You can also send special communications to customers that originally signed up for an account on your website and send different messages to those that signed up via the company website and were then assigned to you. If you have customers being added to your account via any other third-party integration, you can target them specifically with custom-built email campaigns as well. Even if those campaigns essentially convey the same information, just referencing how those customers came to you adds a personal touch that will help them engage. Campaigns can even target customers by their pipeline phase. This allows you to do something like set up a campaign to send an email requesting a testimonial to customers when you close a transaction with them. Once that's been configured, you just need to add a transaction to that customer and set its phase to 'closed' for the system to pick up that they've closed a transaction and email them accordingly.   

Tools like Social Connector, Behavioral Automations, Automated Market Watch Reports, and Automated Seller Reports don't rely on an organized customer database at all. Social Connector can be configured by just going into that system and signing into your business social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Once that's been set up, the system can automatically post your new listings, upcoming open houses, sold listings, and a variety of other things to the social account you choose. Behavioral Automations will send notifications to customers automatically based on their activity on your website. You only need to turn it on for the types of activities that you would like to trigger it. Automated Market Watches will create a market watch report for any customer that requests information on a property through your website. Automated Seller Reports will start sending you weekly website traffic reports for all of your listings both as a source of that traffic information and as a reminder to go in and set one up to send to your seller.  

The MCFL system is another one that doesn't require much customer organization, if any at all. MCFL (My Customer for Life) is a drip email marketing system that sends content, created by Delta Media Group®, that is of value to buyers, sellers, and property owners alike. As a recipient shows interest in the articles sent from MCFL by clicking on them, the system tracks what they're interested in to send them more relevant articles in the future. That allows you to send this email to everyone, regardless of their interests or level of engagement, and let the system tailor the emails directly for them.  

All in all, we tend to have more free time as the holidays approach and we enter the "slow" season. Why not spend that time configuring things that will then continue to work for you automatically, saving you time when things start to pick up again? Even if you don't have enough of that free time to completely organize your customer database (it's absolutely worth it if you do), numerous automations require little more than to be switched on. Using the slow season to get those running will pay dividends all year long.