How Can I Easily Nurture My Real Estate Leads?

Nurturing your real estate leads can be a complex and challenging task for agents. You’ve spent hard-earned dollars and time in acquiring a lead’s contact information – whether through your high-converting IDX website, an open house, geographic farming, direct mail, or any of the dozens of other methods – and not every lead is ready to complete a real estate transaction right away.

The hard work begins in nurturing those leads because the path forward is full of traps and temptations.

On one hand, there’s the trap of perfectionism – waiting until you find and then craft the ultimate message for your leads. However, sending too few messages or messages that don’t match what your lead is looking for will lose their interest.

On the other hand, there’s the temptation of reaching out too often. Sending more than five emails a month (outside of property alerts) has shown a dramatic spike across our clients’ platforms in unsubscriptions. In a survey of consumers who commonly unsubscribe from emails, 51 percent responded it was because “emails come too often.” Excessive and frequent content can quickly overwhelm your leads and push them to unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam to get some relief.

“Online real estate leads have a lot of information at their fingertips, and it’s possible that multiple agents are calling or reaching out via text or email,” Cayla Priest, Certified CINC Trainer, says. “It’s important to stand out and build a relationship with your leads by staying in touch. People have to know, like and trust you to want to do business with you, and nurturing your lead over their timeframe is the easiest way to build rapport and win their business.”

Real estate lead nurturing and automation done right: AutoTracks

High-performing real estate agents use automation tools like CINC’s AutoTracks, built into our all-in-one lead generation and CRM platform, to nurture and re-engage with leads and past clients.

“Following up can be so hard to schedule on top of everything else a busy agent has to do,” Priest says. “That's why I love AutoTracks - it frees you up to follow up via phone and really build rapport with your active leads, while allowing automation to work in the background, keeping relevant information in front of the leads you're nurturing or to even stay in touch with past clients and your sphere.”

AutoTracks can be sent using three types of touches:

1. Emails to leads and past clients.
2. Texts to leads and past clients.
3. Reminder emails to real estate agents.

AutoTracks allows real estate professionals to send three different types of campaigns:

1. Sequence campaigns. These communications are sent in a row with a set number of days in-between. Because contacts can enter the campaign at any time, AutoTracks allows you to skip holidays and weekends, and send communications only during business hours.
2. Calendar-based campaigns. Schedule emails or texts based on specific dates, like US and Canadian holidays, birthdays, or the anniversary of a home purchase or sale.
3. Checklist-based campaigns. These campaigns help streamline internal processes in the office, like new employee onboarding or the contract to close process.

When new clients join CINC, their platform comes pre-loaded with AutoTrack campaigns to get them started, and their implementation and training team walks them through the process of creating their own AutoTrack campaign.

Segmenting your leads and your message

Over half of email marketers surveyed agreed the best way to personalize lead nurturing is to use segmentation. Using the bevy of information you’ve captured about your leads through the CINC platform and conversations, AutoTracks makes it easy to put the information to work for you to slice your database into segmented lists to nurture.

“If you send the same email campaign to every buyer in your database, you are setting yourself up for negative results,” Priest says. “The information may be good and valuable in your eyes, but if it's generic, it doesn’t apply to your audience because it doesn’t speak to their specific situation. Whether they’re a first-time homebuyer, a current renter, an investor looking for opportunities, or someone relocating to your area, it’s extremely difficult to find unique valuable content that speaks to every buyer’s unique situation.”

Instead of sending generic content to a wide audience, consider creating segmented campaigns through AutoTracks targeting specific types of buyers.

For example, when a lead registers on your CINC website, you can find out if they’re a first-time homebuyer. You can now create an AutoTrack campaign that automatically runs whenever a first-time homebuyer enters your database and provides targeted, focused information on the homebuying process.

Stopping the nurture campaign on the lead’s terms

About 1 out of 4 people who unsubscribe from email lists say the reason they left was because the email felt “spammy or overly promotional” or the content was “no longer valuable.”

The best-performing teams use short-term AutoTrack campaigns – never longer than one year. They focus their energy on creating and maintaining automations relevant and applicable to their lead’s situation during the short period the campaign is active. That focus on relevancy leads to better results.

Even over a short-term campaign, a lead may reach out to you and your team and begin the process of either buying or selling a home. That’s why AutoTracks includes stop triggers to ensure you don’t continue to message those leads after their needs have changed.

For example, imagine you’re running a campaign on a lead to get them to describe their dream home. If Greg responds to your message, regardless of what he says, we don’t want to continue to push out content to him as if we’ve never heard from him.