Brokers use a variety of tools to connect to the consumer. They have a CRM from the agent, they have Buyside, they have transaction management like DocuSign, they get emails from drip marketing tools like Imprev, and on, and on, and on.
Imagine the experience for the consumer; you buy or sell a home, and you get bombarded every month with pieces of information from each of these broker and agent application. Whereas the real estate company actually values each of these point solutions for the benefits they offer to the business; this viewpoint often neglects to understand the experience of all of them. To the consumer, your email barrage looks like a mosh-posh of information.
These emails come in, and they are appreciated, but there are two problems:
1. The information is not delivered in an organized way.
2. The information is often irrelevant to their interests or needs at any given time.
How to fix it
1. Set yourself up as a customer on all of your software applications. You may want to use a special, separate email address for this purpose. You can share the address with your team so everyone has the experience. You will become a human integrator – determining what has value and what does not. You can add/remove/edit messages. Use this process to refine your message, and make sure that it sounds like your brand.
2. Try to develop machine learning, and put consumers in stages. Customers who are buying, selling, or closing/moving, have different information needs than customers who are living in their home. The information that your firm (and the agent) is sharing with the customer needs to consider the status that they are in.
3. For customers not transacting – use a service like Milestones or MooveGuru to deliver valuable homeownership information. Move them into a smart newsletter service that bundles information together rather than spamming the customer to no avail.
Be careful whenever you reach out to a client – you DO NOT want your efforts to stay connected to result in a negative experience and ultimately being spam blocked. Whenever you are spam blocked, contact the customer and ask them if they would consider a different type of communication once a month or even quarterly.
