The real estate sales being high ticket is perceived to be far from being easy and foreseeable. There are many factors affecting the client onboarding process, the time to conversion and getting ROI.
This makes it essential for realtors to build cost effective customer acquisition strategies which help you get ROI faster than traditional methods.
Irrespective of the size of your operations, there are many ways you can create an effective way of acquiring clients.
Generally it is seen that the real estate products being big ticket are responsible for lower conversion rates compared to other categories. Our another post speaks about the effective tips for real estate lead generation.
Categorically speaking, it’s not wise to compare real estate sales with most of the retail product sales.
Considering the time, energy and cost involved in customer acquisition, realtors cannot afford to have an ineffective client acquisition strategy in place.
Below are some ways for building a robust plan:
Know Your Clients
The first and foremost thing to master is knowing your clients well. Your target market defines how well you can sell. Think about your ideal customers, their demographics, income range, marital status, preferences etc.
When you’re confident about investing your time & efforts into targeting the right customers, you can be sure of generating ROI through your sales
efforts. A poor targeting is essentially nothing worse than a shot in the dark.
Know where they Exist
Just as you define your target clients, it’s important to know whether they exist online or offline. You can only know the right marketing channels if you know where your clients spend most of their time.
Do your target clients visit shopping malls on weekends? Do they browse Facebook atleast 3 times a day? Have they joined any investment communities near their vicinity?
Are they subscribed to any specific email newsletter? Think about all of this and more to find your customers and you’ll be able to reach them well.
Define your Customer Acquisition Cost
Most realtors and brokerages end up spending more than their planned budgets on customer acquisition. Why?
Because they either are unaware of how much they are spending or what methods they can use to reduce their expenditure
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the amount that you spend on onboarding a new customer. The simple rule of thumb to calculate CAC is that you can divide your total expenses on sales and marketing by the number of clients you onboard by spending that much.
It is hard to get the actual numbers until you spend but when you go past your client acquisition, you can gauge the costs better.
Knowing the CAC, it’s easy to make proper estimate of the amount you need for attracting new clients. Optimal use of funds ensures successful execution of your plans.
Build Your Brand
Real estate markets worldwide are very competitive. Owing to the rewarding journey a hardworking realtor is often entitled to, there are thousands of new entrants into the realtor markets. In such tough scenario, a large enough challenge is creating a brand name for yourself. For doing this, one must not just find ways to stand out but also build relation with the clients to ripe the benefits later.
There are CRMs which help you do exactly that. Starting with a smooth lead onboarding to prospecting via templatized drip emails, auto follow ups and deal closures, Agent360 CRM helps you build relationships not just business.
As a real estate agent, if you cater to your client’s needs and foster great relationships with them, you may attract new buyers via word-of-mouth marketing.
This helps you build good reputation and brand name in your locality. So you should look at brand building as an investment into the future business.
Bottomline
As a realtor, your success is dependent on your efficiency of customer acquisition (and conversion).
If you are able to build your clientele in the early days while instilling confidence in them through your service, you can expect to retain them for future too. This will undoubtedly help put you on a much accelerated path to success in real estate sales.