Jeff Helvin, COO of Ballen Brands here. Today, I actually want to talk to you a little bit more about a how come video I’m doing. This is a how come video instead of a how-to video about how to use real estate campaigns for Infusionsoft to connect with your database and manage your leads.
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Real Estate Agent Lead Management
I’ve talked to a lot of agents about some of their challenges and some of the struggles they experience. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of people that have learned how to hone in on the lead generation side of what they’re doing. What happens next is we’re able to generate a lot of names and numbers, a lot of leads, but then it starts to get a little difficult to actually manage, maintain, and stick with these new contacts, these new leads that we generate. So, I wanted to explain a little bit about what we’ve done in our system and what we’ve built.
We use Infusionsoft, and we’ve built campaigns that we do offer for other agents. We built campaigns that help us interact with the database. Some of the key components here really are identifying who the actual leads are and how we should be speaking with them. So, we’ve developed a series of campaigns, not all of these are available for market, but I will address the ones that are to help you understand how we utilize our campaigns and how we interact with our database. I’m really just going to run through some of the list here, going from the bottom up.
Using Turbo Dial in a Campaign
Our first campaign is Ballen’s Turbo Dial API functions. We do utilize Turbo Dial. We think that it’s a great product. If you want more information on that, please visit loristools.com and see the different tools that we use there. We use Turbo Dial to do the texting component and calls. The texting component is key to our interacting with the database because we tend to get a lot more response via text message. Turbo Dial works within a lot of these different campaigns, and we just utilize it as a programming function as part of our campaign structure.
Buyer & Seller Arrival Campaign
We have a Buyer Arrival campaign and a Seller Arrival campaign. The arrival campaigns, we call them the Autopilot ISA because they’re intended to help assist. These campaigns basically chase after your leads. Now, what these are really intended for would be more like cold web leads from Zillow or realtor.com. It’s not meant for an open house lead or someone that you may have actually already spoken to.
The whole purpose of this Arrival Campaign is for two way contact. The goal here is just to establish if the name and email address we’ve been given is real and valid. This campaign’s focus is to get the lead to respond. This is a 90-day campaign that has a series of questions. The first 10 days it’s very aggressive. After that, it’s once a week, different days of the week, different times of the day, with the intent to try to get someone to respond.
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Once someone responds, there’s usually a few different results. They may say it’s the wrong number, they are not interested, or they already have an agent. We’re going to mark them as a dead lead and move on. They may say, “Oh, you know, I’m interested in this particular property. I’d like to go see it this weekend.” In that case, you’re not going to put them necessarily on another campaign right now because that’s automation and they’re ready to go. You’ve qualified them, we don’t want to automate anything with them. We want to handle that manually, make sure we’re going to take them to the closing table.
How Campaigns Help Nurture Leads
They might say, “Yes, we’re interested, but we are out aways.” We see that a lot, especially with web leads that are just starting their search. They might be eight months out, sometimes 15 months out. We’ve closed deals over two years out from when we first generated that lead. What’s important with this is that we have a way to keep in touch with them. This is where as real estate agents, we start to fall off. So, we have what we call the Survival Campaign. The purpose around that Survival Campaign is just to keep in contact. So, whether you talked to them last week or whether you haven’t talked to them for three weeks, this Survival Campaign is going to fire about every three weeks. We have it set up for sometimes 17 days, sometimes 21 or 23 days. We’re altering the days of the week and the times of the day.
Based on how they responded in Arrival is how we’re going to communicate with them in Survival. Arrival is going to send out emails and text messages. You can add phone calls or even voice drops as an option. If they respond via text, then they’re going to be on a Survival Text Campaign. If they responded via email, they’re going to be on survival email campaign. The system records and detects that automatically for us. Now, let’s say they’ve been on the Survival Campaign and it’s been 12 months, we look at their record when notified that the campaign is finished. It’s time to assess this contact.
Campaigns Ask Questions to Get Responses
Now, if they haven’t responded in the last three touches, that’s more than nine weeks, we have what we call the Revival Campaign. That campaign is designed to be aggressive. It’s gonna message them once a day for the next week. It will ask them questions like:
- Have you chosen someone else?
- Have you decided not to move?
The point is to not have a quiet lead in our real estate world. A quiet lead is worse than a dead lead. We’d rather them just tell us they’re not moving forward and not have us waste our resources than to just stay quiet. So, the point of these questions is to get them to respond.
Using the Sales Pipeline in Infusionsoft
This is the New Lead, a new contact in the system. They go through this autopilot series, and once someone raises their hand to the degree where they’re ready to actually be qualified, we’re establishing a rapport with them. We’re going to manually reach out to them, we use a sales pipeline and Infusionsoft does offer opportunity stages as an upgrade. We use the sales pipeline to keep track of our leads in different categories. We use ABCD Buyers, for example. We qualify people by stage. They are either A Stage, B Stage, C Stage, or D Stage. Based on that stage is how often we’re going to reach out to them.
If we have an A Buyer, we consider them ready, willing and able. It’s really just a matter of getting them the right property. There are no other hindrances. They’ve been pre-approved; they’re ready to move and need to find the right property. The A Buyer needs to be touched at least once a week, more likely you’re probably talking to them multiple times a week, but if you haven’t, the system is designed to remind you once a week to connect with this person. With the B Buyer, our strategy is to reach out every couple of weeks. The B Buyer may be ready and willing but not able. Or they’re ready and able but not willing. There are two of the three as is how we qualify that. The C Buyers is set for every 30 days, and D Buyers are further than that.
Infusionsoft Campaigns Help Manage Your Database
On the seller side, we have Short-Term Nurture and Long-Term Nurture. When a seller’s property goes under contract, we have a stage of nurture for that. We’ve designed these stages to keep our database and our pipeline in order, in order to make sure that we’re not dropping people. We’re not forgetting to follow up with somebody, we’re not missing someone that’s important because of time constraints.
The system helps hold us accountable to who we should be talking to at different times. We need to stay more in touch with the leads that we’re generating. I hear too often, “Oh, I generated 200 leads this weekend,” or “You know, I had a great open house and had 40 people through.” What it comes down to is there are two or three people that might be actually reactionary to you and interacting with you. The other 37 people basically get written off. Maybe they get put on a drip email or some sort of market update, but at the end of the day, if you’re not pursuing them, they’re not categorized anywhere.
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So, we need something more like these campaigns. If you’ve already had two-way contact and open house contact, you can put them right into Survival and then they can be pursued every few weeks after you’ve had the open house. We create another open house campaign if you want to talk to them more specifically. But the point is that we need to have more direct communication and seem more authentic in our approach when we’re reaching out.
Sphere of Influence Campaigns
We have a Sphere of Influence campaign that we developed. Six weeks from when they go on Sphere of Influence you get a task on your list to call them and actually have a conversation. Six weeks after that, a text message is going out. Six weeks after that an email. Six weeks after that, a call, a text and an email — call, text and email. Now, this just runs on an indefinite loop. It just continues to go because if they’re part of your sphere, then we’re going to keep in touch with them. The point of this is not to try to get them to do a transaction. The messages here are not focused on buying questions. These are not for leads. The Sphere of Influence campaign is designed for the people that we’re trying to communicate with on a regular basis.
I have clients that put in here automatically and in the text message that goes out, “Hey, I was just thinking about you. I would love to do coffee. Let me know when.” You could have 300 people on that same campaign and just have that rolling through. Maybe throughout the course of the year, you have 300 cups of coffee. That’s not a bad thing at all! This is designed to reach out, to pursue, and be a little more authentic.
Reaching Out to Past Clients
We have a Past Client campaign. It’s a short, 30-day campaign. It’s meant to be a little more customized. The point of this campaign is actually to interact and engage with your past clients in case you’re not already doing so. Some agents have their closing process down on lock. They’ve got 30 days and 60 days plans. They’re following up, calling, and sending things. Unfortunately, we often close a deal and move on to the next closing. Maybe we don’t give the proper attention to our past clients. We take for granted the fact that we say, “Oh, just call us anytime if you need help.” Then we find out six weeks later that they struggled to get utilities on or needed a resource for landscaping. We didn’t reach out, and we weren’t able to be there to help with that process. This Past Client campaign is a few touches before it automatically puts them onto the Sphere of Influence campaign.
Additional Infusionsoft Campaigns
We have an Internal Forms campaign that we automatically install for you, as well. This is for contract details, and it can include escrow details. These are meant to help control and make the system Infusionsoft easier to utilize so that you don’t have to try to navigate around 17 different spots. You’re able to go to one spot, fill out the required information, and move forward from there. We created additional campaigns that are personal ways of touching the database.
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We have a Birthday Campaign, Holiday Campaign, and Anniversary Campaign. Anniversary could be for a home anniversary or it could be for spouse anniversary. We could duplicate it to use for both. Once a year you send a birthday notification, “Happy Birthday,” but what we’ve done here is we’ve added a couple of components that make it a lot more strategic in our approach and the purpose. We have the ability to hook this up to a third party printing company like Zendirect or send out cards. We could send physical cards as well. We can send physical birthday cards to some people and only electronic birthday cards to others, it’s all based on how we manage our data in our database.
What we have is meant to seem personal and to reach out. I say seem personal. This is automation, but at the same time, the point of this is to actually put some thought into it and to make sure that there are care and concern. For our birthday campaign, we may say, “Each day, we should recognize somebody important in our lives. Today, that person is you. Happy Birthday. Thinking about you.” Even though this was automated, the fact that we took the time to put them on the campaign, that we have invested in doing this shows that we do care. This isn’t just a sales strategy, We like to get the email back that says, “Oh, thank you so much.”
Real Estate Market Update Campaign
Another one that we do as a Market Update campaign. The idea here is that we’re publishing a market report or a market update on our real estate agent website. This is not meant to be a separate campaign for every individual person and their particular zip code. There are services that do that as well. In this particular case, we are saying, “Hey, I was just thinking about you and here’s the latest information on the market.” This is a great way to connect with buyers and sellers who are watching market trends. Every 29 days they get an email that gives them a link to your website.
The purpose of these emails isn’t to produce a fancy flyer with all kinds of imagery or so forth. We don’t want it to look canned. We want it to look like we personally just typed out a message. So, if you were to look at these, you would see that they’re actually a quick messages and say, “Hey, I was just thinking about you. Here’s a link to the latest market information. Let me know what I can answer for you.” We also have a Review and a Scoring campaign in the works that is based on interaction with IDX Broker.
Have Questions? Contact Ballen Brands!
I wanted to share a little bit about how we go after our database. This isn’t about clever verbiage or tricky top of mind drip emails. What this is about is having a combination of these to pursue your leads and to keep in touch with your database. That’s what’s so critical here. If you have any questions, we would love to answer those for you. You can always reach out to us at team@ballenbrands.com. Or give us a call at 702-917-0755. We look forward to working with you.
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