What do you do after you send a mass mail to your prospective home buyers or Realtors and brokers?
Chances are you put a lot of effort into the design of the email, then you spend time testing the email and then you send it. Right after you send the mass mail, you likely have a look at the quick stats to see how many people opened it, but what do you do next?
Often we see the regular blasting of a registrant list all with similar results over and over (in fact, sometimes with declining open rates). A 20% open rate is not bad, but we think you can probably do better with a few suggestions on what you can do after you send out the mass mail (or before you send out your next email!)
- Read and review the mass mail detail report in Lasso. You’ll see who opened the email, who clicked on a link, who unsubscribed, as well as who didn’t receive the email because of a failure.
- Learn what the delivery failures mean and update your registrants accordingly. If you see that an email address has bounced, pick up the phone and ask the prospect if they are still interested in receiving information. If they are, ask for a new email address. A great opportunity to touch base with potential home buyers!
- Make sure that the “From” email address in your mass mail is a valid address. Often when you send out email, you receive “out-of-office” responses and many times a registrant will reply with a query. It’s important that this email is monitored and someone is responsible for responding.
- Update invalid email addresses. These are the email addresses with a typo, such as “hotmial” instead of “hotmail”.
- Try resending your email. Yes, you heard me correctly. I’m suggesting that you send it out again. But this time, don’t send it to everyone, just send it to those who didn’t open it the first time. You may want to change the subject line to include “Update” or “Reminder” or “Last chance . . .”. We’ve had a number of clients use this approach (albeit, carefully – you don’t want to be sending email so often that you annoy people). They have seen a surprisingly good open rate the second time around.
- Have a follow-up email ready to go out. If you have a link in your first email about one-bedroom units and 75 people click on this link, have a follow-up email ready to go that provides further information and pricing incentives on one-bedroom units!
- Plan some human interaction. We get so caught up in email today; however, it’s important for a human touch. Use the mass mail reporting to follow-up with those registrants who haven’t opened an email in awhile, or maybe even those registrants who have unsubscribed. Some people just aren’t into email. It doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. Don’t ignore them!
Follow these ideas and you will find that your email subscribers are more engaged and your open rates are going in the right direction . . . up!! More appointments, offers and sales will follow.
In Search of Quality Homebuyer Traffic . . . Lasso and NewHomesDirectory.com Announce a Strategic Partnership
We are really excited at Lasso about the opportunity to help our homebuilders and
developers drive more quality traffic to their project websites. Read more about this exciting partnership.
Lasso has been involved in over 1,000 new residential developments around the globe and our clients have repeatedly told us that driving quality traffic has been a major marketing challenge in the past couple of years - even more so with over 80% of homebuyers starting their research on the web.
NewhomesDirectory.com is the perfect marketing alliance for us as they already are a leading internet directory listing service for new home builders in the United States. Our new partnership means Lasso will be able to offer these services exclusively to builders throughout Canada and to our clients in the USA. The benefits for homebuilders are many:
- Newhomesdirectory.com is solely focused on new residential developments;
- The directory is simple and uncluttered with a home buying prospect able to get to a developers website with just a couple of clicks;
- Homebuyer prospects find builder projects via organic rather than expensive paid search, and
- The unique pay per click model is economical and it's really easy to measure results.
The ultimate objective is to help our clients sell more homes! We think we can increase the Lasso value proposition to homebuilders, beyond being a terrific CRM solution for managing the prospect relationship, to also being an avenue for traffic generation, lead behaviour, intelligence and nurturing - really, the full gamut of a builder's online marketing strategy.
New Homes Directory .com will initially include directories in the following Canadian cities:
We like spreading good news - Lasso proudly announces the following new clients:
- Bucci Developments - Vancouver, BC
- Cupecoy Village Real Estate - Porto Cupecoy, St. Martin
- Extell Developments - New York
- KHI - Dubai, UA
- Morningstar Homes - Vancouver, BC
- The Ponds - Kelowna, BC
- Pointe of View - San Diego, CA
- Proment - Montreal, Quebec
- TAKaya Developments Ltd.- North Vancouver, BC
- Reign Developments - Calgary, AB
- Ritz Carlton Denver - Denver, CO
- Tobiano - Kamloops, BC
- Trico Homes - Calgary, AB
- Villa Group - Cabo San Lucas & Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico
This is a great sign that new home projects are being developed. What's changing is the way these projects are being marketed; traditional methods may not cut it - perhaps it's the builder being more involved in the sales process, more emphasis placed on capturing the interest of the web savvy new home buyer, or real estate sales and marketing professionals embracing a whole new set of tools for mastering search engine optimization.
New home builders and real estate marketing and sales professionals are choosing Lasso real estate software. It equips you with the information you need to sell more real estate.
When it's your money on the line, it's a little easier to swallow spending time and money doing research on major personal investments before dropping the actual cash.
Sometimes, it's harder to make that time for business technology purchasing decisions. Maybe the schedule has just fallen out from under you, and you need a technology solution up and running yesterday. Or, more common in today's world, there's a budget crunch going on and your first choice is to go with the cheapest vendor, whether it's a good fit or not.
Ultimately, if there's any way you can make the time to fully research and perform due diligence on your technology vendor, you should do so. Here are a few tips on what to keep an eye on as you make your business decisions.
1. Determine your needs and requirements. Before reaching out to any vendors, spend some time taking a close look at what is motivating your drive to purchase the real estate software in question. Always match the technology to the business requirements - not the reverse. What are the biggest sales and marketing challenges you are facing right now, and what are the biggest opportunities you are passing by? Create a brief one to two-page outline of prioritized list of needs and wants. Such a document will help guide your selection process and keep you from being seduced by the wide variety of technology features and capabilities.
2. Generate buy-in from stakeholders. From the top of your organization down to the front lines, there needs to be a commitment to utilizing technology to support sales and marketing initiatives. Inevitably, there will be push back from those who are perhaps not as technologically savvy as they should be, or those who see a system in place that is "working" already and don't understand the reasons for change. Respond to those arguments intelligently when possible, and ignore them when not possible. Keep the path clear and stay confident in your purpose.
3. Don't be afraid of sounding stupid. That may seem harsh, but it's true - you need to ask "dumb" questions of vendors in order to get every vital detail regarding the money you'll be spending. If you need to, recruit a tech-savvy advocate to help you in vetting vendors and understanding the minute details of their presentation and solutions. View every vendor presentation as a learning experience - even if a vendor comes in with a quote that falls out of your budget, they still may have insights on their products that can help guide your decision-making process.
4. Decide between software as a service offered via the internet or "on premise" software. One of the most popular trends in technology in recent years has been the rise of "Software as a Service," or SaaS. Through this delivery method for software, the software functionality is provided through a high-speed Internet connection. All maintenance, enhancements, upgrades, and customer support is managed by the vendor for a recurring monthly service fee. There is no hardware, networking, storage, or database technology investment required.
The simplicity, the lower financial and technical risk plus the inherent accountability of SaaS vendors can be quite compelling, but your specific needs will dictate whether a SaaS deployment is more cost effective and appropriate than an on-premise installation. Research should be devoted to this area in order to determine the best solution for your corporation.
5. Insist on the best customer service. Your business is building and selling homes. Your provider is in the technology business. Any vendor should understand this and be well equipped to bridge that gap and have a level of expertise about your business. Customer references to validate the vendors implementation approach and support responsiveness should be a given. If not, simply continue the search - you deserve the best value, service, and functionality for your sales & marketing software investment.