Thanks to our many new clients for their strong endorsement of Lasso since
we bundled our software into two editions - QuickSTART and Professional - a few months ago. QuickSTART, specifically for marketing & sales of new home developments, has resonated extremely well with builders all across North America - from luxury hotel residences like W Hollywood Residences, to leading multifamily developers like Concert Properties, to active adult community specialists like Paramount Homes.
We are finding that builders, more than ever, have recognized the necessity and are now acting to capture every lead and nurture their home buying prospects -- from initial interest stages through the buying cycle to purchase and occupancy. Our feedback has been particularly strong in four key areas:
 | - Capturing leads. Every one. From multiple sources, whether it is from website, kiosk, landing pages or external directory listings. Then being able to evaluate ROI of which sources deliver best results.
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 | - Nurturing prospects. With extended buying cycles now the norm, the ability to incorporate a scheduled series of marketing tasks and activities for regular communication to build trust with prospects over a period of time.
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 | - Email Marketing. Being integrated, having a template library, campaign manager and real-time reporting of open and click through rates makes it easy for targeted professional campaigns.
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 | - Lead Intelligence & Web analytics. The functionality to learn and understand the online interests of prospective homebuyers, for everything from popularity of floor plans and models, to key words and time spent on the site makes personalized prospect follow up much more effective.
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Just like homebuyers want choice, we think homebuilders should have the flexibility to choose the feature sets they need along with pricing that delivers leading CRM for as low as $200/month a community or the option of unlimited projects and users at a set predictable monthly fee.
Creating templates for email marketing can not only be time-consuming and require some design knowledge but it's also recommended to have an understanding of email marketing best practices to maximize deliverability and open rates.
At Lasso, we're pretty passionate about email marketing and helping our clients achieve success (we've written many posts in the past on email marketing best practices for real estate project marketing).
We recently announced a new enhancement to our integrated email marketing which will help real estate project marketing professionals. Now included with Lasso is an email template library.
This is a library of pre-built templates that gives you a starting point for your email marketing campaigns. Well-built email templates are an important start to creating great email marketing campaigns. A good balance of images and text is important, along with testing to ensure that the emails render properly in Outlook and the major ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail. Lasso has done this for you (although it's still important to test after you've put your own content and images in the template!)
Our goal at Lasso is to make using our Real Estate CRM easy for our clients. To start, the template library contains 10 different emails and we'll be adding more each month so keep checking back and let us know what you'd like to see . . . or maybe you have an email template that you'd like to share with other Lasso users - let us know!
The library includes templates for newsletters, events, announcements and letterhead. We've given you a great starting point to make it your own - add your images and your content and you'll be ready to go in no time.
Email marketing should be an important component to your marketing plan. Whether it's a community or construction update, it needs to be professional looking and follow good email best practices to maximize open rates.
If you have any questions about email marketing, contact Lasso Client Support, we're here to help.
One of Lasso's key technology partners is PEER 1. They are a leading global provider of data center services with HQ in Vancouver, BC.
Peer 1 provides us with world class data co-location services that keeps our extensive server farm secure and up and running to serve our homebuilders and developers worldwide. PEER 1 is celebrating their 10th Anniversary this month. Always looking for a reason to have cake in the office, we thought we'd celebrate their milestone with a birthday celebration.
Have a look at our "Happy Birthday" message to PEER 1:
To view pictures of our event, see them on flickr.
Now you can gain valuable insight into your leads and prospects' actions and buying interests on your project website ... even before you make a phone call!
Over 80% of new home buyers start their search on the web. This is a pretty radical change from even a few years ago. What does this mean?
Quite simply it means that:
- A real estate project's website is more important than ever.
- Finding ways to get traffic to your website is vital.
- Knowing key information about your website traffic, where they spend time on your site and how many times they visit is intrinsic to relationship building and selling.
Improve your sales team and your marketing intelligence with Lasso's new Website and Lead Tracking for one or more of your projects. A 60-day free trial test drive available now!
Sales will know exactly what web pages were visited, what forms were filled out, and how the site was found. Have information at your finger tips to determine prospect interest level and sales-readiness, plus differentiate yourself from the competition.
And receive real-time email alerts every time a prospect comes back to visit your website!
Track website and lead traffic:
- Number of visitors, number of repeat visitors and number of new Registrants.
- Website pages a Registrant has viewed as well as how many visits they have made to your site.
- Your lead sources/referrals - is it organic search or paid search that has the biggest impact for you?
Creating blogs, link-building, and pay-per-click campaigns are all popular ways to generate interest and traffic to your website. Many new home builders and developers are using facebook ads, Twitter, Google Adwords and websites like www.newhomesdirectory.com to establish a strong presence on the internet and generate traffic to their project website.
Lasso's Website Tracking provides additional detail that isn't available through Google Analytics. You will see specific lead details - like exactly how this lead found your site and you'll be able to analyze how effective your marketing efforts are.
This functionality isn't only for new online Registrants - you can also track web activity for existing Registrants.
We're excited about these new features. They provide our clients with a significant competitive advantage during these times when there's much focus on generating website traffic and lead nurturing.
According to Google's Security Network, Postini, 94% of all email sent through servers is considered spam and there are roughly 250 billion messages sent daily throughout the world! It's no wonder that large ISPs are taking the approach that mass mail senders are guilty until proven innocent.
Lasso works diligently to ensure that we have the functionality and tools required for our clients to create and deliver successful email marketing campaigns. In addition to the services Lasso provides to improve deliverability (e.g. domain authentication, email throttling, hard bounce suppression, etc.), last fall we reached out to each of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to begin participation in their Complaint Feedback Loop programs. We have signed up with the following ISPs: AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, and Yahoo.
What is a Complaint Feedback Loop?When a user receives an email that in their opinion is either unsolicited or unnecessary, they have the option of hitting the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of that email or hitting the Junk/Spam button provided by their ISP in their email application. For years, end users have been told not to trust email unsubscribe links, so many users hit the Junk/Spam button as a way of unsubscribing. Once the user hits the Junk/Spam button, information is relayed back to the ISP, who will then forward that email details to Lasso. These returned emails are referred to as complaints.
Once Lasso receives these complaint emails, we then Opt-Out the Registrant from the project from which they received the mass mail. Since October of 2008, we have manually Opted-Out over 18,000 Registrants across all of our clients' projects. Based on the overall volume of email sent, this number is actually fairly small as a percentage but many of the ISPs have a very low tolerance level when it comes to complaints. For example, AOL has an enhanced white list that has strict restrictions. Senders must keep complaints very low, as low as one complaint per 3,000 recipients and they must maintain this rate, without exception for a period of 30 days. To remain listed, senders must maintain this rate. If they exceed it only once, they are off the list and will not be added back until they have once again remained below the threshold for at least 30 days. Senders can not apply to be on this list.
Starting this month, Lasso has automated the process and updates are provided in each of the Registrants' History and in the Audit Logs.
What are the advantages of the Complaint Feedback Loop?- ISP - by providing this feedback to Lasso, they are assured that Lasso will Opt-Out the user and therefore their user will no longer be receiving unwanted emails from that project. Therefore, over time, they improve their end-user satisfaction levels and reduce the number of unsolicited emails.
- Lasso Clients - by reducing the number of Complaints over time, we improve the overall deliverability for all of our clients' mass mails.
Here are some results that you might find of interest:
As you can see from the results in October of last year, we've made significant progress in reducing the number of spam complaints with AOL, Comcast, and Yahoo.
Although we've not seen an appreciable improvement with Hotmail, we can however show that we've seen significant improvement in email being delivered to Hotmail users' inboxes. Hotmail provides an additional level of insight via their Smart Data Network Services web-based application, which provides a daily report on Lasso's deliverability. This daily report lists the number of emails sent, the percentage of complaints, and the number of trap hits. They also, provide a ‘scoring' system that is based on a color coded system incorporating three colors: red, yellow, and green, where the emails sent on that day from that IP address:
 | - RED - the emails are being delivered to the end-users' Junk box.
- YELLOW - the emails are either delivered to the end-users' Junk box or their Inbox (depends on the mailing history).
- GREEN - the emails are being delivered to the end-users' Inbox.
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Lasso recently introduced a second IP address from which to send mass mail. We did this to help improve deliverability. The two IP addresses are:
- Primary IP Address - this is the bulk of our clients' projects and is used specifically for those projects that have domain authentication in place.
- Secondary IP Address - this a limited subset of our clients' projects that are not domain authenticated and/or for those client's that are not following email best practices.
We're quite pleased to show you the following results for our Primary IP Address:
We only activated the Secondary IP Address last month, and not surprisingly the results are 100% red. The results for our Primary IP Address are showing tremendous improvement, and we hope to continue improving over the next few months.
Improving email deliverability may mean that you're not sending to the same huge, dated list from five years ago, but you will find better overall results and a happier, more engaged prospect when you send to those who are truly interested in learning more about your new home projects.
The Media Spend Report in Lasso.
This feature can pinpoint your best (and worst) media sources and save you 1,000's of dollars in marketing costs (print, radio, TV, signage and events). It literally equips you with the necessary information to make decisions pertaining to ongoing media spending and to analyze registrant and purchaser costs for your new home projects.
The way it works is pretty simple - you input the publication/media, your costs, along with a timeframe that the ads will be valid; and then, associate to a question on the registration or landing page - usually "How did you hear about us?" - The answers are recorded and then reported in the Media Spend Report. You can easily see in a graphical format where your leads are coming from and what is your cost per lead.
If you prefer to view the information in a textual format report, you can see the name of the publication, the start and end dates of the campaign, the number of leads, the cost per lead along with the number of purchasers and cost per purchaser.
Want to capture the graphs and charts off the pages of Lasso? Use Snag-it - a great tool for capturing information on web pages and then incorporating the images in a document.
Lasso Tip
Don't limit the Media Spend report to just media. You can actually use any question in Lasso as a "Media Cost" category and be able to see a graphical representation of your questions and how your registrants responded. For example, do you want to be able to visually compare what price range your leads have selected? Add the question specific to price range as a media category and you've now got a graphical comparison of the variety of dollar ranges your leads are interested in!
Do you have questions about this functionality? Contact our Client Support Center at
support@mylasso.com.
A great sales and marketing site is www.gtms-inc.com. The company is Go-to-Market Strategies. It is a sales and marketing resource center to help companies "achieve big aspirations with limited budgets". I recently came across an article on their site called "The truth about selling value . . .".
The article speaks to the definition of value during the selling process - "the amount of money or relative worth that is considered to be the fair equivalent for what is to be received in return."
The challenge, GTMS states, is that value is in the eye of the buyer, not the seller. And, buyers want to be assured that what they are buying is worth more than what they are paying - they want value-add.
This article rings true for the current new home market. It refers to ways to determine what your prospects value and then market to them. Using functionality within your CRM software, you can survey your prospects and determine what's important to them and then sell to them accordingly.
Determining your prospects' priorities and then being able to segment and market to them is critical. For example, some of your additional questions to your Registrants may be whether they prefer the idea of being close to great restaurants or if a new organic grocery store is important; or whether providing free bike storage is important because the majority of purchasers prefer to walk or bike rather than drive a car. Your CRM software can capture all this information, the key here is to use the information so that as you progress through the sales cycle you will be able to show value and value-add and hopefully turn prospects into purchasers.
Remember that your CRM technology can capture an amazing amount of information that can be cleverly used to ensure that what your client values, is what you propose. Think about what information you need that would help you provide value. Use technology to capture this and more.
Lasso Introduces Enhanced Email Marketing Reporting and Click-Through Tracking
We've all heard many times that relevancy is the key to email marketing success. Creating relevant email is important if you want to keep your prospects engaged and move them along the sales cycle. If you're constantly bombarding them with email messages that aren't important to them, not only will they disregard (and possibly unsubscribe altogether) but when you do finally send them something relevant, it may get disregarded as "another annoying email". Lasso's email marketing functionality can now help you with further segmenting your lists by tracking your prospects' behaviour within an email.
For those of you familiar with Lasso, you'll know that unlike many CRM applications, Lasso has a standard built-in mass email marketing capability. In fact Lasso delivers over a million emails on behalf or our clients each month. Recognizing that targeted mass email is an important component for residential CRM marketing and sales strategies, Lasso has released enhanced click-through tracking for mass email. Within Lasso, you have always been able to see whether Registrants have opened an email, and now you can also track which links within the email were clicked.
We've also updated our Mass Mail Summary Report using some common industry-standard terminology as well as adding some useful reporting elements.
So what is an email Click-Through? A click-through happens when the recipient of a mass email clicks on a hyper link within that email. Each click that they make on a link, counts as a click-through. If someone clicks on the same link five times, it will show five click-throughs but only one unique click-through. The click-through rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of opened emails and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.
The following are examples of how you can use the new click-through functionality:
Example 1 -An email is sent to a list of brokers with details about three different projects. 100 of the brokers click on the project in Hawaii. All the brokers who clicked on this project can now easily be sent another email specific to the Hawaii project.
Example 2 - An email was sent to a list of Registrants with links to the available project floorplans. Registrants can now be segmented into groups that correspond to the floorplan they clicked on and specific follow-up emails can be sent to the Registrants based on their preferences.
Example 3 - After you send out a mass mail announcing a new sales promotion, you can create an activity for your sales reps to conduct follow-up phone calls to all the Registrants who clicked on information about the new sales promotion.
Sending relevant emails to your lists of prospects is considered an email marketing best practice. Sending information about a project in Hawaii to prospects whose primary interest is skiing at Vale or Whistler may not do too much for your open rates; and, in fact, can reflect negatively on your reputation as ISPs track open rates and can mark email as junk if you continually send email that does not get opened. This new functionality allows you to further segment your lists as well as gain valuable insight as to what information is important to your prospects.
You'll see a few other changes on the Mass Mail Summary report. We've updated column headers to reflect email marketing standard terms and you're now able to see your delivery rate, open rate, failure rate and referral rate all as percentages. This is useful when comparing mass mail statistics from one campaign to another. In addition, you can now see how many registrants opted-out of each mass mail.
Using the 'personalize' feature in Lasso, you can customize the Mass Mail Summary report to show the columns that you want, in the order that you prefer.
For more information, refer to the Lasso Release Notes within Lasso. Do you have questions about this new functionality? Contact Lasso Client Support at support@mylasso.com.
"If you build it, he will come." - Famous words from a well-known movie. For most new home residential communities and projects, thousands of dollars go into marketing to generate leads and prospects; then even more is spent in the sales process to turn prospects into home buyers. In past markets, the lead traffic was high and sales efforts "just seemed to work". Nowadays, depending on your location and project, the volume of new prospects signing up on websites, calling in, or visiting sales centers may not be as high. How you handle these new prospects and manage each prospective buyer through the sales cycle is more important than ever.
What is a Sales Process?
A sales process is defined as an approach to gaining new sales using predefined steps. Virtually all new homes sales involve the following steps by the sales reps:
- Prospecting - capturing and engaging with people; every lead is a prospective home buyer
- Initial Contact - qualification process
- Sales Center Visit/Appointment - assessing the buying indicators
- Handling Objections, Customizations, Incentives, etc. - proposing
- Offers - closing the sale
- Customer Care - service after the sale
What differs constantly is the amount of time required for each step as well as what's involved. Some prospects know exactly what they are looking for - they've done their homework and are ready to buy when they walk through the Sales Center (your dream customer), others may visit several times and take months to make a decision. One of the biggest challenges for sales reps is identifying where a prospect is in the sales cycle and moving them along the buying process.
Within Lasso, a Sales Process allows you to define an automated set of activities that are generated for your sales team as a prospect progresses through the sales cycle. You can create triggers that will allow for a set of activities to be created for a prospect. By creating the activity for the prospect versus the sales rep, the prospect/lead never gets lost in the sales cycle due to staff turnover or changes within your organization and mapping a process provides a starting point to move the prospect along the sales cycle.
How do you go about setting up a Sales Process?
A sales process you create may be a triggered activity for the assigned sales rep to follow-up or an action that needs to be performed. Setting these processes accomplishes at least two things - it provides a reminder to the sales rep to follow-up and it keeps the prospect moving along the sales cycle.
Lasso Sales Processes can be setup for each step of the sales process. Here are examples of some great ways to use the Sales Process functionality in Lasso:
- A reminder to make a phone call within 24 hours of a prospect signing up on the website.
- A reminder to make a seven day follow-up call referencing a couple of the prospects buying interests.
- An alert to send a thank you card after they visit the sales center.
- Send flowers to a new purchaser.
The key to any sales process is to keep it simple so that you're not bombarding your reps with a multitude of administrative tasks. You want them to be creating that customer relationship and do what they do best, and that is to sell your new homes. Make it easy for your reps to follow through . . . if you want them to send a thank you card to a prospect that visited the sales center, have the cards readily available; or, if they are to send updated floor plans to a prospect, make sure the corresponding email template has the correct information.
Many will say that this is all just common sense and a good sales rep will do all these things intuitively - and yes, that may be true; but why leave anything to chance? To maintain consistency, promote your brand, ensure exceptional customer service and ultimately have your prospects convert to purchasers, a little structure and direction for the sales reps never hurt. The majority of sales people are more successful when they follow a specific sales process and are provided the tools to use for each step.
By setting up Sales Processes, you will be well on your way to having your Sales Team working effectively in creating that deeper customer relationship, closing more deals, and using the science of technology as their ally in the art of selling. By developing a solid sales process work flow, perhaps we can modify that famous quote - "If you build it, he will buy."
For more information on how to setup a sales process in Lasso, please contact Lasso Client Support (support@mylasso.com) or refer to Lasso University in the Client Administration Center of Lasso.
Regardless of how many hours you spend on getting the copy just right and the care you put into your creative, it will all be wasted if your emails are not delivered.
Authenticating that an email was sent from a valid source has become the first step Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use in filtering spam. ISPs use authentication to verify the claimed domain name in the emails they receive.
Many sources will cite that on average 95% of email being sent to the major ISPs (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc) is spam. That means only 5% of email is considered legitimate! Because of the staggering volume of email being sent daily to these ISPs, they will treat you as "guilty until proven innocent". You need to work thoroughly and with diligence to prove that you are a legitimate sender. Domain Authentication is one of the first steps.
Before you send a mass mail using Lasso's email marketing functionality, check to make sure that your web developer or someone from your company has gone through the authentication process with Lasso Client Support (support@mylasso.com). Completing this step, means that Lasso has been approved to send emails on your behalf.
Authentication legitimizes email senders. It is the effort to equip messages of the email transport system with enough verifiable information that recipients can recognize the nature of each incoming message automatically; and it is the means for ISPs to establish the true identity of an email sender.
Lasso has incorporated performance and optimization technology which provides authentication that assists our clients with improved email deliverability.
There are a number of ways ISPs authenticate a sender's domain name:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): An authentication standard that specifies what IP addresses can send mail for a given domain.
- SenderID: An authentication standard that goes slightly beyond SPF by looking at the headers of the message to determine the PRA, or purported responsible address.
- DomainKeys: The most comprehensive authentication standard that signs each outgoing message with an encrypted key.
Click on image to see larger version
In addition to authentication, you must also have a solid sender reputation. I like this analogy that was brought up at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Summit in Boston 2007. "Think of authentication as your driver's license and reputation as your driver's record." The ISP may know who you are, but if your driving record stinks because of arrests or fines, the delivery cops won't allow your e-mail into the inbox.
Domain Authentication at one point was just an email marketing "best practice"; it now has become a mandatory measure to improve your email deliverability.
The diagram above shows the journey a marketing email travels to either get into the intended inbox, or find itself filtered into Junk Mail, or bounced back by the ISP.
Prove your innocence and get authenticated!