The value of a product is only recognized once a customer starts to use it. In the real estate industry, there are many “products” you can use to attract qualified buyers. In addition to your main listings, there are a number of other products and services that your real estate company can offer to improve the customer’s experience.
Customer onboarding typically refers to the period after a customer has made a purchase and is learning about your product. In the real estate sector, customer onboarding starts the moment you generate a qualified lead. The reason for this is that the sales cycle is longer and buyers need to go through multiple stages of the sales pipeline.
Make sure the buyer starts the email onboarding process as soon as possible so you can move on to the next phase, which is providing value. This means that real estate firms can increase sales and strengthen their brand by providing valuable content via email.
To successfully onboard new customers, you should be aware of their expectations and what overall goals they are hoping to achieve. If your clients are new to this, they will rely on you and your support.
You need to track buyer email onboarding metrics in the real estate field in order to gauge the efficacy of your lead nurturing and your email communication as a whole. This will result in more satisfied customers and will help them convert more quickly.
Therefore, let’s check the nine metrics of tracking the success of email onboarding:
Contact Rate
The former metric for real estate agents’ success was based only on the number of cold calls and direct mailings sent to potential clients. Not anymore.
Agents are using email to reach leads more often because it allows them to measure success more accurately. The following text is discussing how a CRM should provide a record of which emails were opened and if any links in the email were clicked.
First, establish what your average open rate is. An open rate of 2% – 10% is good for most bulk emails, and anything over that is great. Try to find patterns in the emails you’ve sent that seem to affect the open rate. That could include factors such as:
- How often you reach out to leads
- What types of messages and marketing collateral you send them (e.g. ebooks, blog posts, etc.)
- What the demographics are of those who respond (e.g. older or younger, looking for high-priced properties or affordable homes for sale, etc.)
Once you have pinpointed the main reasons why people are drawn to your company, you can better customize your marketing efforts to attract even more leads.
To optimize your email marketing for real estate lead generation, send the right emails at the right times. You can test different email strategies by sending personalized emails to qualified leads at different times. One list of leads could receive an email every two weeks, while another list could receive an email every four weeks. Once you discover the open rates for the two groups, you can determine which group is more responsive and use that frequency for your real estate marketing.
This type of testing will give you an idea of how many emails your leads want to receive, and what kind of content they prefer. You can use this information to improve your email marketing campaigns and make them more effective.
Email Onboarding Time
The first step after generating leads and attracting interested buyers is the onboarding phase. This is where potential buyers can learn about your brand and what you stand for, as well as explore some of your listings that are tailored to their needs. Your goal should be to create a clear value proposition from the start, and to align your values and needs with those of your potential customer. By doing so, you will be able to build a trusting relationship with them.
If you want your real estate business to succeed, you need to focus on capturing qualified leads and nurturing them until they’re ready to buy a property.
Measuring the email onboarding time will be key. Make sure you are aware of how much time has elapsed since a customer’s first interaction with your brand. This is the beginning of your email onboarding process, and knowing the exact time can help you with your performance. This will improve your efficiency and onboarding time with each new customer.
The goal is to make the onboarding process short yet effective and valuable for the property buyer and their needs. You will need to spend time helping them to understand their own needs, the local real estate market, and the services and listings available.
Teaching new real estate agents customer onboarding strategies can benefit both the agent and the company.
The property procurement process can be shortened by the entire customer success team. This can help you get more buyers to begin the process.
To measure email onboarding time, track the time it takes to get from the first email exchange to reaching a goal.
Some of your email goals can be:
- Selling a property – top level goal.
- Building brand awareness and trust.
- Educating the prospects.
- Building social proof.
- Generating more qualified leads.
- Driving traffic to your website or social media.
Customer Engagement
It is important to engage customers in email onboarding to ensure they are interested in continuing their journey through the sales pipeline. You can improve engagement by using various tactics, such as visual storytelling. You can track progress, identify potential issues, and prevent them from occurring.
It’s not unusual for a potential buyer to misunderstand something, especially if they are communicating by mail. You need to clarify the situation before moving on to the next step. The first step in onboarding customers is to guide them on their journey, particularly when using email communication to nurture real estate leads.
Time to First Value (TTFV)
The onboarding process is complete when a potential buyer or new brand advocate has a strong understanding of your company’s values and is passionate about your brand. This is called time to first value or TTFV, which is when someone experiences the good attributes of your brand for the first time. When you are emailing a potential buyer, you need to make sure that your email is personalized to their specific needs. At the same time, you should also emphasize how much value your real estate company can bring to the table.
Your job is not only to educate the buyer, but also to help them make decisions while allowing them to get real-world value from your brand and your services.
To achieve this, you will:
- Get to know the potential buyer and create a personalized approach based on their buyer persona.
- Curate your listings and your offering according to their specific needs.
- Provide valuable information they can use in their search for the perfect property, as well as real-world information they need to become successful homeowners.
- Continue delivering value through diligent support and valuable content.
This will satisfy customers’ needs and allow them to realize the full value of your company’s brand, your knowledge of the market, and your professional services.
Free Trial to Paid Conversion
To get people to buy property from you, you need to offer a lot of value for free. People love getting free stuff from brands they love. It creates a connection between the customer and the brand.
In the end, your objective is to sell real estate. In order to do this quickly and to attract buyers who will pay a high price, you need to establish a connection with the potential buyer.
Perhaps the most effective way to achieve this is to offer free knowledge, guidance, consultations, and insights on real estate. Email strategies are a powerful marketing and sales tool for real estate companies.
One of the best ways to improve your brand’s reputation and offer more value to potential customers without making them feel like they need to make a purchase before they are ready is to offer a free trial.
How can you know if the free services were effective?
The goal of providing free material to prospective customers via email is to achieve a specific objective. In order to determine if your free email marketing efforts have been successful, you should compare them against the goals you initially set.
In real estate, if you can turn a lead into a buyer, or achieve any of the complementary goals, you can consider your free services and products a success. This can include increasing your brand’s visibility and reputation in your industry, making it easier for customers to find you, and encouraging customers to recommend you to others.
Customer Progression
After some of your customers have commissioned your services, you should thank them for their purchase and trust. Then you can move on to customer progression. The amount of time it takes to complete the onboarding process is an indicator of how long it will take to get the job done. Make sure your information is concise and easy to understand.
Customer training is also known as boosting your word of mouth. This will help solidify your relationship and will go a long way in boosting your word of mouth.
By emailing buyers online material, you let them study at their own pace without assistance. Provide them guidance through one-on-one conversation to become homeowners.
For example, you can create different types of instructional materials on topics that a future homeowner or property owner might need to know. Your email communication can be improved by adding instructional videos, how to articles, or even a section of frequently asked questions. This will help educate customers and add value to your email communication.
It doesn’t matter what the case is, the important thing is to measure the amount of time you spend on a potential customer until they buy a property and are satisfied with the purchase. They should then be able to recommend your services to others.
Be sure to explain any details from the customers’ perspective so they are not left confused. If this happens, it’s likely that the prospect will seek help from another real estate company or an independent real estate expert, which can cost you. Losing customers can happen quickly if they are not happy.
Customer Response Rate
As mentioned before, buyers may encounter many problems and will need assistance during their home purchasing process. It’s important to provide feedback forums, send out email surveys, and document frequently asked questions so that people can easily voice their opinions and get answers to their questions.
It’s important to make all the emails you send to potential customers personal, which will help improve the response rate. GIFs in emails can lead to a 150% increase in engagement rates. When considering what to include in your email signature, you may want to include links to your social media accounts and a page on your website where recipients can ask you questions.
You can improve your customer service by tracking and comparing your performance to others in the industry. By understanding how you stack up against the competition, you can make changes to better meet the needs of your customers. You can improve the performance of your email signature by monitoring its click-through rate.
By reviewing the data you have collected, you can make an informed decision about your current communication methods with potential customers.
Escalation Response Time
If you receive any email communications from prospects or buyers that require you to resolve certain issues, it is important that you respond to their complaints or negative feedback as quickly as possible.
The amount of time it will take you to resolve a complaint from a customer from the moment they file it. How you respond to customer complaints can have a huge impact on their loyalty. The time and manner in which you respond to a complaint is critical regardless of the method used to communicate the complaint.
Real estate customers want immediate responses, so there is no time for delays. This will lengthen the amount of time it takes new customers to develop a relationship with their real estate agent if this occurs, which will have a significant effect on the sales process. Remember that the amount of time it takes to respond to an issue is an important part of the onboarding process.
You need to be responsive to your outreach strategy by providing a solution within 24 hours. Making a good impression on prospective buyers will help your agents and your brand as a whole.
Adoption Rate
The success of onboarding can be measured by the adoption rate, which tells you how many people have adopted the onboarding process. Product adoption rate is a measure of how effective your real estate brand is, how engaged your customers are with your services, and howinterested they are in the properties you’re selling.
You can determine how likely a customer is to succeed simply by knowing the time and length the customer has spent in contact with your agents and the steps they have taken towards property procurement or any other goal.
There are a few ways you can measure the adoption rate. To estimate the adoption rate, find out from your potential clients how useful your services and advice have been. You can do thisura by talking to people directly or by sending out surveys and questionnaires.
The adoption rate can also be monitored by measuring the success rates of emails sent, such as the number of people who open and respond to emails, as well as how engaged they are in the conversation. Remember that more people will want to adopt your product if they feel like they are valued and included.
Milestones Completed
Your real estate agency will only achieve certain goals if customers complete specific milestones. The customer needs to adhere to a set timeframe in order to complete the milestones.
If you complete certain milestones, it will make people more likely to want to use your product, and more likely to have a positive experience. It’s important to have an email onboarding checklist to make sure that every customer will have a good experience when they start using your product.
The number of milestones the buyer has completed is a good indicator of how strong your email onboarding strategy is. The results of your email campaign will give you insights into how to improve your customer onboarding emails.
Conclusion
Each step in the email marketing process is important for tracking the success of the onboarding process.
Making your email onboarding process more efficient will help your real estate agents guide prospective buyers towards your goals. If customers adopt your brand and find value in your services quickly, they will become loyal brand advocates.
