Mastering the art of captivating your customer’s attention and seamlessly converting it into a closed deal is a cornerstone of a thriving real estate enterprise. If you want to build a book of business that’s resilient against the ebb and flow of market dynamics, you need a robust real estate marketing funnel.
In our crash course, we’ll walk you through building a successful marketing funnel that is sure to attract, capture, and covert. You’ll learn how to navigate lead categories, tailor compelling offers to entice them, adeptly capture lead data, and ultimately foster enduring relationships that culminate in successful conversions.
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What is a real estate marketing funnel?
In real estate, a marketing funnel refers to the systematic process of attracting potential clients (leads), nurturing their interest, and guiding them toward a desired action, such as hiring you to assist in the purchasing or sale of a property. Similar to a traditional sales funnel, the marketing funnel consists of several stages through which leads progress as they interact with a real estate agent or brokerage’s marketing efforts. These stages typically include:
- Awareness: At the top of the funnel, the goal is to ensure potential clients know of your brand and services.
- Interest: Once aware of your brand, leads may express interest by engaging with your content, visiting your website, or signing up for your email list. During this stage, you should focus on providing valuable information and building trust with the leads.
- Consideration: In the consideration stage, leads are evaluating their options and deciding whether to engage further with your services. This is an opportune time to showcase your expertise and highlight your unique value proposition.
- Intent: Leads enter this stage by taking action that moves them closer to making a decision, such as requesting a consultation, scheduling a property viewing, or submitting an inquiry about a listing. It’s crucial to respond promptly and provide personalized assistance to further nurture their interest.
- Conversion: The ultimate goal of the marketing funnel is to convert leads into clients. This could involve closing a sale, securing a listing agreement, or facilitating a rental agreement. Effective communication, negotiation skills, and exceptional service are essential in converting leads into clients.
By understanding and optimizing each stage of the marketing funnel, real estate agents and brokerages can attract qualified leads, nurture relationships, and drive successful outcomes in an increasingly competitive market.
Necessary components of a successful real estate marketing funnel
To fully optimize your funnel, you need three crucial elements:
- Your offer, or what you are promoting
- Lead capture: how you obtain contact information
- Lead follow-up: how your convert leads into qualified opportunities
Let’s dive a little deeper into each component below.
1. The offer
An offer is what you’ll use to attract your ideal customer. It is the value you are exchanging to get the contact information from your target market. There are two types of leads: high funnel and low funnel. It’s important to have different offers to attract leads that feed both your short-term and long-term business goals.
High-funnel leads
These individuals are not very far along in their purchasing decisions. In real estate, they’re prospective clients who are not ready to buy or sell a home and may need six to twelve months of nurturing.
Because you’re targeting leads in the awareness or interest stage—those who are exploring their options and want to learn more—you need an offer that is more educational and less sales-driven.
High-funnel leads are typically cheaper to obtain and more plentiful, but most will not be ready for a transaction in the near future. Filling your sales funnel with high-funnel leads is critical to long-term growth, but this strategy only works if you commit to nurturing them.
The best channels for attracting high-funnel leads include Facebook and Instagram ads. It’s a low-cost and effective way to reach a larger segment of your target audience and help build awareness of and interest in your brand. When crafting your offer, lead magnets like home selling and buying guides often perform well.
Low-funnel leads
Low-funnel leads are further along in their purchasing decision—prospective clients who are ready to buy or sell within the next one to three months. These leads are carefully weighing their options and ready to take action.
Low-funnel leads are highly prized because they need very little nurturing and have shorter sales cycles. They can generate business in the short-to-medium-term future.
However, it’s important to note that low-funnel leads are generally more expensive to acquire. The best channel to use for attracting low-funnel leads is Google Ads. Google Ads, while more expensive, utilize highly sophisticated analytics to segment and finely target the ideal low-funnel leads in your market.
Offers that appeal to low-funnel leads include:
- Complementary home valuations
- Lists of homes available in a certain price range or neighborhood
- MLS search on your website
- Co-marketing local home loan programs with lending partners
2. Lead capture for real estate
The simplest way to capture your lead’s contact information in exchange for your offer is to set up a landing page with a lead capture form. At Luxury Presence, we provide our clients with pre-built templates. However, if you’re doing this yourself, there are many landing page builders available.
Lead capture can also happen at live events like open houses, where you ask attendees to sign in with their email addresses. The lead capture step is a crucial element to the marketing funnel, and as long as you are offering something of value, you should have no problem asking for those all-important contact details.
Of course, your greatest lead capture asset is your website. Whether you’re using a landing page, helpful lead magnets, or general contact forms, a polished, professional, user-friendly website optimized for lead capture is essential for lead capture.
3. Lead follow-up
On average, it takes nine individual outreach attempts, or touch points, to get a response from a lead. As an agent, you likely don’t have the time to call, text, and email each lead you get nine times, so we recommend automating this process as much as possible with your CRM.
Most CRM systems allow you to create short-term nurturing sequences. Here’s an example of how this might look:
Over a period of seven days, your CRM delivers automated email and SMS messages to the new lead nine to twelve times. If the lead doesn’t respond within seven days, the lead should then move to a long-term nurturing sequence. This is where 70-80% of the leads that you generate online end up, so this is a critical step. You should expect to nurture most of your online high-funnel leads for at least 12 to 16 months before they turn into a deal.
Expert tips for your lead conversion sequence
There are a few key points to remember for optimum real estate lead conversion.
- Speed to lead is critical. You must have initial contact within the first few minutes. Not able to respond that quickly? Consider using a chatbot that acts as a lead nurturing tool, keeping your lead engaged with questions and answers before handing the lead off to the agent.
- All of your messages should be personalized. For example, if you were sending a text message, it should read, “Hi [first name], do you have any questions about your home valuation”?
- Every message should reflect the type of lead (buyer vs seller). If someone requests a home valuation, your follow-up should be crafted around the home-selling process.
Lead conversion benchmarks
In order to measure the success of your efforts, there are a few metrics you should monitor regularly. Your lead conversion rate is perhaps the most important. The National Association of Realtors estimates that the average real estate lead conversion rate is 0.4%-1.2%.
You should also monitor leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators can help determine the health of your real estate marketing funnel while lagging indicators reflect your results. Below is a breakdown of some leading and lagging indicators to monitor.
Leading indicators:
- Lead response rate: the percentage of leads that respond to outreach
- Appointment booking rate: the percentage of responded leads with whom you’ve scheduled a meeting
- Close rate: the percentage of consultations that result in closed transactions
Lagging indicators:
- Cost per lead: the number of leads divided by the total cost of your campaign
- Cost per appointment or consultation: the number of conversations you have with your leads divided by the total cost of your campaign
- Cost of acquisition: the number of clients who transact with you divided by the total cost of your campaign
Generally, your cost of acquisition (or how much money it takes to acquire a new client) should be around 30% to 40% of your total commission in the beginning. For example, if your commission on a deal is $10,000, your cost to acquire that deal should be in the range of $3,000 to $4,000.
This cost should decrease over time when you implement an effective lead nurturing process, as we covered previously. Be sure to check your metrics monthly to ensure positive ROI.
Your marketing funnel + Luxury Presence
If you’d like assistance implementing these real estate marketing strategies in your own business, we’re here to help. Our experts seamlessly integrate each step of the real estate marketing funnel into our award-winning website design. Book a free strategy call with our team to learn more.
